Random freezes with windows 7 - 64 bit

Heyyy!

I've been chasing all over the Internet, WKB, Forums, everywhere I could find.

And here is a note, that the issue, for you, was that an "auto" set in CMOS, in yourASUS MOBO, that was the problem.   How you ever found that one out, is beyond me. Of course, it may not be my problem, but at least it's something new to try!

Will get back to you soonest.

Barry

(shalba1)

Same problem.  Freezes requiring hard reboot.  A couple of BSODs - they flashed by pretty fast, but on one I saw a reference to a "bad pool caller".  Most importantly, I noticed that the freezes occurred when starting a browser or if it started then shortly after being online.  Using local programs did not seem to have any issues.  While trying to think of what changed, I noticed that around the time the problems started was when I installed Security Essentials.  I uninstalled it and saw no problems.  Within minutes after re-installing Security Essentials, my computer froze again.  So, I uninstalled Security Essentials and have had no problems since.  Note, I do have Zone Alarm (free version), and I wonder if there may be a conflict there - I noticed someone else on this post asked if people were using Zone Alarm.  However, I intend to keep Zone Alarm since I know it has kept me safe over the years.  As other posts have mentioned, there seems to be an anti-virus connection.  I thought it was interesting that one or two people have said they solved their problem by switching to Security Essentials, whereas my problem was solved by removing it.  So, my suggestion is if you have this problem, try changing (or temporarily shutting off) your anti-virus to see if that solves the problem.

System:

Win 7 64 bit Home Premium

I7 920 2.67 GHz

9GB DDR3 RAM

Nvidia GeForce GTX 260

I recently solved a random freeze issue with Windows 7 x64 on my system, turned out to be the HPET bios setting. Disabling "HPET support" seems to have solved random freezing (and a few 0xA bluescreens that happened instead of a freeze) for me.

This issue would happen most often when running uTorrent. I tried everything in vain, from memory timings, LAN driver settings, using original Win7 drivers, etc. etc. etc. Nothing helped at all until I realized the nature of the few 0xA bluescreens I got pointed to the same motherboard memory area (that is, not the RAM itself, but actual motherboard "resources"). So I remembered I had turned on the HPET bios setting about a week after I installed Win7 (it was off for XP32 before that), which was really the last of the hardware related settings I could try. Hope this helps some folks!

What solved the freezing problem for me was turning off the Workstation service.

This is not an ideal solution, as this is the service used to manage remote connections using SMB protocols (e.g. remote desktop, file and printer sharing, etc.).

However, once you've started the computer, you can go to start, type "services" and run as admin, then find Workstation and double click to open it's properties, there you can set it to start manually, and then simply press the start button. I haven't had any freezes using this method, however this is still far from satisfactory.

Right now I'm thinking maybe the service file got corrupted, and I'm looking into ways to repair it, but have had no luck with that so far.

Two days ago, I also tried turning off the Workstation Service and this has indeed reduced the number of 'not responding' issues. But there are still too many, especially with Internet Explorer and Firefox. Google Chrome is a touch better.

I've also been suspecting 64 bit Windows 7 Home or Professional installs with dual and quad core processors. Today I read post that referred to this possible processor problem. It suggested that you check your advanced boot options. Open msconfig and click on the Boot tab and then Advanced Options . Make sure there is a tick in Number of processors and if it's set to 1 change it to show how many processors you have i.e if dual core put 2 in the box and if quad core enter 4.

I’ll see how these two changes work out, as I‘ll be back to work on my computer all day writing articles and blog posts for my web sites.

UPDATE

I have now changed the Advanced Boot Options by removing the tick from the processors box but I have left the Workstation Service disabled. This has made no difference to boot up time or general use. I changed the Advanced Boot Option because Windows 7 can work out how many core processors you are running

Task Manager still shows the four processors of my PC when you select ‘One Graph Per CPU’ and so does Device Manager under the Processors branch.

With these changes, the frequency of  'not responding' messages has decreased and when they do occur they run in a frozen state for far shorter periods of time. Previously they ran for 30 seconds to 10 minutes but with these small tweaks they last between 10 seconds to 1 minute.

FURTHER UPDATE: I am now running Outlook 2007 in compatibility mode (as if it’s working under Windows XP) and the 'hanging' problems have disappeared for this program. Other programs, including Windows Live Writer, still freeze and lock for short periods of time.

Intel Core 2 Quad CPU Q9400 @2.66Ghz

4GB DDR2 RAM

Nvidia GeForce 9600GT 1024MB GT graphics card

Samsung 1 TB Hard Drive (Windows 7 64 bit)

Western Digital 500 GB Hard Drive (Windows Vista 32 bit)

Motherboard: Asus PSN-D

Window 7 Home 64 bit was a clean install on a new 1 TB hard drive

Dual boot with Windows 7 being the default Operating System

Windows Experience Index: 5.9 (CPU: 7.2 - Memory: 7.2 - Graphics: 6.8 - Gaming Graphics 6.8 - HDD: 5.9)