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I have a new pc with windows 7 which freezes randomly. I hit every single key on the keyboard and it works again. Is there a way to prevent windows 7 from freezing?

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4 Answers

up vote 20 down vote

Most system freezes (where you can't use hot-keys like CTRL+ALT+DEL) are caused by hanging drivers,
so you will have to either replace the device or update the driver. Troubleshooting can be done:

  1. Download the setup from Windows Performance Analysis Tools for your Windows version.
  2. Install the software on your system.

  3. Open a command prompt as administrator, and copy paste the next command:

    xperf -start perf!GeneralProfiles.InBuffer && timeout -1 && xperf -stop perf!GeneralProfiles.InBuffer myTrace.etl

  4. Press ENTER once to start the command, now you will have to wait till your system hangs.
    You can do whatever you want to. Please no heavy activity like gaming or private things...

  5. Right after your system stops hanging you go to the console and press ENTER.
  6. After waiting some time a log file myTrace.etl will be produced, compress this to a zip file.
  7. Put this compressed version of the file somewhere online (perhaps 2shared).
  8. Share the link here, I will do an attempt to find and show you the cause of your problem.
  9. OR troubleshoot the trace yourself using instructions found here, start with step 6 - 7.
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This doesn't scale very well, having people just upload an xperf trace. Is there any way you could edit this to include some info on how people can use that information to debug the system themselves? – nhinkle♦ Jan 5 at 6:24
@nhinkle: This outlines the program out in a bit of detail, however it boils down to just opening the trace and looking around. If a person isn't smart enough of actually doing some self study on the things seen there, he should probably not be debugging traces. Debugging is really something you should use Google extensively for. When a program crashed, I can see the data that was on the stack. Can you? Of course one can ask how a specific thing exactly works or what a specific things means. – Tom Wijsman Jan 5 at 11:24
But in general, you are on your own. Writing a complete guide on how to use XPerf would detriment away from the intention of this post, which is to get the actual problem resolved. Please note that a compressed Xperf trace is very small, so it does scale very well compared to crash dumps. And oh well, those would even be harder to explain how to debug them (it requires a good understanding of the internals of a computer). Google is your friend‌​, if you read documentation you can even access it from a Memory window. – Tom Wijsman Jan 5 at 11:30
Also, it depends from case from case what you have to look for. One time, I'm walking down the stack tree of a process to find out that a firewall is messing up my Visual Studio debugger. Another time, I just look at the DPC calls for someone that send me a dump through a mail, another time I look for the biggest I/O consumer for someone on the SU chat. You need an understanding to actually know what you need to look for, if I need to cover most of these cases I would have the longest post on SU. Although most of that can otherwise be reached by simply researching and learning. – Tom Wijsman Jan 5 at 11:40
However, feel free to ask a question on the actual use of XPerf as well as a community wiki that summarizes what to do when specific cases arise. It might help as a start for beginners that don't have a clue what they are doing. However, I currently don't have the time and willingness to do this here and now.... Excuse me for the length of my comments, but I thought a single comment is insufficient to get the idea. – Tom Wijsman Jan 5 at 11:42
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up vote 4 down vote

I have the same problem and so far nothing has worked for my system.

You might want to look at this thread at Microsoft Answers:

http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/windows_7-system/random-freezes-with-windows-7-64-bit/85cad5d1-dace-415d-9b06-5c609209e232

Lots of people have the same problem. This is the thread with most views in the Win7 section of Microsoft Answers. The thread offers many possible solutions.

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up vote 3 down vote

Not without knowing what is causing the freezing as it is not actually causing a crash.

This sounds like at first guess that it is a hardware interrupt / bad device driver causing this, as for banging the keyboard - this is most likely just down to luck.

Try first looking through your system event log for any errors or warnings that could be driver related.

Next either uninstall the driver or if you do not find anything, I would first advise unplugging all extra USB devices as the easiest solution, then if that solves it, plug them in one by one until you find the bad one. If you do not find anything, you may actually need to uninstall drivers.

If you still have errors or want to rule it out earlier, I would advise running a memory test, and going to the command prompt to run a Chkdsk to scan the hard drive for problems.

I used to get this all the time on old machines, 99% of the time it was people buying cheap/unknown brand devices with VERY bad drivers - it gives Windows a bad name. If however you still getting problems after following this, please say and I will try to help further.

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up vote 1 down vote

That sounds like an unusual circumstance (as many people experience little trouble day-to-day with Windows 7 and your issue sounds quite inconvenient).

Could you provide more detail? Is this a "new" new PC or just one that is new to you (i.e. second hand with Windows 7 newly installed)? Do you know the specification of the PC? Does the problem happen regularly in normal use, intermittently with no obvious pattern, or at specific times like shortly after start-up?

In the absence of more information, a first stab at somewhere to look for the cause of the issue is to check that you drives are healthy by querying their SMART status paramaters with a tool like http://gsmartcontrol.berlios.de/ (available for both Linux and Windows - there are numerous other utilities with similar abilities if this doesn't work well on your PC). A failing drive is quite a common cause of unexpected pauses, as for certain faults the drive will cycle retrying until it manages to read/write what it has been asked to read/write and the user interface seem to hang until the OS gets a response from the drive.

Also check the Windows event logs for around the time(s) the issue is apparent. Most hardware drivers will report unexpected conditions there and Windows itself will report certain driver errors there that the drivers themselves fall over before reporting (older Windows variants would just bluescreen in such circumstances, but newer releases will try restart drivers and log the event when an otherwise "fatal" error condition occurs) - so if the problem is caused by an errant driver or faulty hardware those logs may give useful clues.

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It is a new PC (not refurbished). There doesn't seem to be any pattern. Hitting the windows key enables the system to operate again until the next time it freezes – Jason Martin Nov 1 '10 at 22:51
Could it be a problem with the machine trying to go into sleep or hibernate mode, and failing? Check your event logs around the time the machine pauses or the time you manage to unpause it for errors/warnings/messages regarding this (or other issues). Also check your power management settings to see if the machine is set to sleep/hibernate (uncommon but not completely unheard of for desktop machines). – David Spillett Nov 2 '10 at 0:38
Can you please provide steps to access the event log in windows 7? – Jason Martin Nov 4 '10 at 3:28
I don't have a Windows 7 install anywhere to check, but under Vista just typing "event" into the start menu brings up "Event Viewer" which opens the relevant admin snap-in and it is also available under Computer Management in control panel. – David Spillett Nov 4 '10 at 14:07
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