Hard lockups in Windows 7 Professional

Hi, I have an extremely annoying problem basically Windows 7 keeps freezing on me. And a beeping sound comes from the earphones when that happens. I thought it was because my cpu was undervolted but restoring the original voltage doesn't do anything it keeps freezing up and that seem to be random. It can freeze just after booting up or after 10 hours of uptime... I stresstested the CPU for 2 hours and it ran fine. I did the same with the GPU and it ran fine too. It seems like the freezes are totally unrelated to the CPU load. Any help with solving this would be greatly appreciated.

I'm posting this from my Ubuntu install as it doesn't seem to be affected.

 

undo all of your mods/hacks/tweaks even if you yourself don't think they could possibly have anything to to with this problem. if you haven't kept track you might have to completely reinstall windows to set things back to a neutral state.

make sure that bios/firmware is up to date, and make sure that device drivers are up to date.

malware scan? use the msft tool as well as something like malwarebytes.

whole disk diag program?

Running hardware diags from inside of windows is problematic. get a bootable diag ISO, linux-based bootable hardware diag distros are plentiful.

is the os on your machine correctly activated/licensed?

do you have multiple memory dimms installed? if so pull one and run that way for a while. if the machine works fine with one dimm, take that one out and put the other one in for a while.

have you ever opened up your machine for any reason at all??

 

Check your windows logs for error messages.

I have couple swollen caps on this shuttle desktop and everytime computer crashes I get same error message in the log (CPU HPET error).

 

Only "tweaks I've done are CPU undervolting and GPU overclocking and that's the first thing I got rid of without effect... Everything else I've already checked and

Which log is that? But as I told you before only Windows is affected. I can render scenes all day in Ubuntu and nothing happens. Which makes me think that it might be a software problem.

 

Software and hardware issues are shown in the System Log, Application Log shows all kinds of other information too. Best thing to do is apply a filter to see only critical events.

If you see there some certain events happening at the same time your computer malfunctions it might give you a hint what to fix.

Slightly offtopic, I just checked my system log and saw new error: "The driver detected a controller error on \Device\Harddisk6\DR6." My trusty Shuttle box will soon be scrapped

 

Ok the system has been stable for 2 days and then today it just crashed again.... It seems like Flash is the culprit. As most of the crashes happen when a Flash video is running.

 

Unfortunately this definately sounds like a problem with a computer virus!

I would first suggest getting a good antivirus like Kaspersky, then doing a FULL system scan. Then update your drivers and BIOS. After that, I may even suggest formatting your computer and reinstalling windows!

Good luck!!!!

 

No it doesn't.

@Ayle

Download and run the Adobe Flash Player uninstaller to remove all instances of Adobe Flash Player from all browsers on your system. VLC can play YouTube FLVs via URL in the player: load a couple of flash videos in VLC after the uninstall & reboot. If the crashes continue, look at your memory module(s), as newsposter suggested.

--L.

 

Ok. got rid of flash and it is fairly stable now... WTH???

 

Fairly stable? What exactly does that mean? It still crashes, just less often?

What version of the Flash Player were you using? The latest 10.1 (the one with GPU acceleration)? An earlier version?

--L.

 

It hasn't crashed yet. We'll see if I can go the rest of the week crash-free.

 

Once you feel comfortable identifying Flash as the culprit you have a couple of options.

1) If you were not using the latest Flash Player (10.1), you should install that version and see if the lock-ups resume.

2) Try switching to a different browser. Each browser has its own plugin -- nothing is shared between browsers. Whatever is locking up your system may be present in the Firefox plugin but not in the MSIE plugin (or Chrome plugin or Opera plugin).

--L.

 

Might also want to run MemTest86+ for about 24 hours.

 

I've gotten my fair share of lockups just by going to youtube ever since they updated it to use the GPU, and it seemed to happen more with the newest beta nvidia drivers; I haven't done any testing though because it only happens once every... 23 videos I open?