Unexplained Freezing/Lock up

TITAN392 · 14 Nov 2009

Hi, I've been trying to fix my problem for weeks now but no matter what I do, I cant stop it. Im not sure what is causing it to happen, but my Windows 7 Professional continuously locks up for no apparent reason. I might be just listening to music or typing something up or just idling, and the computer just freezes and I have to restart. I have tried changing the power saving settings to high performance, even editing the advanced settings to that the HDD's never turn off. I have cleaned the registry, reinstalled windows three times on different hard drives, taken off my overclock and turned up the cooling, re-orientated my computer (I thought the non-horizontal position of my HDD's had an affect), added a screen saver, updated and uninstalled drivers; nothing does the job. The first time i installed Windows 7 it worked fine, no freezing, nothing, but I had to reinstall because windows wouldnt start after I rearranged the posiiton of my HDD's in my computer. Most of the time when i walk away from the computer for a long period of time and come back, the computer is frozen with the screen not able to turn on again. The last crash was when iw as playing a game. the game crashed then windows froze. I have checked the event logs and i only see the kernel restart error.

Sorry if that sounds like a bit of a waffle, but I am trying to give you all the information I can. My system is:

Motherboard: Asus P5K
CPU: Intel Q6600 2.4Ghz (was over clocked to 3.2, cooling: thermaltake MaxOrb)
Memory: 4gb G-skill-800 (3.2 on 32bit)
Graphics card: Gigabyte ATI HD4850 512MB
PSU: Antec Basiq 550W
Hard Drives:500GB WD (Windows Installed on this one single boot)
320GB WD
640GB WD
1TB WD
Other: Creative X-fi XtremeGamer sound card
Netgear WG311T 108Mbps wireless adaptor

Any help would be much appriciated,
Thanks in advance.

Ok the game crash is completely unrelated, the game crashed, but windows did not lock up. Also, windows hasnt locked up when im watching a movie.

pageyboy · 14 Nov 2009

I have been having a similar problem over the last week in particular the last 3 days. I could have been doing anything, browsing, writing an e-mail, working in photoshop and then the computer would just hang completely, time frozen in the corner, ctrl-alt-del wouldn't work and then I would have to do a forced reboot via the reset button on the front of my pc case.

This would happen with clean installs of vista x64 and windows 7 x64. It was doing my head in. Looking at my event logs told me nvidia was at an insecure state at 32 or something to that effect even though I updated all my drivers. So I found a tip here for this:

TweakGuides.com - Nvidia Forceware Tweak Guide

and then I very reluctantly used a driver checker program to check my system for drivers. I have a gigabyte motherboard and the program was coming up with all these drivers needing updated for intel usb etc. ratePV explained this to me here that I had an intel chipset on my motherboard

https://www.sevenforums.com/drivers/2...ws-7-a-13.html

So i updated them as well as fingers crossed no error reports for nvidia and no more freezing, locking up or crashes.

I did try the nvidia option mentioned before first and my machine still locked up so I done the other things as well and no problems so far.