My windows 8 is randomly logging off on its own, bug?

Anonymous
2012-10-31T12:06:22+00:00

This is really frustrating. It's happened twice now, in the past 24 hours. I'm just doing my work, and suddenly the screen goes black for 2 seconds, flashing black, then goes to the 'metro' screen saver screen, where you start when you first boot the computer on. so it appears that it is logging off. I log back on, and a FEW of my open programs (skype, dropbox, few others) are still there, but most of my programs (wordpad, browser) simply terminated and I have to start them again, restore chrome session, lose work that I didn't save in WordPad, ETC.

Windows 8 Pro here.

Please help, it would be good to get to the bottom of this. 99% sure it's no virus, I'm careful and an experienced computer user and have MSE monitoring things so it can't be a virus.

Windows for home | Previous Windows versions | Performance and system failures

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  1. Anonymous
    2013-01-27T15:37:53+00:00

    On windows 7 I had the same harddisks and sometimes the same happened, only difference was that Windows 7 was not so evil to kill everything and logoff. A terrible idea!

    ...and in the EXACT same boat as the overal problem with windows 8 which is them ruining things by chaotically combining the desktop 'get stuff done' interface with the simpler 'dumb' jumbo tablet one. If they don't fix the problem in win9 and properly separate them and give users the choice (sheesh, what happened to CHOICE I thought they were the masters at that), or even get worse and dumb things down even more, (like not getting rid of problems like this one), I'll just be forced to go Mac OS. I've already got it right at my fingertips since I'm running win8 on a 16GB RAM rMBP.

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  2. Anonymous
    2013-01-27T11:51:07+00:00

    Nope, chrome is working fine on this computer. I think sometimes I have literally 200 tabs or more open.

    I think in my case it could also be harddisk related. I have some of the green drives who are sometimes taking a few seconds to come out of sleep. Last time I tried to start a movie from such a drive. Then the movieplayer appeared to be hanging (because it took a long while for the disk to become awake). I tried to press CTRL+ALT+DEL to see what was going on. And then suddenly at once a black screen and a log off.

    IIRC I think last time before I also pressed CTRL+ALT+DEL when it happened (when something seemed stuck). Will keep an eye on it and try to not hit CTRL+ALT+DEL anymore next time when something like this happens. Whatever caused it, Windows should not behave like this. The system was running fine otherwise with easily 10 GB ram spare. On windows 7 I had the same harddisks and sometimes the same happened, only difference was that Windows 7 was not so evil to kill everything and logoff. A terrible idea!

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  3. Anonymous
    2013-01-26T22:50:01+00:00

    On a related note (and I feel comfortable with discussing this since I'm OP and also cos it may be related/relevant): has anyone else noticed, if they use chrome, and happen to be an insane tabs power user like me*, that chrome also gives up sometimes when I don't think the computer was being particularly clogged up ALL that much? It's SO annoying - luckily it always retains everything due to my chrome settings, but it seems like it's the same thing - I wonder if that behaviour is win8's fancy new memory management 'solution' (for apps like browsers) that I read about somewhere before upgrading!.....I don't really call this behaviour memory management. I call it memory LOSS. haha

    •  -  -  -  -

    *over 100 tabs usually open, and sometimes, it expands to uh....more than that. <.<

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  4. Anonymous
    2013-01-26T12:35:53+00:00

    Only possible related thing I found in the eventlog (could be also just after the "crash"):

    Error 6003 The winlogon notification subscriber <AUInstallAgent> was unavailable to handle a critical notification event.

    Error 6000 The winlogon notification subscriber <AUInstallAgent> was unavailable to handle a notification event.

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  5. Anonymous
    2013-01-26T12:19:42+00:00

    It seemed to be when the memory or something gets overloaded. It looks to me to be a shocking tablet/mobile-oriented design choice: 'memory gets too choked / 'apps' don't perform so well? EASY - metro will reset itself for you to start all over again.' (wow, such good memory manegement!)

    Yeps this sounds exactly like what is happening. Some kind of hesitation in the system: Windows thinks: Hey let's kill all and logout. Although I have 32 GB of RAM. I only had about 18 GB in use. So I was certainly not out of RAM. No idea what happened, but this is not the first time I experience it either. It's really horrible :(

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