windows 7 - Computer Freezes but no Idea why

08
2014-07
  • P_Q

    I have a 2 year old desktop, with x86 32-bit processor, and came originally installed with Windows 7. I since installed Ubuntu 12.4 and now run both dual booted.

    Running in either OS, my screen freezes occasionally. Perhaps about once per day. I am not sure why. I did a memory check and a hard disk check and found no errors. I ran the sensors tool in Ubuntu and found nothing overheating. My fan seems to be running fine. I read that it may be my video card that has a fried capacitor, so I looked inside my machine but I could not find anything that looks wrong. I'm pretty sure it is not RAM or hard disk issues.

    If it crashes in Ubuntu I

    ctrl alt F1

    and the console shows there is one (usually) zombie process. Attempting to kill the zombie process has no effect. Going back into the GUI it is still frozen. Also, sometimes I cannot even get to the console and have to do a cold reboot. If I do get to the console I can at least do a 

    shutdown now

    Absolutely no idea what is causing this. I'm at the point where I might just by a new PC. But if anyone has any ideas how to understand or fix this I would be grateful.

    • Answers
  • Ruslan Gerasimov

    It may be fried/dried capacitor(s) at motherboard. Looks like you did check other parts, but you did not check MB. As you have desktop, not laptop, it is easier to check by changing MB. Do you have any chance to borrow one just to check?


    • Related Question

    Crash / freeze - probable hardware failure - ideas?
  • MGOwen

    Hi I am running a (until yesterday) stable PC with Vista.

    Since yesterday, I've had four instances of this problem:

    The system, without warning, completely stops responding - no reaction to mouse or keyboard (including Ctrl-Alt-Del). Screen just freezes. Only reset button works.

    As far as i can tell, I'm not doing anything unusual, it's not the same software running each time (firefox, outlook, VS 2008, etc).

    Any ideas where I should start looking to diagnose this? Could it be RAM? Software / OS? CPU even?


    • Related Answers
  • hanleyp

    Is your system still under warranty? A system that freezes could be any on the list you gave (including drivers). Have you made any changes to your system recently? Now might be the time to roll back any installs.

    The most effective way you can debug this is to strip the motherboard down the the bare essentials (motherboard, CPU, power supply, 1 stick of memory, video), do a clean install and add things back to the system one at a time until you can reproduce the failure. Then test various configurations around the failing component until you can find a working configuration or remove the failing component (assuming it isn't the motherboard). Also swap out the processor, PSU, memory with known good parts.

  • greyDrifter

    Take a look at see if anything stands out in: Control > Admin Tools > View Event Logs or %windir%\system32\eventvwr.msc

    I'm not too familiar with event viewer, but seems like a good place to check and will have logs of system and hardware problems.

  • MGOwen

    Turns out it was heat - my power supply fan had died, and I hadn't noticed.

    A new fan fixed the problem.

    Thanks everyone.