Win 8.1 freeze randomly without BSOD

krneki1

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Aug 26, 2014
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For the past few weeks, multiple times daily (4-5x), I've been constantly having problems with random freezes on Asus N76Vz notebook @ Windows 8.1 x 64 with latest updates. I don't remember updating any drivers or installing any software that could be capable of doing that, so it has begun out of sudden.

Freezes are actually pretty weird. It starts with a partial freeze, i.e. I can still switch between opened programs, I can still open new tabs in Chrome (it won't open any new sites though, just rotating circle icon), winamp will keep playing music etc., actually all programs will freeze only partially, nothing like I've ever seen before. But I can't close any currently opened programs or open new ones, including task manager. Explorer (+Classic shell) will freeze (become completely non-responding) as well, so sooner or later, I will have to force shutdown computer and turn it on again.

I really have no idea where to look at because there's not a single minidump report. S.M.A.R.T status is telling me that SSD (with latest firmware) and HDD (0 bad sectors) are completely fine (checked with Hard Disk Sentinel). Computer is not infected nor have ever been (Comodo Internet Security for active protection, also scanned with malwarebytes, hitmanpro, TDSSkiller and adw cleaner). I have the latest BIOS and the latest drivers from official ASUS support website.

There are no other problems with Windows, except a lot of times I can't reboot Windows normally - it will stay at reboot screen forever. I've already tried few solutions I've Googled about, but none helped, including turning off hybrid shutdown.
And another problem unrelated to Windows freezing mentioned above. Sometimes I can't close an application (Winamp and iTunes mostly) and killing in task manager from Processes tab also won't do anything. But if I try to kill it from Details tab, I get "The operation could not be completed. Access is denied." error. I've Googled about that one as well, most solutions were solved by unplugging USB devices, but I don't have any connected at all, so dead end here too. I've also tried with Unlocker and FileAssasin and they can't do anything as well in that case.

Since there are no minidumps, I've collected system, application and administrative events around occurrence of random crash. I'm also posting system summary and hardware report from AIDA64. Please have a look at them here:
https://www.dropbox.com/sh/zbshbr1pmnk3kux/AAApt-kSUs0l9WSNoEdCafkya?dl=0

Let me know if you need any other reports, I'd be glad to post them. Thanks in advance for help!
 
Solution
So I just though that it would be nice to share how I fixed my problem. Steps I mentioned in previous post didn't help at all, so I did these steps:

- disable dynamic tick
- change all scheduled tasks to Win8.1 compatibility
- uninstall Comodo Internet Security

I'm not sure which one helped, but one of these 3 did, so far I didn't have any freeze at all. I already installed Comodo again and it looks fine so far. Perhaps I'll also try to re-enable dynamic tick to see if that was the real issue.

krneki1

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Aug 26, 2014
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I've just updated my dropbox folder with the following files:

sfc_scannow.txt - as you may see, no errors
CHKDSKResults.txt - not sure if that fixed anything
1st_boot_after_chkdsk.png - interesting thing, happened for the first time. Just after the CHKDSK ran, a bunch of identical CMD windows opened up on the 1st boot.
 
if you system hangs like you describe it will generally be code processed by a second processor. Most often in a GPU, Some fancy server network cards, or in the firmware of a solid state drive.

My bet is on the solid state drive.

What I would try: make sure there is plenty of free space on you solid state drive (20%)
boot into your system BIOS and leave the drive powered but idle for a few hours. After 5 mins
the drive will attempt to run it clean up routines and relocate retired blocks. It is hard to do this when the drive is in use and windows has to wait for a response from the drive. As far as windows is concerned the drive is still running but very slow.

after a few hours or over night boot into windows and see if the problem persists.

also note: that windows 8.1 will do a lot more checking of the drives than windows 7 did. It can be doing a repair of your drives in the background while you are using the system. This can take days if your system is set to go to sleep. You might go to control panel power management and tell the system to run in high performance mode then leave your system idle for a few hours to get the repair finished.

Note: generally you see a lot of disk activity from the system process (5) in resource manager when this is the case

note: you can also get deadlocks in code that cause the same problem. I have see many with the graphics driver that could be "fix" when you disable unused sound devices in control panel device manager. (does not really fix the problem but changes the rate that you hit the problem) Most of the time it is a bug in the graphics driver sound support, so you want to make sure you have a updated graphics driver and disable its sound support if you don't have a speaker driven from your monitor.

 

krneki1

Reputable
Aug 26, 2014
6
0
4,520
So I just though that it would be nice to share how I fixed my problem. Steps I mentioned in previous post didn't help at all, so I did these steps:

- disable dynamic tick
- change all scheduled tasks to Win8.1 compatibility
- uninstall Comodo Internet Security

I'm not sure which one helped, but one of these 3 did, so far I didn't have any freeze at all. I already installed Comodo again and it looks fine so far. Perhaps I'll also try to re-enable dynamic tick to see if that was the real issue.
 
Solution