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

 

[QuantumQuest]

I want to make a few comments too, noting that the contributions on the thread are already excellent.

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...

This is absolutely essential. As I read the OP, I initially thought that there was one antivirus on a permanent basis and jim hardy just disabled it and run another one in order to check for malware. Two antivirus programs running both at the same time is just a source of various problems and also there will be a lot of false positive and some (maybe many) undetected real alarms.

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.

As I have already run and develop on Windows platforms for years - I use also Linux in my work, I wouldn't disagree with this but the real problem for every single version of Windows is Microsoft policies. Now, while these are very protective and well designed for many cases there is a lot of cases that they aren't. I cannot really count the number of cases that I got in need of finding / devising some workaround and this is certainly a bad thing for an OS.

The Windows version that jim hardy runs has been proven to be a stable one - taking the various SP's and updates into account. I can confirm this too as I have already a machine with this OS for seven years with no problem at all.

I think that for both problems mentioned, the source(s) can potentially be various things. The safe way to go is to boot in safe mode and see what the behavior of the system is. Then you can begin to see if it is software (maybe faulty / corrupted drivers, conflicting programs etc.) or hardware (faulty or not anymore compatible with the OS). Trying to modify the registry - I have personally done it a lot of times in older versions of Windows, is not of much help in a vast number of cases, as there may be the same or correlated settings in various places of the registry.

 

[jim hardy]

Just had a second successful wakeup from sleep
system seems to be noticeably better now.i think i'll delete those things @I like Serena suggested deleting
and go back & un-rename the ones i did on my own up in Regedit Graphics list one at a time
\
but first will try that safe mode boot(sleep a while)

i'm back now in safe mode

This is absolutely essential. As I read the OP, I initially thought that there was one antivirus on a permanent basis and jim hardy just disabled it and run another one in order to check for malware.

That's indeed what i had done
ran Malware Bytes too, it reported clean, but uninstalled it as well just in case. I'm NOT a software guru by any stretch.

Startup was flawless, i even cycled monitor power afterward just to see if it caused any upset which it did not .

Most likely candidate is those four entries where @I like Serena suggested deleting - i only renamed them so i think i'll go back and delete.

Thanks Folks
I don't know what we fixed but it has either removed or masked the symptoms.

@phinds Thanks for validating my opinion of Windows (Shutters?) 10 and that awful busybody Cortana .

 

[jim hardy]

Thanks all, going to put this machine in sleep and go defrost the freezer. Got to make use of the daylight and the cool day.

old jim

 

[phinds]

@phinds Thanks for validating my opinion of Windows (Shutters?) 10 and that awful busybody Cortana .

I spent several hours just figuring out how to delete as much of the voluminous crap as possible and disabling as much as possible those things that Windows just won't LET you get rid of (like Cortana). Even with all that, I refuse to put Win10 on my workhorse workstation. The laptop only gets used a few times a year so I can live with Win10 instead of paying an extra #100 to retrofit it w/ Win7

 

[jim hardy]

I bought a Win7 pro disk from a retired microsoft employee
just can't abide ten's irrationality
......
Deleted those files in HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run
but Windows wouldn't allow the Default REGSZ (value not set) deletion

we shall see if black screen comes back.

Am getting popups telling me to change my Windows update setting back from "Never" - i guess they still snoop around anyway.

.................
Boring Anecdote Alert -
After we got the plant computer running in 1973 we did not ever update the operating system, to the vendor's considerable dismay.
It ran well until 2002 oops 1992 when we replaced it..
29 oops 19 years was i think not a bad run for an old Data General Nova 840 with magnetic core memory .
It did give trouble though when the moving head disk developed seek errors due to a defective op-amp in the head positioning servo loop. Its slew rate deteriorated so at max head speed the drive sometimes lost count of the track number and had to recalibrate itself to track zero...
Once in a while it would fail to notice the mistake. That's where i learned about the assembly language command "LED" - Load and Execute Data.
The only symptom was an occasional crash. Once it reprinted a report from a year earlier and that was the tipoff that we needed. We knew printer output was spooled to disk so that had to be a disk error.
Sure enough the disk diagnostic showed trouble on long track seeks but only at highest speed. Oscilloscope showed degraded rise and fall times at the opamp output that caused a race in downstream logic.

Moral of that boring anecdote -
Software ?
1. If it isn't broke don't fix it.
2. Do it right the first time.
That Windows has accrued so many thousands of updates does not create in me, well, let's just say 'a sense of well being' .

old jim

 

[Tom.G]

but Windows wouldn't allow the Default REGSZ (value not set) deletion

No, it won't. Each "item" must have at least one "value", even if it is empty! Subsequent entries in an "item" are pointers to names/values of subservient entries.
It's just a fancy linked list of name-value pairs; where the "value" may be a pointer to another name-value pair. (IIRC)

An overview of the registry internals is here: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc750583.aspx

 

[jim hardy]

It's just a fancy linked list of name-value pairs;

Thanks Tom
Vocabulary for understanding the Registry :
Keys ? Bins? Hives ? Trees? Cells ? Roots? Blocks ? Indexes? Kernels? Pools ? Object manager? Configuration manager ?
This dog is too old. Gives me hives.

I took one operating systems course. Myriads of pointers and lists. I decided programming wasn't for me because i can't remember names.
But i admire those who can do it well.

 

[jim hardy]

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

Well you were exactly right, and checking it gave me a restore point from 26th of September...

Since the 'black screen' came back i just tried it
successful restore
successful restart even if a slow one, without black screen
so i quickly set Windows Updates to "NEVER AGAIN !" because the restore undid yesterday's change
and i'll see how it does today.
Will look at those REGEDIT HKEY entries again.

with fingers crossed

thanks again for all the help

old jim

 

[jim hardy]

and i'll see how it does today.

Well, my Firefox browser disappeared. Fortunately there was a copy from 2006 on the other drive, version 3 i think, so was able start it and download version 56.
I'd uninstalled IE when undid the involuntary Windows 10 'upgrade' earlier this year
Ghost of Cortana ? ' Hell hath no fury...'

 

[Idyit]

I've had similar issues with two Phillips monitors, it's a hardware problem in the Monitors interface card, one would "Flip" on every few seconds, nothing fixed it until I put a new monitor on , then problem vanished. The other Monitor (Same brand), would take about 20minutes to warm up before the flickering behaviour stopped.

Try swapping the monitor outputs and if the problem persists then I'd say the monitor has a faulty interface card.

As for the lock ups it's very hard to say, if the Taskmanager is reporting very low or zero CPU use, then I'd be guessing the Network drivers are at fault.

I've had this with a couple of Dell machines recently, one laptop and two desktops, the only way I could fix them was to use the PowerShell scripts PSWindowsUpdate.zip which I downloaded from Microsoft (I am using windows 10, but it should still work on windows 7 if you are lucky), the scripts found a whole bunch of drivers which fixed the reboot / power / network issues on all the machines, although it has started happening again on one of the laptops.

I've also found that the Dell implementation of the Intel Rapid Storage drivers is faulty at a hardware level, and was corrupting the HDD of both the Dell laptops, I ended up changing them both to AHCI (You need to enable AHCI in windows before rebooting otherwise windows will not find the kernel driver at startup and will never start again so beware, check this link for a rundown on how to do this ... https://winaero.com/blog/switch-from-ide-to-achi-after-installing-windows-7-or-windows-8/)

So try swapping the monitors, use the PSWindowsUpdate.zip to check for updates (It uses the same microsoft website, so I have no idea why the standard update doesn't find them and if you are using a dell with the Intel Rapid Storage enabled, you may want to consider swapping to AHCI, but the last is something you need to approach with caution as it may kill your machine if you get it wrong, switching back to Intel Rapid Storage in BIOS may not help after you have enabled the AHCI, I don't know why, but I'd guess windows kernel drivers get confused after automated repair)

Good Luck Jim ;-)

 

[rbelli1]

I have found two bugs (probably features if you ask Microsoft) from upgrading to Windows 10. Both are related to windows update. One is that the wake-up is still programmed for Windows update even if you turn off automatic updates. So the computer turns on at 3 in the morning and wakes me up too unless I remember to turn off the monitor. Normally it will be programmed to update and hibernate once again. But if you turn updates off then no update occurs and no re-hibernate occurs either.

The second is that *something* is actually done at the mandated update time that disallows hibernate to operate properly. It takes an extremely long time to hibernate and then rarely wake up in an operable state.

BoB

 

[Idyit]

You should disable the wake timers in your power options, and check the BIOS doesn't have any wake timings set.

I've started using the ...
shutdown -hybrid -s -t 00

Instead of hibernate, it allows for a much faster startup, and actually switches the machine off completely.

These days I tend to use the PowerShell script for updates as it appears more reliable.

 

[rbelli1]

You should disable the wake timers in your power options, and check the BIOS doesn't have any wake timings set.

I did that. Update re-enables them. Updating and rebooting is the only fix I have found. Regardless, the crashy thing precludes long term avoidance of updates anyway.

BoB

 

[Idyit]

Nasty Windows ... this link may help it's a bit of a trek though ...
https://superuser.com/questions/973009/conclusively-stop-wake-timers-from-waking-windows-10-desktop

 

[rbelli1]

Nasty Windows ... this link may help it's a bit of a trek though ...

I did all of that (several hours of sleep lost finding all of them). It kept the wake-ups at bay for a while then update re-enabled them. I give up. I just try to remember to do the updates in a sort of timely fashion.

The only effective option I found was to hibernate then when it tried to wake back up shut down at once. This works but Windows becomes unstable for some unknown reason.

It's frustrating how Windows update has gone passive aggressive on insisting on updates.

BoB

 

[Idyit]

Indeed, I found the preview release fast ring broke my machine on a regular basis, got sick of it and went back to the Creators update, which is a lot more reliable (Understandably I guess)

I've never found the hibernation shutdown to be reliable, so the hybrid shutdown option sounds like it may be your best answer.

Wake timers won't wok if it's actually powered down, and the startup speed is very comparable (On my machine(s) at least).

 

[rbelli1]

I've never found the hibernation shutdown to be reliable

It works great for me until the second Tuesday of every month.

Wake timers won't wok if it's actually powered down

That explains my success of mashing the power button to keep it in hibernate.

and the startup speed is very comparable

It depends on how much crap you have installed. I have every development environment from here to Timbuktu installed and every one wants to start their services and check for updates on startup. That takes forever.

BoB

 

[Idyit]

Mmmm, I'd install a SSD, and I use Virtual machines for the dev environments much easier to manage and transfer.

 

[jim hardy]

I have found two bugs (probably features if you ask Microsoft) from upgrading to Windows 10. Both are related to windows update. One is that the wake-up is still programmed for Windows update even if you turn off automatic updates. So the computer turns on at 3 in the morning and wakes me up too unless I remember to turn off the monitor. Normally it will be programmed to update and hibernate once again. But if you turn updates off then no update occurs and no re-hibernate occurs either.

The second is that *something* is actually done at the mandated update time that disallows hibernate to operate properly. It takes an extremely long time to hibernate and then rarely wake up in an operable state.

BoB

I sounds as if that didn't get undone when i reverted this machine from 10 back to 7.

 

[Idyit]

It's possible, but from memory Windows 7 had all those update paradigms already so it may be a "standard" windows "feature".
Hibernation is never reliable after updates, the core kernel files will most likely no longer match the memory dump.

It really does sound like you'd be better of re-installing the core OS, and setup some virtual machines for your dev environments, it will take some time but, in my opinion you will end up with a much more manageable solution.

I'd recommend Oracle Virtual box for the VM's, Hyper-V doesn't support USB mapping (not natively anyway) and allows for hiding the NX flag which makes the VM much more portable between bare metal boxes. You find the performance very good in the VM's these days, as long as your CPU supports all the latest Virtual Technologies. You may have to buy another Windows 7 license, nut only one should be enough as I don't think the DLC licensing will be smart enough to realize the multiple installs.

VMWare is another option, but I haven't used it for a long time so can't really tell you much about it.