Computer lockup, sometimes temporary, sometimes audio distortion

So I've tried troubleshooting this for months on my own and haven't been able to come up with a solution. Reaching out to the forum now! Attached is the collected files (hopefully helpful) that are required on the BSOD section (Not having a BSOD so I did not post in that area.)

I can't figure out the source of the freezing/lockup, and after having it do so three times in 30minutes earlier I really am at wits end.



First off there are two major 'types' of freeze I'm having. One with audio distortion and one without.

1) When playing a video, most often youtube but has happened with twitter, during the freeze the audio becomes loud and distorted and requires a hard-reset. Neither mouse nor keyboard work, lights die on keyboard, and Task Manager can't be reached.

2) Second type is the simple freeze. This can happen any time, be it using modeling or art software, only text software, with browsers. Again, mouse and keyboard stop working, lights on keyboard die, and task manager will not open. SOMETIMES it will recover after a period of 20-40 seconds. Opening task manager after the freeze shows a bump in the CPU but not all the way to the top of the graph (sorry for non-technical description).

Since basically anytime I'm on the computer I have a browser open, I have difficulty ruling out Firefox as the source of the issue. But I'm not sure, because again, the entire system locks not just a program.

All Windows updates are up-to-date with the exception of
'Windows6.1-KB3177467-x64' which remains in the update center, and I've installed manually as it refused to before.


Things I've already tried:
Turning off Hardware Acceleration for Firefox and Discord
diskcheck and memchecks, both came back fine.
Opening tower and making sure all the cables were connected firmly (somewhat difficult to do with the build.) Also dusting (as best as I can I'm somewhat wary of touching the internals too much)


Safe Mode won't start for me (and hasn't for like three years) [Gets hung up after ACIPCIE driver]


Other information about issue:
Computer has dealt with at least the screaming/audio distortion freeze that requires hard-reset problem for years, but only appearing once in a blue moon (usually during gameplay.)


House that I'm in has serious wiring/grounding issues. Already I have bricked my former UPS, and had the ethernet port on the motherboard stop working. (now using a usb adapter) Standard practice is to entirely power-down the system any time I leave the house and physically unplug it and everything else from the wall.


Started to be serious after Sept 14th 2018 (After Hurricane Florence)



Part of my hurricane preparations included disconnecting everything from the tower and putting it in a trash bag beneath a bed.


Hangup usually just happens during normal browsing/light computer load, never during 3d rendering, or gaming. I need the computer as my partial source of income, as I do freelance.


Should I just take it to a repair shop to diagnose hardware issues? Or is there something else I can check? I don't have the money to just replace things willy-nilly. Apologies for the huge text wall.

An error you have there is the same error this guy has: Solved: AODDriver4.2 service failed to start, The system cannot find the file specifi | Tech Support Guy

Try his solution.

Another error may be due to ICS. Do this:


1. Click Start, type services.msc in Start Search bar and press Enter.
2. Find Internet Connection Sharing (ICS) service, and disable it.
3. Restart the computer




You also have a repetitive warning and this post may help: The driver \Driver\WUDFRd failed to load for the device... error

Also, go to Search, enter cmd. Right click cmd and open as Admin. In the black box enter: ipconfig /flushdns

Thank you for the suggestions! I tried all* of these, and it seemed okay, but then froze again after a few hours of doing things. Thankfully this time was one instance it let me return from, which was good since I was in the middle of a drawing.

The only thing in event viewer that happened before the freeze is a dbupdate event, saying it can not be found. I don't really use Dropbox's application, so I went and disabled the services for it in case that is an issue.




*Disclaimer the only fix I haven't tried yet is the AODDriver4.2 fix which involved registry.... I attached an image below but I'm unsure if this is the correct fix. Isn't it already using the highest Driver?

Following these directions, you want to concern yourself with 4.2.0.


Event ID 7000 AODdriver4.1 error fix - Graphics Cards

Also note that in this thread there is a fix using IE. You can read that at the very bottom in this thread here: Solved: AODDriver4.2 service failed to start, The system cannot find the file specifi | Tech Support Guy

Remarkable how many stories like this I've seen over the past two months. Very suspcious, and coincidental?

In my own case I have now totally lost one 5-year old homebuilt ASUS P8Z77-V Pro machine which was 100% stable and reliable, until about two months ago when it began to exhibit this "lock-up/freeze" symptom (not BSOD, but just totally unresponsive). I'm always suspicious of failing hardware that's had a long life, but is finally showing normal aging unreliability.

This machine at one time served as my HTPC as well, meaning it ran Windows Media Center and had to have 24/7 reliability. It's powered through a UPS for just that reason, to cover for short intermittent electrical power outages and other anomalies. And it worked perfectly for 5 years, until two months ago. When I tried to get it back and running WMC recently (i.e. over the past two months, when my primary current HTPC also began exhibiting the same serious instability and freezes) this older machine was simply too unreliable to be useful as a DVR. Wouldn't stay "up" and running normally and I was re-booting 1-15 times per day.

Finally decided to try a new power supply which I ordered last Friday. On Saturday the machine finally crapped out totally, no longer being able to power on at all. I feared I had fried either the motherboard or CPU, or that the perhaps failing PSU had finally totally crapped out, or even that the tower case itself had died. When the new PSU arrived on Sunday I installed it with cautious optimism that my latest no-longer-able-to-boot would be cured, but alas to no success. The machine was now totally and completely a boat anchor.

I've now removed all of the internal parts worth salvaging and transferring to a new machine (including the brand new 600W fanless PSU, GTX 1050ti SC graphics card, one Ceton 4-tuner cablecard TV tuner card, one Hauppauge 2-tuner OTA/ATSC TV tuner card, four HDD spinner drives adding up to about 10TB) and put the remaining "turkey carcass" outside in the garbage for pickup.


Which brings me to my other similarly failing big-boy homebuilt HTPC machine, this one based on an ASUS Z170-Deluxe Skylake motherboard and i7-6700 CPU, 32GB, M.2 SSD, 2.5" SATA3 SSD, and 6TB HDD spinner. With Ceton 6-tuner cablecard TB tuner card, 4-tuner Hauppauge OTA/ATSC TV tuner card, this machine is only 1 1/2 years old and definitelyshould not be failing.

And yet it is failing over these past two months. Sometimes I can't even complete the boot process and get to the Windows desktop before it's frozen, and other times (like right now) it will remain up and seemingly perfectly normal and stable for extended periods (currently going on 21 hours). Otherwise, it can lock up anytime in between.

At first I thought it was a failing Ceton TV tuner card. I happened to have a totally brand new unused "spare" in a carton, for possible use in just such a situation. So I swapped Ceton cards. It did seem to make things better, at least for a while. But the freeze symptom has returned again and with the same vengeance and randomness so that the machine can stay up for an hour or more, or maybe not. It can record 4 TV programs consecutively and then freeze in the middle of the fifth recording. No real explanation, but I no longer think it's the Ceton card which is the culprit.

I've tried swapping ethernet switches all around my house, I've tried unplugging unnecessary USB devices when not required, etc., but all to no avail. I even bought a new ASUS Z170-Deluxe motherboard from a seller in Japan (at a $100 premium price over original retail price when these were being sold normally a few years back) because they're simply unavailable any longer here in the US, planning on replacing what I thought was a failing motherboard. Haven't worked up the energy to attempt that job yet, but at least I have the replacement.

Might also be a failing CPU, or tower case, but this seems less likely than a failing motherboard. Interestingly before my older machine totally died on Saturday I decided to reinstall Win7 on it since I'd been running the same Win7 install for 5 years. Added 2x8GB of additional memory I'd had waiting for the right moment to be installed, and did the clean install earlier last week. And I had about 3 days of "perfect" solid running, without a single lockup or freeze or other symptom of instablity. Amazing I told myself, is it possible this instability was because of assorted old detritus etc. in my Windows system itself accumulated over the past 5 years? Seemed to be the case, as the brand new Windows saw "stability", at least for the first 3 days.

And then it broke again. Once more lockups and freezes, and all the old symptoms had returned. While the fresh Win7 install might have helped some for other good reasons, it obviously had no effect on curing what to me was clearly now seen as one or more serious hardware failures. And as proven by the complete machine death on Saturday, unable to be brought back to life even with a replaced PSU, it's obvious my problems had nothing to do with the installed Win7 system.


Bottom line: I've now had to quickly replace BOTH of these machines. Rather than spend the time and energy buying and building both from scratch again, I found a good deal on TWO open-box but "new" Lenovo M910t tower machines (with full Lenovo warranty), best-seller (popular but minimal ) configurations which is exactly what I wanted to start from, including Win7 pre-installed which is what is required to run WMC.

I will transfer whatever usable parts I can from both of my current machines into the two new M910t machines, upgrading as well to fit my needs and desires. It's a bit of a compromise in many regards, and won't be exactly the total configuration and performance I might otherwise been able to re-build for myself, but it's cheaper, and MUCH FASTER, to go this route. And in the end it'll probably be just fine.

I need to get my two desktop stations back up and running ASAP. Temporarily I've got a laptop replacing the function of my 5-year old dead machine, and I'm struggling along with the HTPC (re-booting as required) until I receive my two M910t replacements at the end of this week.


So as to how all of this might apply to you, I simply advise that there's no way an outsider can possible know what's happening inside of your machine. It can be any one of many possible hardware failure issues, be they internal components or USB devices. It might even be network-connected devices sending out spurious signals, or it might be Windows system corruption which is playing havoc.

You can perform your own intelligent forensic diagnostic and detective work, trying to isolate which components do or do not seem related by removing them and confirming that you now still do or do not have the symptom you're chasing. That's the usual way one determines the failing component, assuming it is an easily removed or swapped component. But not everything is so easily shut off temporarily or swapped out.

I even had a symptom of my freeze not actually being a freeze after all, but rather my two monitors had simply both gone into power-save mode and had not sprung back to life as they should have done when I jiggled the mouse. Is this two failing monitors? A frozen system? A bad USB mouse? A failing graphics card? Who knows. But as it turns out when I would then physically power off monitor #1 (causing Windows to want to reassign the "main monitor function over to monitor #2) lo and behold things woke right up! Monitor #2 powered back up, my desktop was now all presented on this single monitor, and apparently I wasn't frozen after all!

I then powered monitor #1 back on, and Windows now reverted to the original normal "extended desktop" configuration, reverting the primary desktop contents back over to this montior which had now just come back to life. So what happened here? Failing graphics card? Theoretically it should have sent power-up commands to both sleeping monitors when I jiggled the mouse, but apparently it did not. Or did it and the signal got lost? Who knows. But apparently hard power-off of the intermittent critical monitor didn't get lost, and triggered Windows to recover, and then hard power-on also didn't get lost, and Windows was back in business operating normally again.

These things happen, but it's probably a sign of aging hardware. Didn't happen years ago, ever. But now it occurs "commonly".


Don't know what else to say, other than that we all get old.

@F22 Simpilot Trying the 4.2 fix now, just rebooted we'll see how it goes! One of those things where I won't know unless it stops or becomes less frequent I suppose.



@dsperber Thank you for this post, can I just ask, are you a writer? Your post had a very appealing flow to it and honestly, I got a little bit emotional towards the end. Very moving. Perhaps I'm just overly sympathetic towards machines.

Don't know what else to say, other than that we all get old.

- Tears.

If I was going to build an HTPC, I'd use a server motherboard and enterprise grade HDDs and what not. It looks like you're using old hardware, and to make matters worse you're recycling old hardware with hardware you just bought increasing the chances of another likely computer freeze up should the affected recycled hardware be the problem.

One thing is for sure, the cost for hardware often dictates its quality. Not saying you can't pay some $300 for a motherboard and end up with a dud, but for the most part the components are a lot better and go through a more rigorous testing process and what not. That's true for Hitachi hard drives. Although, WD bought them, the Hitachi HDD is still manufactured by them.

Anyway... the OP's Event Viewer logs are in fact indicating sources of issues and I have researched these issues and posted the links to hopefully mitigate the problem. The bad AC could be a vector as well, but a good quality (again, price dictates quality) PSU with a good quality UPS should help mitigate that issue. A bad ground may or may not be an issue. And I say that due to the fact where my desktop is plugged in there's no ground once so ever and my PC runs fine for the most part. But once in a great blue moon while I game I also get an immediate and sudden freeze up with a loud pop sound over the speakers. There are no events in the log in my case. I'm thinking it's hardware related and possibly my yoke or pedals. I have bought a USB power meter to try and observe any amp or volt spike. Yes, I tested my RAM with all Memtest 86 tests and tested my HDDs. But again, my issue of a sudden freeze up doesn't happen but maybe once every two months or so. Really hard to diagnose something like that. I am using the latest BIOS except a new release that came out last March. But I highly doubt that's it.

dsperber said:

Don't know what else to say, other than that we all get old.

Everything is meant to die in this universe as we are made of stars and stars do die.

Eventually the rotation of atoms withen your body will cease as well as the rotation of atoms within a celestial object, and their elliptical rotations will too cease.

Great songs here and here.

I'm 38 and I'm smart enough to know good music and what have you. LOL Music today is a joke all made to earn money without a real artistic expression once so ever. Albeit there's a few songs, but far and few between.

Anyway, back on topic.

F22 Simpilot said:

If I was going to build an HTPC, I'd use a server motherboard and enterprise grade HDDs and what not. It looks like you're using old hardware, and to make matters worse you're recycling old hardware with hardware you just bought increasing the chances of another likely computer freeze up should the affected recycled hardware be the problem.

One thing is for sure, the cost for hardware often dictates its quality. Not saying you can't pay some $300 for a motherboard and end up with a dud, but for the most part the components are a lot better and go through a more rigorous testing process and what not. That's true for Hitachi hard drives. Although, WD bought them, the Hitachi HDD is still manufactured by them.

Anyway... the OP's Event Viewer logs are in fact indicating sources of issues and I have researched these issues and posted the links to hopefully mitigate the problem. The bad AC could be a vector as well, but a good quality (again, price dictates quality) PSU with a good quality UPS should help mitigate that issue. A bad ground may or may not be an issue. And I say that due to the fact where my desktop is plugged in there's no ground once so ever and my PC runs fine for the most part. But once in a great blue moon while I game I also get an immediate and sudden freeze up with a loud pop sound over the speakers. There are no events in the log in my case. I'm thinking it's hardware related and possibly my yoke or pedals. I have bought a USB power meter to try and observe any amp or volt spike. Yes, I tested my RAM with all Memtest 86 tests and tested my HDDs. But again, my issue of a sudden freeze up doesn't happen but maybe once every two months or so. Really hard to diagnose something like that. I am using the latest BIOS except a new release that came out last March. But I highly doubt that's it.

I assure you, both of these machines were top-of-the-line hardware when they were built. No cheap "green" drives, just highest reliability WD Black drives. No bargain equipment when 24/7 100% reliability is demanded for my DVR. You record 4 channels continuously for two weeks when the Olympics are here and you want it all usable when you finally get around to watching it weeks or months later, so you record to a 6TB drive with 128MB cache and when that fills up you copy to a second 6TB drive to make room for continuing recording.

I assure you, I've been using WMC and HTPC and Ceton/Hauppauge/AMD cards since 2010, and I know that if you want reliability to don't buy cheap components, or under-power. I don't skimp, and I use 600W high-end PSU's (NesteQ, NoFan, Seasonic Prime Fanless).

The Event Viewer logs for me showed nothing, other than the kernel-power entries from the post-next-boot that the machine had been booted without a prior clean shutdown. So nothing was noticed during the final instants before freeze that could account for the freeze.

I'm pretty certain it's not the two 6TB drives which are at fault here, since they are only "data". And besides they're both 2 years or younger. The main HTPC is otherwise solid-state, with M.2 PCIe NVMe for Win7 and 2.5" SATA3 SSD for additional "data", and I'm totally not suspicious of either of these storage devices. I actually plan to eventually replace the lesser 2x2TB HDD spinners in my older machine with another single 6TB drive, but the new Lenovo M910t machines doesn't have sufficient internal drive space for all of this. So I've bought an external 2-bay USB/SATA enclosure to use for the time being, while I get all of this machine migration sorted out and stabilized.

BIOS on both of my ASUS boards was right up to snuff, as were all drivers for Intel USB 3.0 and SATA/AHCI. Of course we've all gone through last year's Intel CPU hardware-CVE major panic with firmware updates to solve the vulnerability pushed out by all manufacturers (including ASUS and Lenovo) over a 6-month period and corresponding MS Win7/Win10 updates to support the firmware updates. Who knows if this major major low-level machine upgrade might not in some way be tied to what's changed in the stability of a previously 100% reliable universe of hardware, like my two high-end home-built desktop machines particular.

I also mention that my cousin's machine (Lenovo Ideacentre K330, vintage 2011) has also started exhibiting the identical freeze-lockup non-BSOD symptom as well!! Yes, this a lesser and even older Win7 machine, but all was perfect until just December, when I began to get panic phone calls requesting my help. I'm remote so can't do physical hands-on diagnosis easily, but after some time spent doing things like surface analysis tests on the original HDD spinner which is still there (and, by the way, which tested 100% error-free!) I decided to recommend a hardware upgrade to a "new, modern machine". So, ironically, I'm already receiving parts to be installed into the new Lenovo M920t tower desktop machine (i7-8700 CPU and Win10 Pro) we ordered to become her new replacement PC.

Again, as a very experienced computer person I simply point out that this is all rather remarkable and coincidental to me... that otherwise naturally-aging but seemingly perfectly fit hardware being used in no different a manner than they've been reliably performing in for many years, suddenly begins to exhibit this curious lockup/freeze symptom that many other people are also reporting on their totally different machines.

You can attempt a solution yourself, or by bringing the machine to a computer repair place and hope he/she is smarter and better at diagnosis than you are. You can try replacing one part at a time, or backing out recently installed software or drivers or Windows Updates, or whatever you can think of that might be responsible. Or, as an extreme you can just go with a whole new machine and pray you've therefore fully excised the beast from your midst. It's a matter of time and expense, and what resources you have available.

But I assure you I'm no rookie here. I actually was going to replace the Z170-Deluxe motherboard with a brand new one, believing it was the failing component even though it's less than 2 years old and has operated flawlessly until 2 months ago. I still might decide to do that first rather than make the transition this coming weekend to the new M910t that is arriving on Friday. After all, I do have the replacement motherboard in a carton so why not at least give it a go. And I might still. I do have confidence that no other parts inside that machine could possibly be causing the random freeze symptom but the motherboard and its SATA controllers. So using the drives and cards transferred into the new machine (or used on a replacement Z170-Deluxe board) doesn't much concern me, at least going into that course of action.


And, in total contrast to this rampant instability, I am using a 2013-vintage Lenovo Thinkpad W530 laptop as my temporary substitute for the older totally-dead-and-gone ASUS P8Z77-V Pro desktop machine, and it's now been up 100% solid for four days without so much as a hiccup of instability.

And I'm using a 2016-vintage Lenovo Thinkpad P70 laptop as my "work" fallback for the now undependable ASUS Z170-Deluxe HTPC/desktop machine, including use as a "internet-provided TV streamer" and WMC viewer for non-protected content to my HDTVs. Again, 100% solid for the past four days since I began depending on it.

Expecting 100% dependent reliability from our PC's is not too much to ask. It's only the non-100% intermittent freezes of most likely failing hardware which is the surprise.