Inexplicable System Freezes

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Wookington

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Oct 2, 2013
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10,510
Hello

One of my pc's has been having very bad problems.
During use it freeze entirely in the sense that the screen remains on, but there is no interaction possible until it is turned off manually. Initially (I'm coming back to trying to get this PC working after a couple of years of it being under my desk) it seemed to freeze mostly under heavy load, however that isnt always the case and sometimes it just freezes on the desktop without having been touched.

It has had its Motherboard, CPU, Power Supply and Heatsinks replaced and I have ran memtest without it reporting issues either now or in the past (however it did caution this isnt foolproof). I also reinstalled Windows in case it was some form of inexplicable software conflict, I also updated BIOS.

The PC in question has:
Motherboard - Asus P5N-D (Which Sysinfo doesnt seem to see properly)
CPU - Intel Q8300 (formerly a Q6600)
Graphics Cards - Nvidea 9800GT x 2
RAM - (Unsure), 3x 1GB sticks
Power Supply - OCZ Stealth Xtreme 600wt
Windows Vista 64 Bit

Any other information needed, just ask. Thank you
 
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Tabris DarkPeace

Tabris DarkPeace

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Jul 3, 2013
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Go into Device Manager.
Expand IDE ATA/ATAPI controllers.
Right click whatever the SATA AHCI controller is (list it here) and go into Properties, then the Driver tab.
Click Driver Details.

Check if the Provider of the storage driver is Intel Corporation (iaStor.sys) or Microsoft (the 'Generic' SATA ACHI, if you're even using ACHI or SATA with NCQ).

It might be that the HDD is failing, in which case the entire OS will freeze 'just in case' it needs to perform a Hard Fault (a Page Fault to, or from, the physical disk).

If the disk isn't talking then it does this to prevent data loss and/or corruption. (As it is better than writting potentially bad data to disk, then reading it back later and doing God only knows what).

Try disabling your PageFile (I normally never suggest this) and see if it gets better.
- Only do this if you're already running an Intel Corp. (iaStor.sys) driver for SATA AHCI though.
- If you're not running Intel Corp. SATA AHCI, or regardless I 'spose, check if the Index Service or other services are running that might cause problems.

If you are happy to Clonezilla, or similar 'GHOST' your OS drive, then you might also want to do that THEN try disabling UAV (see if it helps, then restore the system image).

Err, there's a few other things it might be, but I'd check those first.

Oh, 2 x 9800GT's would stress the PSU over the years... so it 'might' be a hardware issue in the traditional sense of the term.


 
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Tabris DarkPeace

Tabris DarkPeace

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Jul 3, 2013
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Oh, there might also be a shared IRQ (permitted with the ACPI IRQ's we have today) on say IRQ 19 (or whatever your SATA controller is using) and that might be throwing a wrench in the works so to speak. (You can check for shared IRQ's using Device Manager).

If it is then try enabling PCI Lock using MSCONFIG and rebooting, that tells Windows to leave the BIOS settings 'as is' for the most part and 'listen' to what the BIOS has to say about the PnP configuration far more than usual.

It's very rarely required, but on an old motherboard where the Intel Corp. driver wasn't installed in the first few minutes/hours/weeks of usage it may help. (You mentioned that SysInfo doesn't list the motherboard, which kinda twigged it. It also indicates the BIOS on the motherboard might be either old or partially corrupt... so do this at your own risk).
 
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Wookington

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Oct 2, 2013
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10,510
Thank you very much for all the suggestions and sorry for not getting back sooner, its been a very busy week and I havent got chance to try it yet, will tomorrow though hopefully.
 
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