Intermittent Freezing of System, tried everything I know of...

Hi All,

I'm looking for some advice on what to do with this problem.

Description: On random moments my system freezes up. The HDD light stays out and processor usage drops to 0% . My mouse still moves but every program window turns greyish and does not respond. After a minute or so the system resumes and executes all the input that I gave (aka clicking on a tab, displaying the window switcher after alt+tab etc.. )

One of the problems is that I can't simulate the problem. It comes up randomly. The only thing that I did notice, is that it did never happend when I was playing a game.

Additional info: 3 Months ago a waterpipe in my room broke. As a result the device got whet. I had to replace the keyboard but apart from that everything worked fine upto now. This is also the reason that I cannot send the device back to Dell.



Solutions tried:

- 12 Format C's , even after a clean install the problem started immediatly when I opened the file explorer in windows.
- Several Malware and virusscanners (all came up negative)
- I have a zalman notebook cooler on full power installed.
- Laptop is fairly clean inside
- Changed HDD: I used HDtune to take a look at how my hard drive was doing, since it gave a few errors I tried buying a new hdd (WD 7200 rmp SATA). I thought this was the solution but today after installing windows the problem started again.
- Memtest , result was ok

System
Dell Studio XPS 1647 Laptop
Intel Core i5 Processor 520M(2.40GHz,3MB cache)
Motherboard upgraded to latest BIOS version
Integrated 1GB ATI Radeon HD 565v graphics
4GB RAM
Operating System : Windows 7 Home Premium (64 BIT)


Thanks in advance

 

Try uninstalling all AV/Malware scanners. Disable Windows Defender too.

 

Hi, thx for your reply ,

I've tried working with Microsoft Essentials and AVG and Without a scanner.

None of the options seemed to solve the problem

 

I see, do you have other OS's or maybe a linux live CD? just to rule out a hardware issue from getting wet

I am thinking it might be the drivers (specifically the ATI driver) or a program you installed. Do you have the latest drivers installed?

 

I agree with flipfire, sounds like a driver issue. I'd suggest running your computer in safe mode for awhile to confirm but since it's a random freeze and safe mode isn't exactly user friendly I guess it will be difficult to reproduce the problem.

What drivers are you using, the one from your Dell CD or a new ones? Try to load the Dell drivers for all devices, see if that helps.

Another thing you can try is to to boot normally to Windows and disable some devices like LAN card, bluetooth, soundcard etc and run the computer in this state for awhile. If it freezes again then enable the devices you've disabled previously and this time disable other devices.

 

I agree that it is almost certainly driver related, but try this: use the adobe flash uninstaller and remove all versions of flash.

Do not reinstall but go flashless for the week.

Does the problem recur?

 

Event Viewer might give you a hint. Next time make note of the time of the freeze up event and look it up in the logs.

WinKey+R and then type in "eventvwr.msc". Start in Event Viewer(Local) --> Windows Logs --> System. You should have an error of some kind listed with that exact time of the freeze-up. Also check Applications and Services Logs --> Hardware Events but usually everything is 0 there.