Windows 10 randomly freezes CPU and Screen

[LarryIrons]

I am having random computer freeze ups. This started in late August or early September of 2016. I built the computer in early May of 2106 and I have not had any problems until recently. When moving the mouse over a web browser (any) or email client (Thunderbird), or the system is just sitting there idle, or it is in black screen saver mode, the system will freeze up. The reset button will not work. The power button will shut down the system if held for a few seconds. If the screen is active, the video is still displaying just fine. It does not happen will playing a game such as Battlefield 1 Beta. the freeze ups can happen many times in a 24-hour period or as little as once per day.

I am running Windows 10 Pro 64-bit

I have the following hardware:

Motherboard: ASUS Sabertooth Z170S
CPU: i7-6700 3.4 GHz 8MB Cache LGA 1151
Video Card: EVGA Nvidia Geforce GTX 970 3.5 GB GDDR5
RAM: G.Skill 32 GB DDR4 2133 MHz (*GB x 4)
Sound Card: Sound Blaster Z
Hard drives: 2 x Toshiba SATA HD 3TB hardware mirrored 6Gb/sec

I have gone through the logs and I can tell when the freeze up happens as the logs will have gaps, but I can't see any particular event. I have AVG Internal Security running and it is good at finding virus issues. AVG has not given me any warnings.

I have looked though some other persons' similar issues but nothing has seemed to work for me. I have upgraded and downgraded video drivers but that did not change the behavior. I also installed and uninstalled mouse drivers, but that did not matter.

Any other ideas would be helpful.

Thanks,

Larry

 

[Colif]

right click start
choose power options
set pc to high performance
click change plan settings next to your plan
set PC and monitor to never turn off
choose change advanced power options
set hdd to never turn off

have you got latest BIOS?

 

[LarryIrons]

Yes, I have the latest BIOS which I installed after the symptoms started but this did not change the behavior.

I should note that I have an EVGA PSU of 1000 watts.

 

[LarryIrons]

I did the high performance settings as you suggested.

 

[Colif]

it seems idle is when PC seem to freeze up so might be an idea to open task manager and see what is running while pc just sitting there doing "nothing". Win 10 uses that time to run background tasks and one of them may to cause.

one of those tasks is defrag, I don't know raid but can you run defrag on it?

 

[LarryIrons]

I found this program running:

http://www.file.net/process/atkexcomsvc.exe.html

 

[Colif]

Asus utilities can have bad side effects. I tried them all when I got my motherboard and now only have the GPU Tweak software installed, rest aren't really necessary

If you don't need AI Suite, remove it and it will get rid of that.

 

[LarryIrons]

I am removing. Thanks for advice.

 

[LarryIrons]

Removing the ASUS utilities appears to have solved the problem so far. I will wait and watch a little longer but it looks like this has worked.

Thanks again,

Larry

 

[LarryIrons]

It has been over 24 hours and the system has been stable the entire time.

 

[Colif]

I don't like to jinx myself but hopefully that was all it took to fix problem. That is problem with fixing errors, you can only tell sometimes by the lack of them.