Random freezes with windows 7 - 64 bit

Hi James and everyone, 

    I've posted about my desktop-freeze hassles several times over the past year.  After reading various theories as to what the problem could be, I let my AV Kaspersky program expire in mid-December of 2011. ( I now only have MS Security Essentials running.)  Anyway, since mid-December, I've had ZERO freezes.

    In my case, I feel there are only two possible explanations: either it was an AV problem - or - the Windows updates had an effect.   (??)

so interesting development.... no freezes for me for weeks. Did a recent windows update do something? 

No posts since Feb 16th on the thread either. 

Hope?

My HP pavilion h8-1214 was fresh out the box with a first time install of the adobe creative suite, firefox, quicktime, 7zip, spyware doctor. i had begun a day of work in photoshop when all of a sudden my screen froze with a still active mouse! Ctrl +Alt+Delete brought up a black screen with active mouse!!! as the day went on it got worse and worse and I searched high and low to find a solve!  No suggestions worked! It got so bad that firefox wouldn't open until I finally opted for a system-restore only to realize even that was erased (i created 6 during the installs). I was just about to give up and reinstall windows just when something told me 7-zip was the only cheap freeware I had on the system so just to see I uninstalled 7-zip and the COMPLETE PROBLEM WAS GONE! :) Woo Hoo!!! Hope this helps someone else with the same issue. I'll stick to winrar or other pro software.

I have been following this thread for five months and finally made progress recently.

My PC is a custom built high-end PC with Win7 64-bit, GIGABYTE motherboard, 990 chip, Creative xFi audio card, and 24GB memory, 2 graphics cards, with Trend Micro antivirus and a Killer network LAN card. Notably, I had stupidly ordered it configured with 2 solid state drives configured as RAID 0 to run the operating system and then a 1.8TB drive for data storage. This was dumb because a failure in *either* SSD would bring down the system, so in fact it is less stable than just having one SSD. But since it came that way I did not want to reinstall from scratch and I figured the SSDs would probably be reliable since no moving parts.

A few weeks after it arrived, the PC started to crash every 1-2 days.  The system would hang; I could often move my mouse; but eventually it would just freeze.  The freeze could be random - for example go to sleep with PC on and find it crashed in the morning, however, I felt like it would more often hang when using my web browser.  Each time, a hard power off-on reboot was required.  For some reason it would not make sense of the RAID when it rebooted so I got a strange error 0xc00000e or something like that.  But if I rebooted again it would load smoothly.  So I kept just doing that every 1-2 days.

Based on all the advice here I did following:

• updated all drivers
• installed all Windows updates (although not too many of the special hotfixes since they did not seem to apply)

Those did not work.  I adjusted the voltage levels of RAM and may or may not have seen a slight improvement but no real fix.

I looked for driver conflicts as others said this was a problem.  What I discovered is that between my motherboard, my graphics cards, and my creative xFi card, I had many audio drivers running!  I disabled all but one. 

Then I updated the BIOS.  That was a disastrous adventure because it reset my hardware configuration to defaults.  This cancelled out the RAID, so my system would not boot, and also messed up my network card, so I lost Internet. But I figured that out and re-set the parameters eventually.

By now the system was crashing less, but still every 2-3 days.  I can't be sure in fact that any of it helped.

What happened a few weeks later is that one of my SSD drives completely failed!  So I went out and bought a fresh SSD, giving up on any RAID concept and just using the single 256GB SSD for a boot drive, and I reinstalled Windows and Office from scratch and applied all the updates and updated all the drivers once again (the BIOS had been updated from before so no change there).  And I again disabled the extra audio drivers.  Lastly, on the basis of other user experiences here, I did not install Trend Micro this time.  I wanted to wait and see if the system would be stable without anti-virus software.  But then after a few hours of having no virus software installed, Windows Update proposed that I accept a FREE virus software package called Windows Security Essentials.  Apparently it is a well kept secret that Microsoft gives this for free to you once they detect that you are not going to buy Trend Micro or Avast or Norton etc.  Others here have had a good experience with this package so I installed that.  Needless to say, it took a significant number of hours to reinstall everything and get all my data and preferences reset the way I wanted.

But here is the good news:  ever since the complete reinstall - about seven days - I have had ZERO freezes. 

Was it a bad SSD?  Switching from boot-up RAID to a single disk boot-up?  Was it Trend Micro?  Was it a badly applied Windows incremental patch that I skipped this time by going straight for the latest rolled up Windows updates?  All of the above? 

Not sure, but wanted to share the story so you could try these yourselves.