New disk and W7 instalation freezing. Help!

[WildMarker]

Hi, here's the situation: I recently bought a new HD and installed w7 x64 on it. I had some serious freezing issues on it from the second day so I went back for a replacement. The new one was working just fine, for about a week, and now it's gone into the freezing frenzy of his returned brother as well.

The rest of my hardware however seems to be ok, I put back the old drive with my w7 x86 install and everything works fine. This leads me to believe that there are 3 possibilities:

a- The windows instalation is crooked and i need to find another one
b- The second disk is ALSO faulty and I need to get a replacement until one of them works (unlikely at this point I think)
c- One of my pieces of hardware is not quite compatible (driver-wise) with x64.

In the case of C, I'm seriously starting to suspect the sound card. The drivers can't be installed with their own installer and have to be searched with the device manager.
The other thing that leads me to suspect the Sound card is the fact that while the freezing seems to be at random, it is GUARANTEED to freeze one or two minutes after I start a voice chat program (either Steam voice chat or TeamSpeak) which is incredibly strange. Other than that it's truly random, i just spent hours playing XCOM and no problems, then started browsing in Chrome and BAM! Freeze.

My setup consists as follows:
Motherboard: Asus P5K SE/EPU
Processor: Intel Q9300 2.5GhZ Quad core
Video: NVidia 560Ti
4GB RAM (2 x 2GB slots)
HD: Western Digital Caviar Black 1TB (old disk is WD 320GB Caviar Blue)
Windows 7 Ultimate x64
Sound: No idea, it's a generic one. The brand is "Encore" and the drivers used are the Envy24_Family_DriverV560C (also tried older versions, same effect)

Please help! I'm runing on safe mode trying to find a solution and I'm all out of ideas...

 

[AM2A]

Many people report similar problems with encore cards, pull it out and run through the onboard audio. If the problems clear up, you've probably isolated the cause.

 

[smorizio]

http://www.via.com.tw/en/support/drivers.jsp
5.60c from via web page for the sound card.
also make sure your mb chipset drivers have been updated too.
if it still hangs check the drive firmware and see if there any updates for it.
run memtest to see if it a stick of bad ram.

 

[WildMarker]

My onboard audio card came crooked from factory (which is why I bought the Encore card all those years ago) but I can try that anyway.

Right now I reverted to my old w7 32 bit instalation (still had the disk ). I'm gonna run it like this for a while now, my main concern is ruling out the HD, because it's the one new piece of hardware on this machine so I gotta make sure it's ok (because it costed me moneys and I don't know how many times the Store will take 'em back ).

If everything works ok then yeah, next step is going into x64 with a new sound card. I've tried all drivers for it, none of them made any difference.

Thanks AM2A for that tip, I've been searching through some forums and yeah, it looked like people have that trouble with sound cards, but it was just so... weird. Having guaranteed freeze on voice chat however was a big sign that it might be the case.

 

[pjmelect]

A freezing computer that does not recover is most often due to problem memory, download and run memtest86 for at least three passes to test the memory. If the computer freezes and does recover then the cause is either the hard drive or software. To test the hard drive download from the manufacture of your hard drive web site their diagnostic software.

 

[soundguruman]

Hi, here's the situation: I recently bought a new HD and installed w7 x64 on it. I had some serious freezing issues on it from the second day so I went back for a replacement. The new one was working just fine, for about a week, and now it's gone into the freezing frenzy of his returned brother as well.

The rest of my hardware however seems to be ok, I put back the old drive with my w7 x86 install and everything works fine. This leads me to believe that there are 3 possibilities:

a- The windows instalation is crooked and i need to find another one
b- The second disk is ALSO faulty and I need to get a replacement until one of them works (unlikely at this point I think)
c- One of my pieces of hardware is not quite compatible (driver-wise) with x64.

In the case of C, I'm seriously starting to suspect the sound card. The drivers can't be installed with their own installer and have to be searched with the device manager.
The other thing that leads me to suspect the Sound card is the fact that while the freezing seems to be at random, it is GUARANTEED to freeze one or two minutes after I start a voice chat program (either Steam voice chat or TeamSpeak) which is incredibly strange. Other than that it's truly random, i just spent hours playing XCOM and no problems, then started browsing in Chrome and BAM! Freeze.

My setup consists as follows:
Motherboard: Asus P5K SE/EPU
Processor: Intel Q9300 2.5GhZ Quad core
Video: NVidia 560Ti
4GB RAM (2 x 2GB slots)
HD: Western Digital Caviar Black 1TB (old disk is WD 320GB Caviar Blue)
Windows 7 Ultimate x64
Sound: No idea, it's a generic one. The brand is "Encore" and the drivers used are the Envy24_Family_DriverV560C (also tried older versions, same effect)

Please help! I'm runing on safe mode trying to find a solution and I'm all out of ideas...

well you can try this, if that does not work replace the motherboard.
One of the problems I see is that you have a 1 TB drive.
The OS and apps should be installed on a small fast drive, which boots first.
The 1 TB should be used for personal files, not the OS. 1TB drive is very slow.

One thing is to make sure that the priority of the game or media is highest, there maybe other processes running that have priority over the game.
Including for instance security programs and antivirus. The latest of which have gaming modes.
If there is not a gaming mode on the security try turning it OFF.

Another good thing is to eliminate as many unused / junk / UN-needed applications.
turn off the screen saver
Go into the power profiles,
set standby, hibernate and sleep to OFF
leave the monitor standby ON, that's OK (maybe not, try OFF)
Set the Hard Drive standby to NEVER
Set system Performance to MAXIMUM, not "quiet mode."

Open the bios set up and make sure "cool and quiet" is OFF. (AMD)
There may be a performance setting in the bios setup you have...make sure it's cranked up to max.
in the bios, see that the allocation for video, if available, is maxed.

Now open the hardware manager profiles...
click start
click computer
click system properties
click device manager
double click on mice and other pointing devices
right click on HID compliant mouse
left click on properties
click on the power management tab
UN-check the box that says: "allow the computer to turn off this device to save power." (there is now NO check mark in this box)
click OK

Now repeat this procedure for all mice, monitors, keyboards, and ALL USB ports on the device manager list.

You must open ALL the devices one at a time, as above, and turn off the power saver, for each device.

If you did all that and it still screws up, the motherboard is bad, I will bet you $1.

 

[WildMarker]

Well I've been running the 32 bit w7 since the weekend now and no problems reported. So yeah, it's definetly either my x64 instalation or drivers screwing up on x64. I'm gonna get me a new sound card today, I'm positive now that it was the culprit.

PS: Phew! Good thing it wasn't the expensive new HD!