Random freezes with windows 7 - 64 bit

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.

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.

Didn't mean to propose that as answer. Not sure if I have solved my freezing completely, but I have had onboard sound disabled in bios for last 4 days and no freezes yet and annoyingly no sound either, but I wonder if something in one of the Windows latest updates has messed with sound device in windows?

Start probing into the memory usage of the audiodg.exe and how it interrelates to your sound cards drivers. Google will be your friend here.

I was having the same problem with a motherboard that was designed for vista.  It ended up failing and I switched to a windows 7 motherboard and now I have no issues.  Granted I don't think windows 7 caused the failure, it was a m2n-sli deluxe Asus board that had been acting a little iffy ever since I bought it.  This may not have anything to do with the issues but after reading that a vista laptop was not compatible with windows 7, it just makes me wonder.  Also if you switch out the board be prepared to call microsoft and validate your copy of windows. If windows 7 came with the pc then I would expect that the board is compatible and this isn't the issue unless the people that sold you the pc didn't give a ____ and tossed the cheapest thing in there.  Just another word of advice, something good to know, if you bought a pre-installed windows computer you can't switch the board with any board it has to be from that company.

This is one reason why I never buy preconfigured machines and build my own. I never want to be tied down to any one specific set of components only from one channel.