Vista Keeps Freezing

I've been having a problem with Vista freezing for some time now, and it's gotten to the point that I don't trust my computer to not freeze up. Vista's stability never did seem very good to me, but it's gone too far now. Before re-installing it (or buying XP), I thought it would be prudent to see if there's an easy solution. Here's the rundown:

1. It almost always freezes shortly after resuming from Sleep or Hibernate (not sure yet if it is one exclusively), but it does not always do so.
1. b. Sometimes when I boot the computer it boots to a mouse cursor and blank screen and I have to close and open the lid to get the desktop to display.

2. The problems started after I got to university. The only program I installed since then is Sophos Anti-Virus. I do not know if this is causing a problem.
2.b. I've also installed the recent Windows Updates.

3. I've been using the RM CPU Clock Utility because the Core whine is too loud for a library (really, any) setting. However, this does not appear to be causing the freeze, as I remember it freezing without the RM Utility running as well.

4. Occasionally the computer will un-freeze after a few minutes, but not usually.

5. It is not specific to any application I'm running - it's done it with Opera and WordPad running. Could be a background app, though (see #2).

6. Thus far, it has not crashed is Safe Mode. To a degree I can run the computer only in Safe Mode and be fine, but as I cannot seem to get WordPad or Word to open a Save dialog (only Notepad will), this isn't a long-term solution (unless I can get these programs fully working).
6.b. How can I get the Save dialog to work in these programs in Safe Mode?
6.c. How can I get a battery meter in Safe Mode so I don't have to estimate remaining life?

7. User Account Control is disabled.
7.b. It was enabled for awhile when it was crashing, too.

I'll try to more conclusively pinpoint exactly what is causing the freezing, but if anyone knows of something that tends to cause Vista to freeze, please post. If this keeps up, I won't have much choice but to nuke Vista and re-install this weekend.

 

Sophos Anti-virus...that compatible with Vista?

 

what version of sophos are you using?
only 6.5 is compatible with vista

http://www.sophos.com/support/knowledgebase/article/16071.html

 

RE: Topic

Maybe it's just cold?

- Jordan

 

Sophos is version 6.5.8, last updated 38 minutes ago. So it's compatible with Vista, nominally at least. It is a corporate anti-virus software, perhaps it utilizes methods only in Vista Business?

Vista hasn't frozen again since I wrote this. Go figure - freezes when I don't want it to, won't when I do. Well, I turned the thermostat down again, maybe that'll help.

 

I have the same sort of freezes. I am not running Sophos. It almost always occurs when there is network activity, but I usually have network activity.

In the Resource Monitor, I see the disk activity go to 100% highest activity and 0 throughput; when the activity returns to normal, the system unfreezes. But the activity does not always return to normal; in that case the system does not unfreeze and I have to cold boot. This pattern of disk activity always occurs during a freeze when I have the Resource Monitor open.

Sometimes I don't have the Resource Monitor open (I had to rule out the Resource being the cause) and the freeze can still occur, although I can't say what is going on with the disk in that case.

When the freeze occurs, some applications are affected first, but eventually everything will get frozen. I think applications which do not need disk I/O are OK until they block while waiting to get some disk activity (possibly from Vista VM activity).

 

Hmm, network activity could be a cause. I'll have to remember to track if I have any networks enabled at the time, and then if wired/wireless.

I also have noticed it doesn't always affect all applications immediately. Oftentimes it seems to effect Explorer.exe first, and later the programs I have running. I'll start leaving Resource Monitor open, too - I already usually leave Task Manager running.

Still no freezes since then (guess I can't really complain). After suspecting Sleep, I changed the Power Settings to never put the computer to Sleep (even on Power Saver Battery). Perhaps Sleep is causing it? If it doesn't freeze for a long time hence, that may be an indicator of that.

 

Do you have Restore/Recovery Points on? How about Indexing? The Microsoft AV/FW/AS? Try this.

 

1. what are your specs?

2. possible probs:

a. too much crap at startup
b. rm clock (verify no crashing by not running it for a couple days)
c. virus and/or spyware
d. not enough ram
e. bloatware

 

I have Restore/Recovery, and I've needed it - these freezes have nicked up some files. My latest "chkdsk" adventures are the result of rebooting from the last freeze.

The Indexing was off for most of this time, but I've turned it back on since it's the indices being corrupted which are the errors that chkdsk complains about. So I thought why not give Vista a chance to correct the indices.

At the moment TMM is off. I've had these freezes before when TMM was on.

 

No RM Clock.
Not that much crap at startup, and it doesn't seem to be that particular about what is there or not.
No I don't have viruses or spyware.

I don't believe it is an application because when it happens the CPU can be almost entirely unloaded, and there are no Vista background processes using much resources.

I have 4GB RAM and the 1G Turbo Memory and a very fast processor.

This is not a slow system. It is a frozen system; it is very very consistent with a general file or VM stall which every process that blocks for I/O or paging gets nailed by until it clears. This is why it affects applications one at a time, not in the same order, until either the blockage clears or else the entire machine is hung. Sometimes the desktop stops responding too.

I have seen two instances of this in my computer experience, but those were cases where a filesystem or NFS bug was doing this to Unix machines. I've never seen Windows screw up like this before, usually Windows screw ups feel "schoolyard" to me. So maybe Windows is moving up in the world.

I want people to understand that when this machine and this operating system are going well, it's very very happy. I would just like to get these potholes out of the way.

 

Apparently, you are not the only one, although I have not experience this phenomenon.

 

A screwed up ACPI could explain a lot of things. The fact that some people experience the problems only on battery (I think mine are mostly from being on battery). If some aspect of I/O like the disk controller ends up not waking up or being left in the wrong power state then that could cause the sort of behavior I see. We already know that one of the previous hangup issues was related to LPM (low power management) related.

 

Don't most folks customize their power settings and the settings for the power & sleep buttons and closing the lid and save them in a custom power plan?

 

Yes, and that could explain why not everyone sees the same effects. But I don't see a way that suggests to avoid any of the problem other than always staying in the high power state.

 

Strange. Generally laptops get pretty hot. Are you in the arctic? Try turning the heating on.

 

Well, I got tired of this occuring, so since I had some free time last night I cleared the hard drive and re-installed Vista. No problems at all so far, and I haven't been taking any precautionary measures. Running on battery ever since the install, too. Haven't downloaded RM Clock again yet - haven't installed any software onto Vista - but probably will again because the processor is still noisy.

The reinstall also got rid of all Dell's bloatware (not that much, really), and all the unnecessary startup stuff. RAM is 2 GB, so I'm sure that wasn't a problem.

So I'm out of the case study. Hopefully zenpharaohs can solve it less drastically - I was lucky to not have many files on my hard drive yet. Though the reinstall is pretty easy if it does come to that.

 

The same thing keeps happening to me. Gateway laptop brand new 2 gig ram 140hhd core2duo. Usually it starts and just one program freezes at first I thought it was microsoft works word processor because it happen 3 times in a row. Then I was looking at this thread trying to post and firefox crashed. I could still talk on aim though. When I try to control alt delete nothing happens I get some failure to create security dialogue box. I don't have any 3rd party antivirus software that could have a compatibility problem so thats out of the question. I don't have any software installed that could be causing it its brand new with firefox and thats about it.

edit.

Its not overheating or running on a battery I tried ac power ac with the battery in and just the battery none of which changed anything

When I touch a non froze program like how I was on aim well if you click the title bar as if you where going to drag it it freezes that program too.

This has forced me to do a lot of power button pressing to shut down the computer because the start menu wont open and task manager wont pop up.

another thing just happen I had another freeze but this time I waited messed with alt tab and such and eventually a dialog box came up with windows management instrumentation then that froze so I was unable to look at the details but when I rebooted it ran the chkdsk utility but nothing came up bad.

Is there a better way to shut down in this situation? anything I cant even look for the problem on my computer because it freezes before I can do much


any other information that would help someone help me and everyone else with this problem I can try to get it

gateway model:mt6916
vista home premium
2gigs ram
140hhd
intel core 2 duo

 

Hi, I'm having the same problem.

So, first things first, these are the characteristics:

• This is not a laptop specific issue (I'm on a stationary)
• It is not related to spyware, bloatware etc or slow computer
• It is, however, related to io access on disk it seems
• It seems to affect the OS as well as applications
• It's possibly related to sleep/hibernate

My experience is this:

I've had Vista for about 6 months now. This issue has hit me two times during this period. It seems to happen after a couple of months (can't say for sure, only had it two times). I prefer to sleep my computer instead of turning it completely of, it just feels handy.

So suddenly when booting up (I know the this time it was from sleep, not to sure about last time) you might initially think that the boot process is frozen. That's why I tried resetting the computer a few times. However it is soon apparent that it just really slow. But not your ordinary computer slow, is "idle" slow. My computer is relatively new and runs most later games on the Very High setting (Crysis, Call of Duty 4, Bioshock etc) so performance is not the issue. The disk activity light on the chassi doesn't flash, you cannot hear the hard disk. Eventually (we're talking 10 minutes time frame here) the computer is booted.

Everything I do is slow, in a laggy kind of way. The start menu takes ages to show. It seems that when programs (be it Explorer or any other program, like Firefox) want to access disk they're locked up for a while. But it's not on all reads. When I first had the problem I ran Windows Defender to check for spyware and the program showed the same symptom (of course, all programs do). When scanning, it scans fine for a couple of hundred files until it locks, for minutes, and then suddenly continues for a little while again. This seems to be the pattern for all programs, thus it seems to be some underlying issue.

Installing the Microsoft hotfix for slowdown of copying big files (which almost had the same symptoms) did nothing. It doesn't seem to be hardware either, formatting and beginning anew with a fresh install of Vista is problem free (until the issue hits you) and running Ubuntu works flawlessly. The Resource Monitor shows little disk usage (or none at all) during the lockups.

For the record I'm running the performance power setting plan and have configured my shutdown button to sleep the computer when pressed. If I reformat this time to, I'll try it with no sleep or hibernate, ever, and see if that does the trick.

Any additional info someone comes up with is much appreciated!

I'll post what I find!

 

Are you using Readyboost with SD/MMC/MS.

I was using it on my VAIO UX with Memorystick. When I start/wake it up, UX got slow and unresponsive each time.

 

Nope, nothing like that for me. I haven't touched ReadyBoost.

 

Okay, after some more research this is what I got:

The slow boot phase is almost back to normal now, this I think is due to installing the hotfix KB929734.
However, Vista exhibits almost the same traits as before once booted up and inside my account.

When I used Process Monitor to check which files were read by the system (and the duration of the IO access) I saw that (strangely enough) programs trying to access the C:\Games directory (this is where I install my games) always got IO timeouts, sometimes as long as 110 seconds. Trying to access that directory in Explorer just hangs Explorer and almost the whole system. Somehow it seems that there's something wrong with the filesystem/disk.

I still get this error after installing the hotfix. Trying to run Check Disk, it just tells me the disk in is use and that I should schedule a disk check. I did this and assumed it would happen at boot, but it didn't.

So this is where I'm stuck at now.

 

Only Sophos 6.5 is compatible with Vista? I use Sophos because my college offers it for free, and it says product version is 7.0.6. How come I've been using it for months (I have Vista too) without problems?

 

Oh, and another note: I put sleep support in BIOS back to failsafe defaults (i.e. S1).

 

Running a Sony Vaio VGN-AR550U, I've been having a similar problem, it freezes at startup and when waking up from sleep/hibernate. No mouse movement, nothing. Have to hard-reset by holding power button down.

It doesn't happen when my wireless card is turned off. When I turn it back on after Vista boots up, it hangs again. I realize now it started shortly after I installed the latest wireless drivers for my notebook. Right now I'm trying to roll-back my wireless drivers to the OEM version.

BTW, my wireless card is Intel® Wireless WiFI Link 4965AGN

Good luck, hope this helps.

jb

 

Just a long delayed update on this thread.

Despite all efforts, I continued to have intermittent Vista freeze issues.

Just recently installed the Thinkpad BIOS update as well as the hard drive firmware update (which did not come via the Thinkpad Update but was downloaded directly from the Thinkpad website).

Happy to report that this did the trick. I think the hard drive firmware update was the major improvement -- it greatly improved some of my SMART attributes as well.

I'd suggest anyone who has not updated their hard drive firmware on the T61 to go do so if they are experiencing any troubles.

 

I had this exact same problem. My laptop is notebook and i had updated to windows vista quite a while ago and it always used to freeze on resume where i had the desktop but all i could do is move the mouse and use a few of the sidebar tools. Sometimes it completely froze.

Microsoft was unable to give me any help with this and i had no idea what it was i had tried everything from reformating, reinstalling, recovery, and in the end i resorted running in safemode.

After a long hard think of what might be causing the problem i downloaded driver updater pro and it found that when i had updated my laptop from xp to vista some of my drivers were corrupted during installation or incompatible so i fixed all of that problem.

After that windows recognised all the components and it found that my version of graphics was incompatible with vista it was ATI x700 luckily ATi had a fix for this problem and my laptop has been working perfectly ever since not crashed once for about 5 months now.

What i think you should do is see if your ram, hardrive, and ram, and especially your grahpics are compatible with vista. Another problem with my laptop was that when i booted it up one morning and my Bootmgr was missing but it was easy to reapir with recovery.

hope this helps

 

Wow, apparently this problem was more widespread than I thought looking at the multiple revivals to this thread. I switched to XP way back in December, but I did eventually figure out what was causing it to freeze for me: RightMark CPU Clock Utility!

To better clarify, I was running RightMark CPU Clock Utility to solve the rather infamous Core 2 CPU Whine issue. By disabling C4 sleep mode in RightMark CPU Clock Utility, the CPU Whine magically disappeared. Since the CPU Whine was really loud and annoying when on battery power - not just to me but to other people in a library for instance - this made running RM CPU Clock Utility almost necessary. CPU Whine was tolerable, though still more than it should have been, on AC power, so RM CPU Clock Utility could be forgoed there, especially if listening to music. From here on, "RM CPU clock utility on" means it is on with C4 sleep mode disabled.

After I reinstalled Vista in September, it worked for awhile, but then it froze while I was on battery and running RMCPUClock at an inopportune time, forcing me to re-write a whole monitor's worth of writing on a school desktop to avoid losing it, as my laptop was hopelessly frozen. I did some testing thereafter, and found that the laptop only totally froze like this when I was running RM CPU Clock Utility and was on battery - it was fine when either RM CPU Clock Utility was off, or I was on AC power. This left me with a very noisy Vista laptop when I was on battery, to the point that you didn't want to use it on battery, but at least it solved the freezing problem.

Also note that reinstalling Vista did not solve the problem of freezing, nor that of CPU whine. However, installing Windows XP did solve the CPU Whine issue (no idea why, but I'm certainly not complaining). I don't know if it solved the RightMark CPU Clock Utilty causing freezing, as I no longer need to run RM CPU Clock Utility. But I'm much more pleased with my laptop now that I have XP, for this and several other reasons; hence the XP User sig bar that I never would've bothered looking for if I hadn't tried Vista and been dissatisfied with it.

The unfortunate thing is that it seems the cause/solution is different in almost if not every case in this thread. It seems plausible that there may be one root cause deep within Vista, manifesting itself in many ways, but not anything easily fixable except perhaps within Microsoft.

Glad to hear yours is fixed, and not even requiring a new operating system! This fix somewhat suggests that a CPU sleep state may be involved; BIOS updates sometimes modify CPU sleep state stuff, and XP likely handles it differently than Vista as well.

Hope you've found a solution; I don't know why this might be happening (and have a different, Dell wireless card), but do know someone else in real life with similar problems that also only occur when the wireless card is turned on (don't know if it's the same model). So you're not alone, if that's any solace.

92dr11, I don't know if there's any similar root cause with your Vista freeze problem. I had an nVIDIA video card, and while that also had Vista issues, it wasn't with freezing (and since it debuted after Vista, it always had Vista drivers). But at least you've found a solution.