Random freezes with windows 7 - 64 bit

I hate Microsoft.

I hate Windows.

We all hate what we do not understand and moreso what we fear. If you learn to embrace knowledge it will offset the fear and the hate. This is you key to removing more hate/fear from you life. Trust me on this. Follow the path of knowledge and you will start to become the master of your fears and hates.

Windows 7 is not perfect but my knowledge of its intricacies allows me to contain the anomalies and have a very stable and productive OS that I very much do enjoy. But with no knowledge to have I can understand your frustration.

I have identical problems to everyone else here by the look of things.

My freezes seem to be mainly when playing music, I have tried with WMP11 and KMPlayer and freeze freeze freeze :( I also get problems with IE8, Firfox 3.5, Opera 10, can't be sure about the browsers though, but can about music.

First I had major problems with my SApphire Radeon 5770 GFX and screen corruption I thought freezes were down to this but I guess not as an update to Catalyst 9.11 seems to fix the screen corruption but not the freezes :(

Has anybody managed to solve this problem yet?

My setup Intel i7 860 (not overclocked)

CoolerMaster Hiper 212 plus HS + Artic Silver thermal

Asus P7P55D motherboard

High Power 750W PSU

4GB Corsair XMS3 DDR3 1600 CL8 ram

Sapphire ATI Radeon 5770 1GB GDDR5 PCIE GFX

2 X WD Green 500GB Hd as Raid 0 Sata II

1 x WD 640GB Drive Sata II

2 X LG LiteScribe Sata DVD+-R/RW drives

Creative Audigy2 Platinum Sound (uses this for headphones and onboard for speakers)

Windows 7 64 bit

if your using a Creative sound card (as am I) then it is my hunch the audiodg.exe is the true culprit of the freezes. Somehow the creative drivers interact with the Windows 7 audio go-between file called audiodg.exe. This file has been know to clean up its temp files at a fast pulse interval of around 11ms that seems to trigger the hard disk from being able to resolve a backlog of fast sequential writes at this pace. In addition the audiodg.exe is extremely poor at memory alocation and had been seen to bloat on my system to an alarming size of 980MB+ of commit size memory. I have to run 3 memory utilization utilities to contain this file within tolerances that prevent my system from degrading to a herky jerky slow motion effect with multiple apps running simultaneously. If you incorporate RAM running in excess of 1066mhz into this formula which amps up the system speeds the degradation gets even worst and faster.

I have had to not only install Minimem, Cleanmem and Smartram to control out of control tasks and processes but had to drop my actual RAM chips from 1066mhz to 800mhz to stabilize my system. So far so good and my system is very stable although at "dumbing" down of the potentiality it can and should be able to perform at due to this inferior audiodg.exe process execution. You may also put the "Creative Audio Service" and the "Creative Audio Engine Licensing Service" to manual becuase they are very poor at bloating the audiodg.exe file to astronomical proportions and the audiodg.exe does not reliquish this memory back to the system causing it to get slower and slower over time. These 2 services will in no way affect your sound quality or performance wit the exception of Dolby Live ability they do affect. If you do not use Dolby Digital Live then these services are not necessary to even run.

This article will explain this further: http://forums.creative.com/t5/Windows-7/Driver-Memory-Leak-AudioDG-exe-SB-PCI-E-X-FI-Titanium/td-p/539060/page/2;jsessionid=3804ABE076B6509FC4057087243F602C

As a result of running those 3 memory utilities (2 are utilities one is is actually a scheduled task it embeds itself as) my average audiodg.exe memory commit usage is hovers at around 30mb never peaking at more then 170MB when intensively using sound applications. This is within reasonable tolerances for the operations it needs to do and I am quite satisfied for the moment.

First i would like to say thanks :)

last night i tried to complete disable my sound device (deinstalling drivers and disabling hardware) but i doesn't solve the problem, hdd activity still goes up to 100% in random intervals and durations (in other words win7 still freezing like a charm). Anyway. Tonight i also stumbled across a new nvidia driver version (196.21 WHQL, released on 2010/01/19), since i have installed this driver, my system runs nearly 12 hours without any freeze (All System-Services and Tasks enabled). I hope this is a permanent status. 

Yes i think so, i think classical mechanical drives (SATA / SAS ...) will first degraged to mass-storage devices in areas without any requests on performance and then they disappear sooner or later completly. IMO they allready have only the advantage of price per Mb but wait 2 or 3 years.

Hi,

My random freezes was triggered by a 100% HDD activity time without any or low I/O value. My first thought was a defect HDD so i checked these case without any result. The EventLog shows me many advices with the EventID 7036 (divers messages, "Dienst "Diagnosesystemhost" befindet sich jetzt im Status "Beendet"". is a message frequently seen).

in my case the only working "solution" (It is not exactly brilliant) is to disable the "Diagnosesystemhost" and "Diagnosediensthost" (sorry i dont now the service-name on english systems).  I tried many other things like various driver for various components, disabling several tasks (Prefetch, SearchIndexer, and so on), clean system install (incl. required applications),  changing RAM / CPU / BIOSsettings, changing system settings (Temp-location, swap-file size, ..), sequential installing win updates but nothing helps except disabling services named above.

Up to now i cant discover the real catalyst :/ Indepentend from these freezes i ordered a SSD now, but possibly it solves the problem because from time to time i read about problems with WD Green HDDs on Win7 (?).

I think it is a Win7 / Win7 Driver problem, because before i installed Win7, my system runs very fine on Vista Ultimate (proper system specs (software and hardware))

System: WIN764Bit Ultimate, I7 920 (OC / without OC), Corsair HX3X12G1600C9 XMS3 (12GB), Asus P6T WS Pro (Bios 0804), Western Digital WD10EADS, Asus GTX 275

Edit: I laughed to soon, after few hours without problems, win7 freezing again (but in a lower frequenzy). It's very annoying, it's not possible to work with this machine and the point to drop the complete pc out of the window come closer and closer.

BTW: Sorry for my bad english, it's a "little" bit rusty :)

Your English is perfectly understandable and very easy to follow, you should see my German, you would laugh hysterically at how pathetic it is =/

If what you are saying is true, I can also tell that disk activity may also be at a root cause because the way the audiodg.exe file interacts (and degrades) with the system performance due to the way the 11ms timing of the audiodg.exe file cleanup works in relation to the disk activity.

I have noticed some very weird activity in the way Win7 acts when its required to interact with a piece of software (audiodg.exe is the Win7 interface with the sound drivers of the computer) that requires the harddrive to act on it like fast small deletions of temp data and extremely fast interactions of small stored data like fast sequential writes. I am not sure where this bottleneck may be occurring but I do believe that an SSD may be the only true way in the future to overcome the now antiquated hard drive system we still all use in today's computers.

Can today's computers be getting so fast that the physical data that is stored in them is creating a huge bottleneck because of antiquated Hard Disk technology?