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Windows 7 freezes for 1 minute

dawei

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My custom built rig has lately, in the past 2 months or so, been having these spits of freezing. It will freeze for exactly 1 minute: always 1 minute, every time. I can time it down to the second.

The weird thing is that when it freezes, some programs seem to be immune to it. When playing a full screen game, video and audio will freeze (though not always at the same time, sometimes one or the other will lag). Playing a 3D game in windowed mode seems to be immune to it however. Windows explorer and Firefox always seems to freeze, but Windows Messenger (including video call) will work as normal even while everything else is frozen. After a minute has passed, everything is back to normal. It happens at irregular intervals: sometimes it will happen then happen again 30 seconds later, and sometimes I can go hours without the problem.

It's a bit bizarre and I'm not sure what is causing it. The fact that it is always exactly 1 minute makes me think it's some dumb program checking for an update or something, but I can't pin it down.

Any ideas appreciated.
 
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sound like a very interesting problem
are you able to move your mouse when it freezes, is anything moving on the screen, can you alt-tab?
 

dawei

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sound like a very interesting problem
are you able to move your mouse when it freezes, is anything moving on the screen, can you alt-tab?

I am able to move the mouse smoothly as normal (but can't click on anything, and it shows as the 'waiting' icon, the blue circle with the white highlight moving about).

Things move on the screen...as I said the video in a Messenger video call continues to stream as normal most of the time a freeze is occurring (though not every time).

I can't alt-tab or ctrl-alt-del. If I hit ctrl-alt-del nothing will happen, but as soon as the freeze ends it will remember that I hit that and the ctrl-alt-del menu appears.
 
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dawei

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Can you afford upgrading your PC?
CPU - RAM - Mobo - PSU particularly

Yeah I can afford it, but I'd rather diagnose the problem before going willy-nilly upgrading my hardware...especially if it's just a simple software bug.

My hardware is sufficient for my current uses, so I'd rather not make any investments just yet.
 
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Yeah I can afford it, but I'd rather diagnose the problem before going willy-nilly upgrading my hardware...especially if it's just a simple software bug.

Reinstall Windows 7
 
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defnately a software problem
 
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Hawkman99

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Its probably the SSD. I have read of the freezing problem happening on a bunch of them so update it to the latest firmware from the manufacturer.
 

n1203

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are you using SSD? some cheap SSD has freezing problem. because of it's controller. it has many problem and makes freezing. That can't be solved with firmware update.
 
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I had exactly the same issue.

It's most likely SSD freeze.
Is your HDD led lit during the freeze ?

Check Corsair's website for SSD firmware update. It will most likely fix the issue (or make it way less frequent).

Cheers,
 
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some cheap SSD has freezing problem

Not really. The problem affected most top-end Sandforce 2k-based SSDs as well.
 

Completely Bonkers

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Do you have some (non-standard) software or service running in the background? e.g. something by HP. There are known issues with some kind of failed DNS lookup that can cause a specific freeze. You say that some things work, and some things stop. Are the things that stop internet related? Could be the net stack.
 

chuchnit

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Exactly what model of ssd is that? It almost sounds like the LPM issue on the crucial C300's. Does your drive have a marvell controller by chance?
 

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I had the same problem with random freezing at the start of the year.

The problem turned out to be faulty ram
 

dawei

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Thanks for the replies guys. The problem resolved itself and I haven't had the freezing for about 2 weeks now. Not sure what happened. I am suspecting it is a RAM issue since sometimes my PC won't even start altogether, but whenever I remove and replace my RAM it magically works again.

The last time that it didn't start, I removed and replaced the ram like usual, and since then, no freezing.

I did a RAM error test and it didn't find anything. Who knows.
 

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could be hard drives idling and lagging out as they wake up, with my 12 externals it can take quite a time for them to all spin up one by one. i disabled that here and my lag spikes stopped.
 

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