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Hello guys/girls, please can I get some help? I'm pretty baffled by this problem and I'm thinking that some component is giving up the ghost (RAM or CPU most likely), but I'd love to have some insight from people more experienced than me. Problem description: Random 30 second long lockups... sort of, the computer doesn't actually *lock*, but applications become unresponsive. I can switch with alt-tab between already open apps (or chrome tabs) but they don't get rendered usually and even if they are I can't use any function of them, I can move/resize the windows, but I can't click on anything (buttons, hyperlinks, whatever) or launch any apps including task manager. After the 30 seconds or so have passed, everything gets "done" at once so everything I clicked and any programs I tried to run get opened at once. Task manager usually opens too if I launched it via ctrl-shift-esc, and shows CPU usage at 100% for a couple seconds then normalizes immediately. It seems to be random, but more and more frequent as time goes on - it started out a couple months ago, it was very rare, now it happens a few times per day and can happen both in the morning when just turned on, or in the evening after being on the whole day. Attempted fixes: Reinstalling Windows 10 from scratch, updating drivers, cleaning up dust, reseating the heatsink (Xigmatek Gaia II) with new thermal paste. Also tried disabling XMP on my RAM so that it'd run at "stock" - CPU is not overclocked. I was afraid it was a temperature problem but HWInfo shows temps of 45-60° for the CPU depending on current load, nothing too high (30° ambient temp). Recent changes: Nothing (well except the attempted fixes above). -- Operating system: Windows 10 64 bit System specs: home built in 2013 - AMD FX 6300, Asrock 970 Extreme, Sapphire Radeon 7870XT with boost, 2x4 GB DDR3 1866, XFX 550W bronze, SSD Samsung 840 256GB, HDD Western Digital Blue 1TB. Location: Italy (does it somehow matter?) I have Googled and read the FAQ: Yes but "computer locks up" turns out a shitton of possible problems, I tried a few easy solutions but no luck. I need help narrowing the problem down... is my PC dying? TorakFade fucked around with this message at 12:35 on Jul 26, 2018 |
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Jul 26, 2018 12:29
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| # ? Apr 19, 2024 20:41 |
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I'd check your harddrive health with http://crystalmark.info/en/software/crystaldiskinfo/ grab a screenshot of both drives and paste it in here, if you see caution or warning on either (specifically I would assume the HDD is the culprit) that means they're failing and should be replaced immediately, but the HDD could have a lot of bad sectors and be causing issues.
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Jul 27, 2018 17:16
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MF_James posted:I'd check your harddrive health with http://crystalmark.info/en/software/crystaldiskinfo/ apparently they're both still good...  
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Jul 27, 2018 17:44
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Yeah looks good, much better than I would expect for such an old HDD. When the problem happens again, can you try to find out what process is chewing up all the CPU? If you go to the processes tab in task manager and have it sort on CPU it will be easy to nail down.
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Jul 27, 2018 18:11
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MF_James posted:Yeah looks good, much better than I would expect for such an old HDD. Yeah the HDD is basically a storage only drive so it hasn't been used much. I will try, though the 100% spike when it "unlocks" is very short-lived (might just be the OS sorting out all the inputs I gave before noticing that it locked up)
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Jul 27, 2018 18:22
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TorakFade posted:Yeah the HDD is basically a storage only drive so it hasn't been used much. ohhhhh I thought it was the whole time during the lockup, nevermind that you are likely correct on that. Do you know how to look at the eventlog? I would check the application and system log during a freeze and see if you get any weird errors. This really seems like it's having issues writing/reading from/to disk MF_James fucked around with this message at 18:38 on Jul 27, 2018 |
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Jul 27, 2018 18:24
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MF_James posted:ohhhhh I thought it was the whole time during the lockup, nevermind that you are likely correct on that.  didn't think to check the event log. It says my hardware is hosed  taskhostw (4560,D,0) WebCacheLocal: A request to write in "C:\Users\me\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Windows\WebCache\V01.log" in offset 36864 (0x0000000000009000) for 4096 (0x00001000) byte request completed in an unexpectedly long time (36 seconds). The problem is probably caused by hardware failure. Check with the hardware producer oh well, I tried reinstalling Chrome just to see if it's a botched install doing something wrong with the webcache, let's see if this works out
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Jul 27, 2018 18:43
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TorakFade posted:
That means it's having issues writing to a disk (if you didn't know!) it could be whatever hosts the C: drive; it could merely be a symptom of the problem, it could be an issue writing to whatever drive is hosting C: (SATA cable, drive itself etc), or it could be having issues writing to a different disk but that's on the same controller. What I would try to do is disconnect that HDD and see if the problem goes away.
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Jul 27, 2018 20:48
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MF_James posted:That means it's having issues writing to a disk (if you didn't know!) it could be whatever hosts the C: drive; it could merely be a symptom of the problem, it could be an issue writing to whatever drive is hosting C: (SATA cable, drive itself etc), or it could be having issues writing to a different disk but that's on the same controller. Hmmm can't exactly disconnect my main disk now but good to know that. Replacing an SSD (or better yet just the SATA cable) is much better than doing a new build if push comes to shove.. though it's strange that SMART sees the disk as perfectly fine, usually disks are pretty good at telling when they are kicking the bucket. Thanks a lot for the help  Edit: also, despite a few years of work in IT before, I very rarely experienced hard drives acting up; they usually just died so I'm at a loss here 
TorakFade fucked around with this message at 21:07 on Jul 27, 2018 |
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Jul 27, 2018 21:03
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TorakFade posted:Hmmm can't exactly disconnect my main disk now but good to know that. Replacing an SSD (or better yet just the SATA cable) is much better than doing a new build if push comes to shove.. though it's strange that SMART sees the disk as perfectly fine, usually disks are pretty good at telling when they are kicking the bucket. it still could merely be a symptom of the problem, I would disconnect any disk that is not required for your machine to boot and see if the problem continues. Why don't you have windows installed on an SSD? It seems goofy to have it installed on a platter drive while having SSDs in the machine...
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Jul 30, 2018 16:39
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MF_James posted:it still could merely be a symptom of the problem, I would disconnect any disk that is not required for your machine to boot and see if the problem continues. I don't see where your confusion comes from, I do have Windows installed on the SSD (C:\) and all data (plus some installed games) on the HDD (D:\), always been that way the lockups have already decreased in frequency, only had one instance in the last 4 days, and the event log is relatively clean after that. Fingers crossed, maybe reinstalling Chrome helped. If it keeps happening, I'll try disconnecting my HDD Again thank you for your patience 
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Jul 30, 2018 16:51
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| # ? Apr 19, 2024 20:41 |
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MF_James posted:it still could merely be a symptom of the problem, I would disconnect any disk that is not required for your machine to boot and see if the problem continues. It was the SATA port to which the SSD was hooked up. I switched it to another free SATA port on the motherboard and the problem disappeared, it's been a week now so I'm fairly sure that was it. Makes me think my motherboard (or at least the SATA controller) is going the way of the dodo, but at least for now it's fixed. Once again thank you for the support!
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Aug 9, 2018 10:25
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