Random freezing during browsing or work

Hi Everyone,

My notebook is haunted.

There is an issue I have been having with my notebook for a while, that I have tried everything to troubleshoot and solve, but nothing works. Recently, there was an interesting development.

In short the notebook freezes randomly, while I am working with After effects, browsing the net with chrome, using excel. Just average desktop work. Sometimes the freezing happens a lot and sometimes it just doesnt happen at all. It doesn't happen when I am watching a movie or playing a game. The freeze is weird. The computer looks like it is frozen, but the mouse cursor still works and everything still works. because when it unfreezes after a minute or so, I am on the window where I have clicked on the task bar, or alt-tabbed to. I can stop the music, whatever, everything still works. A while back, I was working in After effects and I had Mocha open at the same time, the notebook was freezing like mad, I was getting mad and taking out my frustration out by clicking like mad all over the screen, then i discovered if i clicked on the mocha icon in the task bar, hey pesto, screen unfreezes. This doesn't work with any other app open.

What the hell is going on, it's driving me nuts, I don't want to have mocha open all the time, just so i can unfreeze the screen. I have already tried so much to troubleshoot this, I have run out of ideas. reinstalled, tested ram with mem test, tested gfx card, latest drivers, scoured event viewer for errors, swapped hard drives. checked latency, all ok. Dodgy rouge software maybe I don't know.

Anybody with any idea on how to solve this, your help would be greatly appreciated.

Ta.

Hello gptsunbeam and welcome to Seven Forums.

Did you happen to check for damaged or corrupt system files? Sometimes an inter-dependency between files can cause erratic behavior. Run a System File Checker scan from an elevated command prompt (option two.) If problems are found run the scan 3 times rebooting in between each scan.

SFC /SCANNOW Command - System File Checker

Another possible troubleshooting aid is running a clean startup (AKA clean boot.)

Troubleshoot Application Conflicts by Performing a Clean Startup

Hey and thank you.

That was precisely the first thing I did and that didn't fix it, so I re-installed. I have reinstalled about 3 times, the same issue comes back.

What I cant understand, is that having one random app open will be able 'wake' the notebook out of the freeze.

What I think it might be, is some background software running amok, i tried using the latency checker, but that showed nothing.

I thought maybe there might be some monitoring software out there, that would tell me what service/app is causing CPU usage at that precise time, so after it happened I could quickly go check who the culprit was, but i couldn't find anything like that. I thought maybe task manager should do that, but I couldn't figure it out if it could.

When you reinstalled did you use the original image that is on a partition on your hard drive?

Or did you use an original Windows 7 Ultimate DVD?

If you are using a factory image on your hard drive then it may have lots of bloat ware installed which tends to cause problems unless all the bloat ware is completely removed, this can be a challenge in some cases.

Ideally you should go to the HP website and obtain all the latest drivers for your system then put them on a flash drive. After that install from an original Windows 7 Ultimate CD, then install your HP drivers. This will ensure that zero bloat ware is installed on your system. In most cases this will solve the freezing problem.

The free tool called Process Monitor might be able to help isolate the problem. You don't even have to install it. There's a "live" run process monitor now link at the bottom of the page. If you click on Options in the menu bar you can choose Select Columns (among others) which can give you a broader view of what's happening behind the scenes.

Process Monitor

First time I re-installed was from the factory default and I always un-install any software i don't use - habit picked up from previous versions of windows. Second time was from a fresh disk with newly downloaded drivers.

That's the thing though, if it's not the OS, it must be the hardware, but I tested the hardware that I could, and updated all the drivers. So the only thing is maybe an IRQ conflict, but that doesn't explain why the GUI freezes, but not the mouse pointer and the OS can still run 'normally' behind the frozen GUI and then snap out of it, only if i click on this certain app. A normal freeze would freeze everything, and perhaps I would get a BSOD and it would happen when I did certain things, but this just happens whenever it feels like it, especially when I have a deadline coming, or just to generally piss me off.

The only thing to do would be to un-install software bit by bit over time and see if the problem is coming from that are.

Life is too short to have a dysfunctional relationship with your notebook.

marsmimar said:

The free tool called Process Monitor might be able to help isolate the problem. You don't even have to install it. There's a "live" run process monitor now link at the bottom of the page. If you click on Options in the menu bar you can choose Select Columns (among others) which can give you a broader view of what's happening behind the scenes.

Process Monitor

That looks the ticket, I will give it a bash and report back to see what I can find.

TA.

I ran the procmon and promptly got a bsod, apparently avast doesn't like sharing, so I killed that and swapped over to AVG. While running procmon, GUI was freezing constantly. I was using my mocha trick to unfreeze and refresh the list but the only thing now is that there are hundreds of processes running per minute, and i just don't know what I am looking for as nothing is standing out, so I will have to study it for a while.

Any clue what I should be looking out for?

I'm just writing here because I'm having a similar, if not the same, problem.

As stated, I can pretty much do anything I want on my computer, play games, watch videos and stuff. Nothing will happen and everything will be fine.

When I open any internet browser(I tried IE, firefox, Chrome, all did the same thing) there is a chance that my programs will suddenly stop responding, or at least drastically decrease in speed giving them the impression of being unresponsive.

Some programs will be completely unaffected, but something as simple as opening notepad will take way longer than it should.

Sometimes it happens for about 15-20 seconds, other times i managed to wait as long as 5 minutes just for my programs to start being responsive again, and this can happen again in a matter of minutes.

To clarify, I've recently just re-installed windows 7 because I had that problem. It did not fix it and did not make it worse, so I suspect it might be an hardware problem. I ran stuff like memtests and HD tests but they all resulted in a pass.

I've never had a BSOD either, my comp never crashed. It might have taken a while but it will always at some point unfreeze and work like normal.