Windows freezing up for anybody else?

[jim hardy]

Freezes got so frequent and long, two or three minutes maybe 5x per hour, i was about to get out the splitting maul again.

Battery stopped it from going through that one.

This one's a desktop. Setting Control Panel / Windows updates to "Never Check for Updates" stopped the freezes immediately.

Now on to
"Black Screen after Startup or Sleep"
i have to cycle monitor power three or four times to get a display .
Security Essentials and Avast both report no problems or virus.
Anybody else having the same troubles?

 

[QuantumQuest]

Freezes got so frequent and long, two or three minutes maybe 5x per hour, i was about to get out the splitting maul again.
View attachment 213074
Battery stopped it from going through that one.

This one's a desktop. Setting Control Panel / Windows updates to "Never Check for Updates" stopped the freezes immediately.

Now on to
"Black Screen after Startup or Sleep"
i have to cycle monitor power three or four times to get a display .
Security Essentials and Avast both report no problems or virus.
Anybody else having the same troubles?

Which version of Windows is it?

 

[I like Serena]

Which version of Windows is it?

That may be difficult to tell - post mortem - after applying the splitting maul. :D

For the record, I have a company laptop that wants to connect to the company network for updates, which only works if my VPN is up. If it's not, I can get annoyingly long timeouts.
And my 2nd screen in my dual monitor setup tends to go black every now and then after sleep mode (Windows 7).
To be fair, the monitor problem is worse with Linux Ubuntu.

 

[Borg]

Security Essentials and Avast both report no problems or virus.

Running two antivirus programs at the same time will cause problems. They lock the files that they are examining and, if they grab the same file, it's freeze time...

 

[jim mcnamara]

If you take a systems approach, diagnosing any of this stuff by remote control is utterly doomed to complete failure. Anything good is the result of random chance.
A simple example on the software side, the same applies with hardware.

Suppose you have eight or ten applications - programs - on your machine. The machine is five years old and is Windoze 7. Some programs were actually written for previous Windows versions - like Vista. Browser helpers may have been written for IE 10 and you are now running IE 11. You have updated your antimalware, but some of its base code may be written in system primitives (NT libraries). Some system calls are "subverted" in patches because of security concerns later on.

Hardware is like the example above - older hardware with newer drivers or the other way around newer hardware older drivers.

There is an almost infinite set of combinations of software, hardware, specific patches, and extra added crap from the internet that accidentally got put on the system.

One other factor - ancient cpus, buses, and disks with really slow throughput generally clog up with new software bloat and slow down. Newer versions of things with extra features require more horsepower than the box really has, but the vendor has gotten it to run on old hardware so says it is fine. Maybe not for you with your very unique mishmash of hardware/software.

Your best software choice is to wipe the disk, then reinstall windows 7 from your Windows disk, apply the zillions of updates, and then see where you are. At this point make a full backup, and save it in a safe place. NO extra browsers like Chrome or Mozilla, free software, printers, nothing. If it boots and runs well then try a very slow increment of software or even hardware (Ex: printer software often is mostly not drivers but applications many of which are there to get you to buy proprietary ink, HP is bad for this). You want enough free space for a fixed size swap file (see windows documentation) and still have at least 50% or more free space. Internet temp files like streaming content - e.g., Pandora - can eat up space so watch what you do in adding back new features.

Windows will fill disks up eventually with updates, temp files, WER directory entries, and all manner of other overhead.

I ran 40 Solaris 10 machines for 15 years in production and development environments. The only issues were occasional hardware error events and the junk data that developers "had" to leave on the system. We applied lots of patches, no problems. Windows servers were the same. Perfecto after long years. This means you and I are our own worst enemies when we have turned a nice piece of laptop hardware into junk in 5 years.

 

[I like Serena]

Your best software choice is to wipe the disk, then reinstall windows 7 from your Windows disk, apply the zillions of updates, and then see where you are.

Long story short, I believe Windows is actually pretty stable and predictable.
It's just that we only need 1 or 2 badly written programs or drivers, and our system starts exhibiting unstable behavior - under certain circumstances.
It can be a quite a challenge to figure out which ones those are.
At least when starting from a clean slate, we can expect a responsive system.

 

[jim mcnamara]

@jim hardy and I seem to like posting long stories.

 

[NFuller]

Setting Control Panel / Windows updates to "Never Check for Updates" stopped the freezes immediately.

This sounds like a network connection issue. If windows update tries to check for updates online but it can't get through, this might cause something to hang up. I actually had a mac machine do this once. It's also possible that the update service is somehow severely corrupted, but I'm not sure how that would happen.

"Black Screen after Startup or Sleep"
i have to cycle monitor power three or four times to get a display .

This sounds like the problem may be the monitor. The video card sends a signal to the monitor to wake up. Perhaps after cycling the monitor a few times, it finally recognizes the signal.

Security Essentials and Avast both report no problems or virus.

It can be problematic having two or more antivirus programs running at the same time. Get rid of Avast. Security essentials is a very good antivirus program and is well optimized, the same is not true for Avast.

 

[I like Serena]

This sounds like a network connection issue. If windows update tries to check for updates online but it can't get through, this might cause something to hang up. I actually had a mac machine do this once. It's also possible that the update service is somehow severely corrupted, but I'm not sure how that would happen.

The network interface is deeply wired into the kernel to provide 'nice' and 'transparent' I/O behavior.
Unfortunately, since the kernel is typically single-threaded, it means that if the network interface to the internet is unresponsive, we tend to get long freezes (up to ~90 seconds) before the network interface realizes that no response is coming forth.
This can for instance happen if the response has to come from a VPN connection that is not up.
And it doesn't help if the system tries to 'recover' by retrying - it just means that we have to wait for another timeout.

 

[jim hardy]

Which version of Windows is it?

thanks for the reply

 

[jim hardy]

This sounds like the problem may be the monitor. The video card sends a signal to the monitor to wake up. Perhaps after cycling the monitor a few times, it finally recognizes the signal.

Monitor wakes up showing desktop, flickers about 10 hz for a second or two then goes back dark. That doesn't seem like hardware more like two programs fighting over who's on first.Avast is gone now. No change.
.

 

[NFuller]

Monitor wakes up showing desktop, flickers about 10 hz for a second or two then goes back dark. That doesn't seem like hardware more like two programs fighting over who's on first.

That sounds exactly like a hardware failure. Flickering in particular can indicate a bad video cable, video connector, or that the monitor is going out. The fact that cycling the monitor's power a few times remedies the problem means that software cannot be the cause.

 

[NFuller]

Also, is there a reason you are still using windows 7? I believe you can update to windows 10 for free so long as you have a valid copy of windows 7 or 8. Using the most modern version of windows may fix some of the update issues.

 

[jim hardy]

Also, is there a reason you are still using windows 7? I believe you can update to windows 10 for free so long as you have a valid copy of windows 7 or 8. Using the most modern version of windows may fix some of the update issues.

I tried windows 10 and HATED it. It's an over-automated presumptuous and ill mannered pest, puts thing wherever it pleases , moves all my pictures, sneaks in at night and changes things around, calculator is a bad joke on science,
fortunately was able to undo the involuntary windows 10 "upgrade" that happened on this machine.

I got a Windows7 Pro disk for my laptop . When get a new battery will install it .

SO yes there's a reason i liked Windows 7, got accustomed to where things are in it, it ran fine for years but seems now to be suffering terminal 'update poisoning'.

IMHO the Tower of Babel myth was prescient of the software industry, a logical extrapolation on Human Nature .

I'm a Grumpy Old Man today, eh ?

Doing my best Walter Matthau..,
old jim

 

[NFuller]

I tried windows 10 and HATED it. It's an over-automated presumptuous and ill mannered pest, puts thing wherever it pleases , moves all my pictures, sneaks in at night and changes things around, calculator is a bad joke on science,
fortunately was able to undo the involuntary windows 10 "upgrade" that happened on this machine.

I feel your pain. After spending some time digging through windows internals, I was finally able to tame windows 10 and get it to function like an actual operating system. Unfortunately, most of us are bound to the whim of Microsoft and their "brilliant" ideas. Unless of course, you are a true anarchist and are using *NIX.

If you still have the install disk and you still can't get the update nonsense and other software issues to stop, then a reformat may be the last resort.

 

[I like Serena]

The fact that cycling the monitor's power a few times remedies the problem means that software cannot be the cause.

Not true. A race condition in the software could show the same symptoms.

Just checking.
You have a desktop and not a laptop (as in the picture ;))?
A single monitor?
No funky stuff with badly connected cables? (All connectors 'click' or are otherwise screwed tightly and without defects?)
No connected scanners, printers, or other peripherals?
And no (custom) drivers for any of those? (I used to have a scanner that had a driver that caused freezes.)
A regular network interface card that is hardwired? And no other funky network stuff?
And no clue that any of the behavior was first introduced when attaching a new peripheral, or installing new drivers/software?

 

[NFuller]

Not true. A race condition in the software could show the same symptoms.

That is very highly unlikely. Software does not care what the monitor is doing. When a program wants to display something, the OS pushes it into VRAM and the video card updates its video output. It is possible that the video driver is crashing, but cycling the monitor would not affect this. Also driver problems tend to produce flickering on the order of once every few seconds not at 10Hz as jim described.

 

[NFuller]

@jim hardy you mentioned that you have a laptop. If that is working, you could plug your monitor into the laptop and see if the problem goes away. If it does, then its something in your desktop. If it doesn't, then it's the monitor or video cable.

 

[jim hardy]

Not true. A race condition in the software could show the same symptoms.

My thoughts exactly.

Just checking.
You have a desktop and not a laptop (as in the picture ;))? Yes, desktop
A single monitor? Yes
No funky stuff with badly connected cables? (All connectors 'click' or are otherwise screwed tightly and without defects?) Checked that many times
No connected scanners, printers, or other peripherals? A Canon printer / scanner I've had for years . This started about 2 weeks ago after another round of uninvited midnight microshaft updates half of which report failed .
And no (custom) drivers for any of those? (I used to have a scanner that had a driver that caused freezes.) Mostly microsoft drivers, re-installed the Intel chipset drivers a few days ago on advice at Intel's support site .
A regular network interface card that is hardwired? And no other funky network stuff? Ethernet cable into the back of the telephone company's router
And no clue that any of the behavior was first introduced when attaching a new peripheral, or installing new drivers/software?
It started immediately after an automatic software update. That's why i suspect 'dueling programmers'.

 

[jim hardy]

On the premise that two different programs are trying to set up the monitor differently during the wakeup process
I tried removing conflicting monitor resolutions in REGEDIT by renaming any that weren't 1280X1024 to DELETED ( so they'd be easy to restore)

i did them one or two at a time
in hopes that would render them unusable to the operating system
to no avail
maybe i'll try renaming all but one and see what happens.

i have no idea what those things do

Of course Acrobat Thunderbird and Firefox self update too

Security Essentials is the only antivirus on now. Will try a restart .now.

old jim

 

[I like Serena]

Sounds as if that update might be 'a' or 'the' culprit.
Windows creates restore points when installing anything, meaning we can undo the update, if only to verify if it was causing the problem.
A quick google shows me this and this.

Alternatively, we can boot in such a way that only the bare minimum of drivers and programs are activated, and we can selectively indicate what else we want to start.
That way we can verify if the problem is caused by faulty drivers or software.

 

[jim hardy]

Started up fine this time except for this piece of ambiguity

Maybe my last tweak on the registry entries did something - will advise after a few more starts.

I like @I like Serena 's approach to troubleshooting this.

It is possible that the video driver is crashing, but cycling the monitor would not affect this. Also driver problems tend to produce flickering on the order of once every few seconds not at 10Hz as jim described.

It'll cycle at whatever is the rate conflicting programs change its settings.
that it settles out after three or four wakeups to the computer from the monitor tells me it takes a while for the software to reach equilibrium. If i wait several minutes it takes only one power off-on cycle. To me that precludes a cable problem

Judging by the horrific list of processes that Task Manager shows, startup time must be a whirling dervish reminiscent of Mozart's "Tuning Up"


It's liveable but annoying . Complaints at microsoft community site about this date back to least 2009.

 

[jim hardy]

Don't think i have a restore point early enough.

 

[Dr.D]

Wow, Jim! What a mess. I have nothing useful to offer, but I hope you get it all fixed soon.

 

[NFuller]

Does the monitor still act up when booting into safe mode? Do you have a dedicated graphics card or are you using integrated graphics?

 

[I like Serena]

Judging by the horrific list of processes that Task Manager shows, startup time must be a whirling dervish reminiscent of Mozart's "Tuning Up"


It's liveable but annoying . Complaints at microsoft community site about this date back to least 2009.

It usually pays off to clear/delete all programs that are automatically started.
That is, everything that is in the menu All Programs/Startup.
And all registry entries in:
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run
None of the stuff that you need is in either of those, but they do tend to collect garbage that doesn't get deleted, and they slow your system down unnecessarily.
It may even fix your problem. ;)

 

[jim hardy]

It usually pays off to clear/delete all programs that are automatically started.
That is, everything that is in the menu All Programs/Startup. It was empty
And all registry entries in:
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run It had only a blank entry
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run Renamed all four entries to "NoLonger--old name" so can put them back
None of the stuff that you need is in either of those, but they do tend to collect garbage that doesn't get deleted, and they slow your system down unnecessarily.
It may even fix your problem. ;)

we shall see

dont know how to boot in safe mode per NFuller's suggestion but will experiment.

 

[jim hardy]

Hmmm

@I like Serena

just had a successful wakeup from sleep with no flickering screen and no power cycle required. First one in weeks.

Will see if it holds.

What do those do ?

Thanks a Million!

old jim

 

[I like Serena]

For the record, I do see a checkbox labeled Show more restore points...

dont know how to boot in safe mode per NFuller's suggestion but will experiment.

It's explained for instance here (first google hit).
This is the absolute basis - it loads absolutely nothing that may be suspect, and it is double checked that there are no corruptions (such as viruses).

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run Renamed all four entries to "NoLonger--old name" so can put them back

That may not be good enough.
The key names are irrelevant - it's about the Data that's behind them that identify the programs that are supposed to be started.
I usually use File/Export to export the entries so that I might import them again, after which I delete everything in there.
(And I have never felt the need to import anything again. ;))

 

[phinds]

I tried windows 10 and HATED it. It's an over-automated presumptuous and ill mannered pest, puts thing wherever it pleases , moves all my pictures, sneaks in at night and changes things around, calculator is a bad joke on science

Personally, I think you are giving it way more credit than it deserves and have hardly even begun to point out its flaws. #IHATEITMORETHANYOUDO