System Freezing

[Grimhowl]

Wasn't sure where to put this, but this seemed the best place.

Every so often, my system locks up solid to the point I have to manually power it off by holding the button down. It can be sitting there idle, or in the middle of a game, or most commonly, looking at the Playback/Recording settings for Windows.

I went into Event Viewer, and it didn't list anything but me powering off the system manually. I had looked around previously and found some people having issues with their Realtek audio causing that problem, so I updated my drivers and thought I had it licked. The rate of freezes dropped off dramatically. But today I ended up having two freezes, one on the Recording options screen while mousing over my Microphone getting ready to right click it, and the other while playing Crysis.

I'm not really sure what's causing the problem, or where to start looking for solutions. I know that my drivers are up to date (at least as of this morning), but then again, they're obviously not going to be 100% rock solid like drivers for the current OSes.

Any advice?

 

[Grimhowl]

An update and a bump:

I ran MemTest for over 8 hours last night while I was out, and it didn't come across a single error, so it seems unlikely my RAM would be a problem. I'm still open for suggestions.

Thanks.

 

[zigzag3143]

Wasn't sure where to put this, but this seemed the best place.

Every so often, my system locks up solid to the point I have to manually power it off by holding the button down. It can be sitting there idle, or in the middle of a game, or most commonly, looking at the Playback/Recording settings for Windows.

I went into Event Viewer, and it didn't list anything but me powering off the system manually. I had looked around previously and found some people having issues with their Realtek audio causing that problem, so I updated my drivers and thought I had it licked. The rate of freezes dropped off dramatically. But today I ended up having two freezes, one on the Recording options screen while mousing over my Microphone getting ready to right click it, and the other while playing Crysis.

I'm not really sure what's causing the problem, or where to start looking for solutions. I know that my drivers are up to date (at least as of this morning), but then again, they're obviously not going to be 100% rock solid like drivers for the current OSes.

Any advice?

GH

there are some issues with realtek and 64 bit. what version driver do you have? it is listed in device manager. to get into device manager type device manager in search. look for audio>right click>properties>driver info

thanks

ken

 

[Grimhowl]

I just snipped the whole Window, so it'd have any other pertinent information that may help you.

As an aside, that's the driver the Realtek site has as it's latest as for yesterday morning, and it's not the audio driver from EVGA's site. I tried the EVGA custom driver first, but the rate of crashes actually increased, rather than becoming less frequent when compared with the Windows 7 generic HD audio driver.

 

[zigzag3143]

GH

One thing I wonder about is your BIOS the most recent?

ken

 

[Grimhowl]

It didn't occur to me to check that.

This is why I ask these things. I'm off to EVGAs site to look for any BIOS updates. Is there an in-OS way of seeing my current BIOS version in 7?

 

[zigzag3143]

It didn't occur to me to check that.

This is why I ask these things. I'm off to EVGAs site to look for any BIOS updates. Is there an in-OS way of seeing my current BIOS version in 7?

there are 3rd party apps that will do that and more. One is everest.

 

[Antman]

Start
Search
System Information

Takes a few seconds - but the data is there.

 

[Grimhowl]

Thank you Antman, you just saved me a lot of trouble.

So, apparently I will need a BIOS update, though I can't do it right now because I'm out of burnable CDs and I left my flash drives in the shop last night.

It seems I'm not even using the EVGA BIOS (unless it's just a repackaged Phoenix BIOS), and it's three versions out of date. Though looking at the patch notes, the updates have been to Improve Bootup BClock, and adding B2B CAS Delay.

I'm always a bit reluctant to flash the BIOS until I've tried all other options. I've got this nagging fear something will go wrong and ruin the mobo. But, if it'll fix my freezing problem, I suppose it's worth the risk.

 

[Grimhowl]

Alright, I updated the BIOS to the latest version, problem still occurs. I checked to see if maybe System Restore was trying to create a restore point and mucking things up in the process, but the most recent restore point was about 11 hours ago, during an install process, and it worked just fine.

I'm still open for suggestions, and will be for the next day or so. On Monday, if I haven't been able to make any progress in solving the problem, I plan to return the board to EVGA for a replacement. I'm really at the end of my rope, and at the very least then I would know whether or not it is something faulty with the board itself (which is possible, considering the randomness of the freezes).

Any further advice is welcomed. Thanks in advance.

 

[Zevaka]

i have the same problem... random system freezing are really annoying.
In event viewer i have kernel power (41) error, but i believe it's cuz i shut down pc holding power button

i can confirm that BIOS update doesn't solve a problem. MEMTEST showed zero errors (ran it for 8 hours!)

btw, my system NEVER locked up during games (though i don't play a lot, so maybe it's coincidence, i'm not sure)

2Grimhowl
so many reports about this problem probably mean that it's win7 problem, not hardware issue

 

[Grimhowl]

Mine doesn't consistently lock up during anything. I've had it lock playing games, lock watching youtube videos, lock browsing forums, lock doing nothing but using pidgin, and lock while the system is completely idol with nothing running. I've had it freeze when the system has been on for 3 or 4 hours, and had it lock when it's been on for 5 minutes.

There's seemingly nothing consistent about it.

And yes, Event ID 41 (Kernel-Power) is where you shut down the PC by holding the power button. I have been unable to locate an actual sign of what error is causing the freeze.

And while I acknowledge that it's possible that it's a Windows 7 problem, if I wait too long to find out, I lose my ability to return the board for a replacement. Although I also had a problem where if I alt tabbed between high load programs (games, or a browser with a ton of programs open) the system would reboot itself (not freeze). I fixed that by using Alt-Tab-Thingy, which has caused no problems so far.

What motherboard are you using, Zevaka? Just curious.

 

[Grimhowl]

Annnd my system just rebooted itself out of the blue. No blue screen or anything, even with the option to automatically reboot on crash disabled. Not sure what caused that, but I'm even more worried than I was previously.

At the time, all I had open was Chrome with two tabs (Seven Forums and the EVGA forums, posting to hopefully find a fix for all this), and the latest version of Winamp, playing a song.

 

[Zevaka]

What motherboard are you using, Zevaka? Just curious.

i'm on Gigabyte, GA-7**** series, with NVidia chipset.

and now i think my pc has Münchausen syndrome... before i read about freezes, it never freezed, before i read about random reboots it never rebooted... how cool is that?

 

[Antman]

What motherboard are you using, Zevaka? Just curious.

i'm on Gigabyte, GA-7**** series, with NVidia chipset.

and now i think my pc has Münchausen syndrome... before i read about freezes, it never freezed, before i read about random reboots it never rebooted... how cool is that?

You should read about stable working systems.

 

[Zevaka]

What motherboard are you using, Zevaka? Just curious.

i'm on Gigabyte, GA-7**** series, with NVidia chipset.

and now i think my pc has Münchausen syndrome... before i read about freezes, it never freezed, before i read about random reboots it never rebooted... how cool is that?

You should read about stable working systems.

hm? about windows 7?

 

[Grimhowl]

I've actually narrowed mine down (with the help of my fellow techs in the shop) to being either the motherboard or the PSU. So, since I'm already paying shipping for the replacement, I figured I might as well not dick around and just return them both for replacements.

Hopefully, this should fix the problem. I'm going to run one more test tomorrow, just to be sure. I'm going to throw a new hard drive in the system, put XP pro on it, and just dick around on it everytime I get the chance. That'd at least narrow it down to whether it's a faulty board or a conflict in 7. But the folks at the EVGA forums (my mobo manufacturer) have been running 7 fine on that board for months, without issue. So I find it hard to believe that it'd be a conflict with 7 if my board were actually working at 100%.

Just an update. Thanks for your help and suggestions guys.

 

[Zevaka]

don't forget to report if there are any issues with new hardware

 

[Grimhowl]

An update, as requested. I've been running the system for about a day and a half since receiving the new parts (a new motherboard and PSU), and it's been working fine. Guess it was just a flukey production quality thing.

 

[zigzag3143]

GH

Glad you are working. Nice avitar<g>