Windows 7 Random Lockups vs Perfect Vista x64 operation

so I have been away for the weekend but here are the things I tried.

Totally switched memory between the 2 PC's I have here and the problem didn't follow the memory unfortunetly. So I took a little more drastic measures, disassembled the raid and did a full reinstall of Windows 7 (I always do full installs, upgrades scare me).

Things looked good, no freezes for about 40 hours till sometime last night.

Now I'm trying new video drivers (went back to catalyst 9.7), and will see if I freeze again. I haven't had the time to do a 24hour memtest, but I did run prime95 for about 20 hours (during the 40 hour uptime) with no faults.

So half of me thinks GPU, and the other half thinks maybe PSU. The only thing that gets me is how could it be hardware since Vista was a rock?

LilBG said:

Do you have the option to raise ICH voltage? I been told this is sometimes needed in a raid environment. Are you running the latest Intel Matrix Storage Manager software? Also run memtest+ for 24 hours atleast.

I don't have a direct option for this voltage, maybe one of the chipset voltages up there would cover it. I'll tweak it a bit.

Now that I have all these extra HDs I've considered installing on one vista just to see if I'm still rock stable there under the same old conditions. Maybe something has happened over the course of upgrading, although I severly doubt it.

What was intersting I did see another ATI 4870 user complain about freezing so I wonder if it is video drivers, maybe some kind of memory leak there or something.

TommyboyCAN said:

Now that I have all these extra HDs I've considered installing on one vista just to see if I'm still rock stable there under the same old conditions. Maybe something has happened over the course of upgrading, although I severly doubt it.

What was intersting I did see another ATI 4870 user complain about freezing so I wonder if it is video drivers, maybe some kind of memory leak there or something.

I would look into increasing the Northbridge voltage ICH? on your board. Everyone uses different names for the NB voltage but increasing it did fix a stablity problem when I moved from Vista to Win7.

If the harddrive light comes on solid during these lockup events, it may be a known issue with the storage drivers. Happens when under heavy load, or simply sitting idle, sometimes during boot, other times hours later.

You can try going to Intel or Asus web site and DL the latest matrix storage drivers for Windows 7. They may or may not apply to your motherboard, but if not the install gives a simple error message about the drivers not being suitable for this machine.

chev65 said:

I would look into increasing the Northbridge voltage ICH? on your board. Everyone uses different names for the NB voltage but increasing it did fix a stablity problem when I moved from Vista to Win7.

I'm pretty sure I asked this before but would a .2V bump be safe and probably sufficient?

fseal said:

If the harddrive light comes on solid during these lockup events, it may be a known issue with the storage drivers. Happens when under heavy load, or simply sitting idle, sometimes during boot, other times hours later.

You can try going to Intel or Asus web site and DL the latest matrix storage drivers for Windows 7. They may or may not apply to your motherboard, but if not the install gives a simple error message about the drivers not being suitable for this machine.

I did that before when it was in RAID and still had problems. Right now I'm running in AHCI mode, I'm wondering if I should just turn that off and run in basic IDE mode?

Hmm, maybe.

For me I had to turn off Native Command Queing but that was a specific fix for a specific drive.

If the HD light is comeing on (somtimes 1-2 mintues after the initial lockup) maybe more research into storage issues will help.

Out of curiousity what drive did you have problems with?

The Intel X-25M.

It is the only SSD I know of that actualy USES NCQ. It uses it to optimise numerous small writes.

Most if not all other SSDs simply ignore NCQ and don;t trigger the problem.

Unfortuantely the Vista and Windows 7 SATA driver (or something further up) has a known issue with NCQ and the Intel SSDs. What's reall dissapointing is that the issue has been known about for at least a year it looks like and MS did not get a fix in before the RTM build

Windows 7 is supposed to be optimized for SSD, suppporting TRIM etc... Still holfiding out hope that an automatic update is available by day of release that fixes this.