Periodic freezes in my system

Hum... yeah i will try removing it right now, to see if at midnight there is still the freeze, because it's 10:42pm here so the midnight freeze will happen here soon again. Unfortunately i can't remove it for such long time (Several days) since i still need to do almost daily captures.

update : done, now i removed ALL pci cards i was using, i also disconnected two of the hard drives i have and the dvd recorder drive. I can't remove the graphics card for obvious reasons (even tough that's not the problem, since i had another graphics card before this one and the problem remains so it's not a problem of the graphics card) so the only thing remaning for now is remove all the memory modules and use only one, even tough i don't like much doing this since i use four 512mb modules and running windows 7 with only 512mb isn't such a good idea i think. Now it's 11:57pm in one hour i will give more feedback.

loool let's see what happens then. By the way the system uptime reaches 1 hour about 10 minutes before midnight, let's see if i can also notice the 1 hour freeze, but probably not because that one is a lot weaker and i only know it happens when i see the tv capture, but i will try to move the mouse and hear a music to see if i notice any freeze on them.

Jeez! At midnight NOTHING changed at all, still the same problem, this time i noticed well, indeed even the mouse cursor freezes as well, i mean, EVERYTHING freezes, and then unfreezes one second after. I was even hearing a music in winamp, there was a freeze in the sound, in the image at the screen and specially the mouse cursor, and this is the ONLY time of the day it happens, usually the 1 hour freezes are a lot weaker and only noticeable in the tv captures.

Well maybe it's a problem of the motherboard needing new drivers for this windows...

Anyway the only way i see now is trying to change all hardware i have and use it on other motherboard, and vice versa, it's the only way i see. At some point i have to pinpoint the cause of this, i suspect it's the motherboard itself or something on the bios. Altough of course it will still take a while to do this, i can't do it right away.

cesm23 said:

Anyway the only way i see now is trying to change all hardware i have and use it on other motherboard, and vice versa, it's the only way i see. At some point i have to pinpoint the cause of this, i suspect it's the motherboard itself or something on the bios. Altough of course it will still take a while to do this, i can't do it right away.

Intriguing :)

Here's one way to potentially get more info:

- Install the "Windows Performance Toolkit" --> Windows Performance Analysis Developer Center
- [Optional] set the clock to a few minutes before midnight, so you don't have to wait long for the "pause" to occur.
- Open an elevated (run as admin) command prompt.
- Around 20sec before midnight, run this: xperf -on PROC_THREAD+LOADER+INTERRUPT+DPC+PROFILE
- Wait unti 10sec or so after midnight, then run: xperf -d midnight.etl

What that does is to produce a very low-level log of what your machine was doing in between the two issued commands. If you zip up and upload "midnight.etl", I or somebody else might be able to tell you more.

The fact that it happens on a bare install (if I understand correctly) is strange enough. The fact that it always happens at midnight suggests some correlation to a scheduled task, or another activity which is timer-based.

Oh yes thanks a lot, you see this is exactly what i need, in fact i was hoping for something advanced like this that i haven't tried yet, because i mean, i really tried just about EVERYTHING i could think of to trace this down and i was unable, i even went as far as disabling all system tasks in windows scheduler and still didn't work.

[Optional] set the clock to a few minutes before midnight, so you don't have to wait long for the "pause" to occur.

Lol that "trick" does NOT work... it NEVER does any freeze at midnight if i do this trick at all (except, of course, in the next time it reaches midnight naturally...), EVEN if i change the time in the bios, and even if i do a image of the disk using true image and then restoring, even like this windows somehow knows i did this and the freeze doesn't happen anymore! Altough yesterday i could notice that even if i shutdown the computer before real midnight, and turning it on before that, the freeze still happens, but only if i haven't touched the clock!

Oh by the way can i do this also before and after one of those 1 hour freezes too while i wait for midnight ? Of course, i would only send this just in case the dropped frames did happened in this case.

Also note that by now i have all installed programs i use to use, unfortunately i am unable to have a clean windows 7 install now, unless i do another image of the partition using true image, but usually i prefer to avoid this since it takes about ONE hour to do the whole image.

cesm23 said:

Oh yes thanks a lot, you see this is exactly what i need, in fact i was hoping for something advanced like this that i haven't tried yet, because i mean, i really tried just about EVERYTHING i could think of to trace this down and i was unable, i even went as far as disabling all system tasks in windows scheduler and still didn't work.

[Optional] set the clock to a few minutes before midnight, so you don't have to wait long for the "pause" to occur.

Lol that "trick" does NOT work... it NEVER does any freeze at midnight if i do this trick at all (except, of course, in the next time it reaches midnight naturally...), EVEN if i change the time in the bios, and even if i do a image of the disk using true image and then restoring, even like this windows somehow knows i did this and the freeze doesn't happen anymore! Altough yesterday i could notice that even if i shutdown the computer before real midnight, and turning it on before that, the freeze still happens, but only if i haven't touched the clock!

Oh by the way can i do this also before and after one of those 1 hour freezes too while i wait for midnight ? Of course, i would only send this just in case the dropped frames did happened in this case.

Also note that by now i have all installed programs i use to use, unfortunately i am unable to have a clean windows 7 install now, unless i do another image of the partition using true image, but usually i prefer to avoid this since it takes about ONE hour to do the whole image.

Curiouser and curiouser :)

Sure, you can do the same thing to collect some logs during the "one hour" freezes, just try not to let it keep running too long either side of the event. About 20-30sec is perfect as it provides a chance to compare what the activity looks like just before and just after the event. Also, if it's not midnight, try to note down the time when "it" occurred according to your computer's clock (while the logging was enabled), as close as possible to the second.

Don't worry about blowing away the install and starting from scratch. I'm mostly interested to see whether I can see any abnormal OS activity at all, which provides hope that the issue can be diagnosed, or whether even the low-level kernel logging has a little rest during the "freeze" period, in which case it'll offer nothing at all and I'll be that little bit more confident in saying the thing is somehow hardware-related.

hum ok thank you for this i am really looking forward to see if it's finally this time this big mistery will be solved or diagnosed once and for all, because this is so far the BIGGEST one i have had so far...

Oh by the way i forgot to say one thing about the 1 hour freezes : even when i didn't had the freeze at midnight in windows xp, i also had the 1 hour freezes but ONLY when capturing tv in SATA drives, but when i captured in IDE drives that problem didn't happened anymore! But in vista and windows 7 it's different, now it doesn't matter anymore if it's in a IDE or SATA drive, now even in a ramdrive it still loses that frame each hour.

Also, if it's not midnight, try to note down the time when "it" occurred according to your computer's clock (while the logging was enabled), as close as possible to the second.

I don't think i understand what you mean... this always happens when the computer clock changes from 23:59 to 00:00 exactly, always... i think the freeze happens exactly when the clock changes from 23:59:59 to 00:00:00, and it never changes. Altough i am not too sure if it's not when changing from 00:00:00 to 00:00:01 since this isn't that easy to check.

By the way do you have any idea how to heck is this possible that it's not possible the reproduce the freeze when changing the clock ?? This is really very very strange, i almost tought it could be a virus but no it's not possible i re-installed windows so many times already and i use genuine versions of windows, altough note that i used windows vista and now windows 7 as "trial" i mean, after 1 month i have to use rearm. Altough when i used windows 7 RC i used a official key from microsoft, so this wasn't the cause of the freezes either, for a moment i almost tought this could happen because of windows being in trial mode.