New
#1
Another Windows 7 Freezing Thread
Sorry to beat this horse once again, but...
I have scoured the internet, I have reinstalled the operating system, I have uninstalled various software and still I have not found a solution as to why Windows 7 freezes randomly. I have some ideas as to what might be causing it, but I would need to test those ideas on three or four new computers with various hardware installed. I have five PCs and a laptop in my house, and with the exception of one I have Windows 7 installed on all of them. Unfortunately four of my computers are 7-9 years old and my theories as to what is causing the freezes wouldn't work on them. The freeze does not occur on any of my older machines.
Older PC specs:
- CPU - AMD Athlon 64 1.8GHz single core (on two machines) Windows 7 Home and Ultimate installed
- Motherboards - Gigabyte and Asus - VIA chips
- Video Cards - nVidia 6800 and 7800GT - both AGP
- Memory - both have 2GBs of RAM PC400 from Kingston
- CPU - AMD Athlon XP 1.8GHz single core - Windows Vista Home installed
- Motherboard - Asus - VIA chips
- Video Card - ATI Rage - AGP
- Memory - 1.5GBs of RAM PC400 from Kingston
- CPU- AMD Athlon 64 X2 2.2GHz dual core - Windows 7 Professional installed
- Motherboard - ASRock - AMD chips
- Video Card - nVidia 7900GT - PCIe
- Memory - 4GBs of RAM PC400 from Kingston
Newer PC specs:
- CPU - Intel Q9300 2.5GHz quad core - Windows 7 Ultimate and Windows XP installed on same HD but separate partitions.
- Motherboard - MSI - nVidia chips
- Video Card - nVidia 8800GT - PCIe
- Memory - 8GBs of RAM PC800 from Kingston
None of the older machines freeze when Windows 7 is installed. The only machine that freezes is the one with the Intel CPU. The CPU is not the cause though, because if you google you will see that many users are having the problem with AMD machines as well. All the older machines listed above have Adobe Flash and Klite codecs installed. One of my theories was that Adobe Flash or some codec was causing the problem. With the codecs installed the freezing occurs more frequently, but when I perform a fresh install of the OS without any codecs the freeze still occurs, just not as frequent. I am beginning to think that the problem only manifests when a particular combination of hardware and Windows 7 are installed. My reasoning is that not everyone is having the problem, even though they have the same software installed. I haven't seen the problem on laptops yet, which is very interesting. There are seven different laptops (all with Windows 7 installed) in my wife's family, and none of their users have reported this problem. I'm thinking the freezing has to do with a certain type of CPU (more than two cores) or RAM (DDR2 and above) in combination with the operating system.
I love Windows 7, and I think it is the best operating system Microsoft has produced to date, but the freezing is driving me nuts. If it weren't for OneNote, Photoshop and some games that I am very fond of, I would switch to Linux Ubuntu in a heartbeat.