Random freezes with windows 7 - 64 bit

I've now looked at it closer and its not actually necessary to close explorer, so maybe thats not it. All I have to do is bring up the task manager.. I can then close the task manager without actually doing anything while there, everything works again.

Obviously we are having similar problems, the severity seems to vary a lot. Its driving me crazy, sometimes it happens 15 times in an hour. Mike the Microlimp technician who was present earlier in this thread.. come back !! lol we need you....

I love 7 but I will be forced to return to XP if this doesnt change very soon...

Hi MainFrame,

Please let us know how it goes with CMOS @ S1 instead of S3.   I was looking at that today too but already changed some things and don't want to do too much all at once.   

I did try setting the power management to High Performance.    Also disabled Workstation in System Config.    Crashed 3-4 times today since.

Hi Losalpes,

Sadly it didn't work, instead I got rid of my RAID 0 configuration and am now running Windows 7 64-bit (with 8GB of RAM) on a singular hard disk drive.  So far so good.  I have however been exceptionally paranoid and not installed anything except drivers, vlc, openoffice, Microsoft Security Essentials, 7Zip, uTorrent, Google Chrome and PrevX.

Dakster1: When my system froze, I was unable to even get the computer to respond and therefore closing explorer.exe was not an option, sadly.

Hope this helps! Please vote or mark as correct answer if it does :)

Jon Breen

• Microsoft Certified Professional (Windows 2000 Professional)
• Microsoft Certified Technology Specialist (Windows Vista)
• Professional Member of the British Computer Society

http://www.xinx.co.uk - my website

http://www.systems-and-solutions.co.uk - where I work

Gotta laugh... just read this thread in its entirety. Even Mike the Microlimp Engineer gave up on this one.. hasnt posted in this thread since Nov 10th..

I see a lot of similarities and a lot of differences in this thread, and mine is different but the same...

I am getting random freezing, but its not the whole computer freezing. I just lose the ability to input..

If I am playing all in a music folder, Media Player will happily go through every track, until it runs out of tracks.. If I set it to repeat I am sure it would play indefinitely. Once it runs out of tracks though, I cant click on my music folders to add more...

I can be playing an online game and all is working just fine within the java applet.. but then go to the taskbar to open a second window to check the weather, and I find the taskbar is not LEFT clickable. Try to close Firefox and therefore the game by clicking the X, and I cant close the window.. the X is no longer clickable. Click back within the applet and I can still play the game! Bizarre though, I can sometimes close the window by right clicking on the taskbar and then left clicking the close window option on the right click menu.. but often I cant left click the option either! The right click works just fine, every time.

This often happens within 30 seconds of a restart too... I get just one click on the taskbar then my mouse stops functioning.. so I open a window in Firefox but cant click on anything...

I am at a loss to find a cause. I note that AVG has been blamed.. havent tried anything else on this brand new i7 yet but I have AVG 9.

I note that Firefox has been blamed. I use Firefox, but I get the same problem with IE.

I've tried various mouses too, including wireless and wired.

Within an hour of getting this machine built, I was overclocking. A friend was heckling me coz he thought his silly AMD junkbox would be quicker! Behold the awesome i7.. successfully got it up to 3.9GHz from its native 2.8GHz with no apparent problems, but the next day the freezing started. OK, maybe as its been suggested also in this thread, its the RAM timings, messed up by the overclocking?

I have reset the RAM timings according to the Asus list, no good.

I have a fix though.. not to solve my problem, but to fix it without restarting. (to restart, I usually have to kill it with the power button as I cant left click the shutdown option!).

I am wondering if the problem is related to explorer.exe    My recovery method, and it works every time, is to ctrl/alt/del to task manager (where the left click DOES work.. because its not affected by explorer??) and kill and restart explorer.exe

For the guys who have been carrying on about the RAM timings.. heres a thought. Lets just say you are right. Windows is intended for the masses, and the most common and heavy user of personal computers (as opposed to those in a business envronment) just happens to be the middle aged housewife, reaching out to the world in the only way she can. How much do you suppose she knows about RAM timings? If it doesnt happen with XP but it does with 7, because 7 is in some way more sensitive to correct RAM timings.... then 7 needs to be made less sensitive. It should be able to compensate for a myriad of potential 'hardware problems' - particularly when its something that can be fixed by adjusting settings - you arent saying the RAM is faulty, just that it has the wrong settings...   Ergo, its 7's fault. This is supposed to be an idiot proof OS for the masses.. if it cant do that then it becomes irrelevant and Linux or Apple will rule the world...

I love 7.. I hope they fix it real soon.

Windows 7 Professional x64

i7 930 2.8GHz

Asus P6T

6G DDR3 1600 Kingston Hyper-X (triple channel)

9800GT silent pipe (fanless) x2 - SLI linked  * these things are huge but they run at less than 50C and this is the quietest PC I have ever owned*

150GB WD 10000rpm Raptor   System drive

1TB WD 7200rpm Data drive

3DMARK06   32112 o/c @ 3.935 GHz  plenty in reserve :)

I think your issue is something entirely different. I consider a freeze something a little unrecoverable, nonetheless uninstall avg and try again...as I reported it is most likely the cause, (anti virus software). I would love to hear if that solves your issue.

 

ALSO MAKE SURE YOU HAVE YOUR MOTHERBOARD SET TO S1...it worked for me.

Arent we all hoping to find a common link which we can all jump on? The only thing I see in this entire huge thread that absolutely all of us have installed is explorer.exe  

I do occasionally get total lockups but its more often partial and only involves not being able to click on anything. If you cant click on anything and you dont have anything thats actually active like a game or a media file.. would you maybe assume you were totally locked up?  At first I was blaming Firefox, because it kept doing it.  Then it was Thunderbird when I noticed it did it there too.. then I thought the culprit might be Media Player... but in ALL of these cases, though it may seem that for instance Firefox had locked up.. closing and reopening explorer.exe recovered full functionality in every case... for awhile.. until I had to do it again. Many people may not think of trying the task manager, and yes I have noticed mention of at least one person who couldnt open task manager..  but I wonder how many people tried closing explorer and noticed if it helps? Its not like they are connected or anything, its not a logical path to take.

I believe I have the same problem as most people here, or very similar, and I suggest you at least try the next time you lock up.. see if you can open task manager and close explorer.. its worth a try?  Sadly, even if you find this works for you, it doesnt stop the actual locking, which is bloody irritating.. it just allows you to recover easier.

I loved RC1, and I am sooo peeved now that I have paid cash for this that the paid version is buggy. AND its a bloody big bug lol.. get ur act together Microlimp!

I'm glad to see I am not the only one with this problem!

For several months I was running XP perfectly fine, then dual-booted it with Win7 x64 for another couple months before I started getting NTLDR errors. After hassling with that for another couple months (where comp would work fine, then crash, I'd rebuild, work fine, repeat) I've just been using Win7 on an OCZ 60gb SSD. I've installed my games on a separate Hitatchi 500gb hdd and it was running ok for a couple days. I was getting more HDD trouble, RMA'd my mobo believing a SATA error, and when I got it back my WD320 gb stopped working (randomally). However, after reinstalling the OS, I've applied the to-date drivers but my games are randomly crashing! As has been said, sometimes I 'll play for 30 seconds, 10 minutes, 2 hours, 5 hours, or have left it on over-night before my video freezes/bsod/stutters.

TF2 would play fine before the video and audio froze. After a dozen seconds or so the game would resume fine, but would freeze again some time later, randomly.

SupCom, I would play an 81x81 map. Just over an hour in the game would CTD without warning (no stuttering, freezing, etc). I've verified the cache through Impulse, which checked out fine.

ETW, crashed two minutes after I began a campaign as Russia, again without warning.

Hearts of Iron 3, the game would pause and freeze. My background would go black and the game would run for a bit longer. Eventually it would crash like SupCom.

A couple times it has BSOD or completely frozen that I had to hard-reboot. I thought it was a heat error, but I've been using the same fan/psu/memory/cpu/hdds/etc for months now with no problems (aside from the ntldr thing). I've started to think its my graphics card. but after reading this i still have no clue what's wrong! I ran a dxdiag which showed no errors and device manager shows all components recognized. Any hints would be appreciated.

System:

MSI P55 775 DDR2 mobo

4gb each of corsair and ocz ddr2 1066 memory (voltages are the same)

775 quad core 2.83ghz proc (not the i series), with aistek liquid cooling

new ocz 60 gb ssd (os disk)

500 gb hitatchi (game disk)

1.5tb segate barracuda (media disk)

MSI Radeon 4870 512mb DDR5 graphics

wireless network card (in addition to onboard lan)

microsoft security essentials