Hard system lockup when playing games.

[Arvano]

Hello, first post here. Bought Windows 7 Home Premium yesterday, did a clean install. My Windows XP was totally broken and I couldn't find the disk so I thought I may as well take the plunge and upgrade. I now regret that decision.

I'm really pulling my hair out with frustration at this point. I use my PC for two things; 90% of its use is for gaming, the rest for watching movies/youtube. I can't play any games. After anywhere between 2 minutes and 1 hour of starting up a game, I get a hard system lockup where the only available option is to press the reset button, or cut the power completely.

I have updated graphics card drivers, sound card drivers, motherboard drivers, fully updated with Windows update, and I have spent almost all of yesterday and today trawling google finding posts from people on various tech forums with the same problem as mine, and there are a lot of people with this problem. I have tried everything that has been suggested to them. I have tried disabling my Antivirus (Kaspersky), firewall, turning off User Access Control, setting power plan to high performance, running as administrator, running with Windows XP SP 3 compatibility, disabling any sound devices that aren't my main sound card, and many more which I fail to remember at this point.

Never had any problem of this sort in Windows XP, so I'm absolutely positive that this is not a hardware problem. My hardware is all fine.

Can anybody help?
Thanks in advance.

 

[PooMan UK]

Sorry to hear about all the problems your having. Is it possible for you to fill in your full system spec it just makes it a bit easier to come up with solutions to your problems.

Thanks pal

 

[zigzag3143]

Hello, first post here. Bought Windows 7 Home Premium yesterday, did a clean install. My Windows XP was totally broken and I couldn't find the disk so I thought I may as well take the plunge and upgrade. I now regret that decision.

I'm really pulling my hair out with frustration at this point. I use my PC for two things; 90% of its use is for gaming, the rest for watching movies/youtube. I can't play any games. After anywhere between 2 minutes and 1 hour of starting up a game, I get a hard system lockup where the only available option is to press the reset button, or cut the power completely.

I have updated graphics card drivers, sound card drivers, motherboard drivers, fully updated with Windows update, and I have spent almost all of yesterday and today trawling google finding posts from people on various tech forums with the same problem as mine, and there are a lot of people with this problem. I have tried everything that has been suggested to them. I have tried disabling my Antivirus (Kaspersky), firewall, turning off User Access Control, setting power plan to high performance, running as administrator, running with Windows XP SP 3 compatibility, disabling any sound devices that aren't my main sound card, and many more which I fail to remember at this point.

Never had any problem of this sort in Windows XP, so I'm absolutely positive that this is not a hardware problem. My hardware is all fine.

Can anybody help?
Thanks in advance.

There are several reasons why it still may be hardware, though I dont think it is. It may have worked perfectly in XP but win 7 taxes hardware substantially more. Did you run the upgrade adviser?

Kasapersky needs to be un-installed to test if it is the casue. Simply disabling it doesnt do it.

Have you checked in event viewer (type eventvwr in search). Go to the windows logs>application tab

You are looking for critical errors (they have red in the left hand channel) that say app hang, app crash, or anything relating to the problem.

When you find them Note thee event ID and source codes and relay them to us.

let us know if y9ou need help with any of this


Ken

 

[pweegar]

How, excatly, do you know all of your hardware is ok????? How old is this pc? Sounds like it could be either the power supply going bad or a faulty memory chip. Try replacing the psu. If that doesn't fix the problem, down load and run memtest from microsoft. Run the program for at least 12 hours. A single pass of memtest isn't really a good idea. It needs to run many times. Run ALL the tests.

 

[Arvano]

Sorry to hear about all the problems your having. Is it possible for you to fill in your full system spec it just makes it a bit easier to come up with solutions to your problems.

Thanks pal

I have completed my full system specs for your viewing pleasure and to the best of my ability. I'm unsure as to how to find out what PSU I have though. I've looked on the back and I see no information. I can't do it tonight, but tomorrow I shall take off the side and have a rummage in there and see if I can find it as I know this is an important piece of this particular puzzle.

Did you run the upgrade adviser?

Will do so in the morning and get back to you.

Kasapersky needs to be un-installed to test if it is the casue. Simply disabling it doesnt do it.

Fair enough. I did add the games to the exclusion list of Kaspersky though, and gave them full permission to run riot all over my hard drive with utter impunity. Also, Kaspersky gave no warnings in any logs after the lockups. It would have recorded them as threats if IT was the cause of the problems. However, tomorrow I shall uninstall it just so I can eliminate it.

Have you checked in event viewer (type eventvwr in search). Go to the windows logs>application tab

You are looking for critical errors (they have red in the left hand channel) that say app hang, app crash, or anything relating to the problem.

When you find them Note thee event ID and source codes and relay them to us.

Yes I have, all of the lockups are recorded as follows: Event ID-41 /// Source - Kernel-Power /// Log-System (Last 2 days = 9)

How, excatly, do you know all of your hardware is ok????? How old is this pc? Sounds like it could be either the power supply going bad or a faulty memory chip. Try replacing the psu. If that doesn't fix the problem, down load and run memtest from microsoft. Run the program for at least 12 hours. A single pass of memtest isn't really a good idea. It needs to run many times. Run ALL the tests.

Because up until I installed Windows 7 everything was working smoothly, perfectly and with no problems whatsoever. The PC is around 2 and a half years old, with the exception of the graphics card which is 1 and a half years old, and the sound card with is less than a year old, although this type of sound card is an old one, the card is new.

I have already run a memory test which tested everything. I ran for 1 and a half hours and all came back fine. I will leave the microsoft Memtest running tonight when I go to bed, just for you, and report the findings in the morning. Before I replace the PSU I shall find out exactly what PSU I have. Am I right in thinking that anything under 400w is unsuitble for Windows 7?

 

[PooMan UK]

Have you tried updating your "bios"

Latest P5B Delux BIOS

You might want to go through the history of the BIOS updates before flashing it to the latest ver. though .... there are 21 bios updates for your board which is quite allot

P5B drivers


* Please be careful when updating your BIOS - read the instructions carefully before proceeding as you could render your Mb useless

 

[Arvano]

Alright, wasn't able to run those tests, but some other things have ruled out. Kaspersky has been ruled out as I did a total reformat with Windows 7 32bit, updated all drivers again but did not install Kaspersky. Was able to play for 2 and a half hours before the freeze, restarted, started up the game again, and it froze within 30 seconds of starting the game up again.

Temperatures have been ruled out as I was running the game with EVEREST Ultimate, which monitors every temperature, including Motherboard and CPU and all temperatures were stable. It also monitors voltage, and the voltages showed no signs of being the problem, however some people have said they solved this problem by upping their voltage from BIOS by .2 or so, so I will try that today.

Another thing I have noticed from the event viewer, aside from the Kernel-Power each time the computer locks up, there is some things in the Errors tab. "Event ID -6, Kernel-Processor-Power". Now, the event viewer is recording these errors periodically all through the day, such as when browsing, or doing anything. However, it's recording them when the computer freezes, at the exact moment, so this is another candidate for the problem.

What I'm thinking is that this Kernel-Processor-Power is happening all day but causing no problem, but when it happens during gameplay, that's where it's causing the problem, the combination of a game running and this Kernel-Processor-Power.

Does any of this shed any light on anything for you expert types?

Edit: Also, my graphics card doesn't support DX11, and even though I have downloaded and installed DX 9.0c my machine refuses to use anything but DX11. Somehow I doubt this would actually cause a complete lockup, though I could be wrong.