Computer freeze

bazzabear

bazzabear

bazzabear

Soldato
Joined
2 Nov 2013
Posts
4,242
I'm asking for help here, but I don't have a lot of information to give! I'll share what I know, and maybe you guys will know what extra I need to find out for you to help.

I've had this PC for 5+ years now, and always been very stable. But for the last couple of weeks I've had a few occasions - maybe 5-6 - where it has just frozen up completely. Screen stays on, but no mouse or keyboard input does anything. Have to hold down the power to close it down, restart, and then everything is back to normal.

on one of those occasions I immediately ran a hardware monitor to check temperatures, and everything seemed normal.

I've not noticed any particular pattern, except maybe it's always happened with Chrome running and in focus. But then that's true 90% of the time, so maybe means nothing.

Any obvious things I should try, or additional information I need to provide to help diagnose?

I could try switching to Firefox to see if it helps? Or does latest Geforce drivers seem a likely issue (the only thing I can think of that's changed) and I should rollback?

Basic computer details are:
ASUS Prime Z370-P motherboard
i7-8700k
2070 super
16GB RAM
Windows 10 home

Oh - there's a thought. I did enable the TPM 2.0 thing in the BIOS recently, just out of interest to see whether it would make it Windows 11 compatible. I'm not sure whether these crashes have followed that action, but maybe I'll try switching that back and see if it makes a difference.
 
I haven't checked event viewer (forgot it existed!)
Not a program I have much experience with. Seems to be showing 2 'critical' errors in the last couple of days:

Kernel-Power 41.

I don't know, but a suspicion that is the act of me having to hard-reboot, rather than the actual error itself.
I've tried to look for an event which just precedes that shutdown in each case, as that might indicate the lockup - but nothing popping out. I will definitely look at that again in case of another lock up.

I did not change anything else in the BIOS, and have no other hardware or software changes that I am aware of (apart from I think there was a recent Windows update, and possibly an nVidia update).

I do have some HDDs, although windows itself is on SSD.

Having turned off TPM again, I will leave everything else well alone for now, so we can see if that appears to have been the cause. Fingers crossed!
 
OK, that's what I did above but the only consistent item I found was actually the error from turning off without shutting down (which I did after the lock up of course).
 
Not wanting to jinx things, but no lock ups since I turned TPM back off, which was on Thursday. During the timer with it enabled, was crashing about once a day. So fingers crossed, issue identified and resolved.

It'd be nice to know why but I'll cope without.
 
This will explain it better than I can:

What is TPM? - Microsoft Support

A TPM, or Trusted Platform Module, improves the security of your PC by securely creating and storing cryptographic keys. TPM 2.0 is a key part of making Windows 11 even more secure.
support.microsoft.com support.microsoft.com

But the point for this purpose is that it is likely something that has to be enabled on your motherboard via the BIOS.
 
Since I re-disabled TPM, I have had one crash which seemed similar - but left nothing at all in event viewer. So that's in nearly two months.

So I'm worried about that one - but hopeful it was just a one-off.
 
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