7

Sometimes my Win7 completely freezes, even mouse pointer doesn't move. It happens only on really hard disk activity (when I perform VM suspend or whole disk antivirus scan, for example). After some seconds all is ok again.
Any ideas?

8 Answers 8

6

You should probably check whether your HDD controller drivers are installed correctly. Drives accessed in PIO mode instead of DMA mode could render your system unresponsive during HDD operations due to high interrupt load.

To determine which disk controller your mainboard uses open the Windows Device Manager (Search for Device Manager in the start-menu search field) and look for "IDE ATA/ATAPI controllers" and/or "Storage controllers" category.

Then visit the manufacturer home page and get latest drivers. For example for Intel chipsets go to Intel download center and look for "Intel Rapid Storage Technology" drives. Then download and install them.

You might also check the Windows System Event Log (Open Windows Event Viewer and look at Windows Logs => System) and check for any disk related entries like timeouts, bad block alerts or similar events. This could indicate issues with unresponsive/broken disk.

4

First you should open Task Manager » Performance » Resources Monitor » Disk.

You have to check "system" and see which part of the disk is causing high activity on the "write" part.

From my experience (making everything slow and even hang for a while), there is no solution for this – even I have also tried disabling:

  • Windows Indexing & Search
  • Windows Firewall
  • Windows Defender
  • System Restore
  • Remote Differential Compression
  • Windows Fax & Scan
  • Superfetch
  • Seaport

None of them were working.

When I tried CCleaner, I saw something strange with "NTFS VOLUME LOG" – its "write" frequency was so high. From CCleaner I choose Tools and then Drive Wiper, choose wipe for "free space only", security for "Gutman (35 Pass)", drive for "C", and then pushed "wipe".

After this finished, everything's back to normal again.

2
  • 1
    What is the connection of "NTFS VOLUME LOG" with the wiping?
    – j riv
    Jan 24, 2013 at 3:33
  • i.e. are you implying you fixed a problem with wiping or did you forget a (wiping) process running?
    – j riv
    Jan 24, 2013 at 15:20
2

Hard drive is unable to respond to requests as it is doing the VM suspend or the AV scan. AV scan that is decompressing a file to examine contents will often slow things down significantly. Both the activities you describe are very drive intensive.You can monitor drive activity during the AV scan or VM suspend and see what is happening. Perfmon might help you.

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  • Thanks, cap ;) But mouse pointer, why it doesn't move? I've never seen this before.
    – user66548
    May 28, 2011 at 16:01
  • Basicaly, the system is busy and the request to move the mouse is queued. The tasks you mention may be using all available resources. I see this often when I have VM doing somthing that uses high CPU and or HD I/O on my local system. Put some monitoring in place to identify the exact issue.
    – Dave M
    May 30, 2011 at 13:10
  • it's obvious. But this "cursor stop" never happened on my previous WinXP, under any load.
    – user66548
    Jun 3, 2011 at 7:44
2

I solved this trouble by updating firmware of my primary disk (it's SSD, sorry for not mentioning this before).

1

You either need to defragment your disk, or your drive is overheating.

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First make sure your hard drive and its data are in a good state and do some basic monitoring to be sure that you aren't skipping something ovious. If it still occurs, you can run this procedure I've described here to trace the performance, if you post the resulting trace here in a comment I will look into it and update my answer to tell you what I've found...

0

I had similar issue and it was caused by bad sectors on HDD. try:
chkdsk /x /f /c /r c:/ and check if it helps (might take few hours).

0

Remove the power cables to all attached hard drives and plug them in again. Loose power connections can cause random freezes on Windows 7.

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