Help to diagnose system crash

mushtafa · 20 Jul 2016 at 21:27

Strange one this, it happens almost every day.

I'd have Chrome open browsing the forums, or Facebook etc, nothing else open, no other programs running.

The webpage I'm on will freeze, like the internet has disconnected. I open a new tab to make sure, nothing loads. I than minimise the window, and I can no longer restore it. I can not select anything on the desktop, or open anything on the taskbar. Alt-Ctrl-Del doesn't work, and I'm pretty sure Rainmeter on the desktop freezes. I retain mouse movement though.

The only way out is to force power off with the power switch (no reset button), and reboot. It reboots fine. I check the 'Windows' section of Event Viewer, but it doesn't show any errors (apart from the an unclean shutdown).

How can I diagnose this? I can't find any virus, adware or malware on the system.

I can play a taxing game like Tomb Raider for hours without fault

jpaul · 20 Jul 2016 at 22:30

if you use something like process explorer (maybe task manager too) you can reduce scheduling priority of chrome, so that when it takes over the cpu and makes the computer unresponsive, you can get a stack trace (from process explorer) to try and see what chrome is doing and google that;
and then kill or suspend chrome without needing to reset the computer
... presumambly there is no common characteristic, you have yet identified, of the web pages/sites that cause it to lock up.

.. often if you have multiple eg 4. cpus's even if one cpu is locked up with chrome the task manager will be sufficiently responsive to get some debug info.

mushtafa · 21 Jul 2016 at 07:30

I searched for Process Explorer, this came back: https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/processexplorer.aspx?f=255&MSPPError=-2147217396 Is this correct?

It locked up 5 minutes ago, had eBay and this forum opened. This time I tried to right click the taskbar to start task manager, and I just got a spinning busy cursor.

jpaul · 21 Jul 2016 at 07:52

yes correct.

need to reduce chrome priority before issue occurs, which should not impact regular browsing much, so that when issue occurs can still open process explorer and get a stack trace for chrome (to see why it wants to take over the world)

mushtafa · 21 Jul 2016 at 21:29

I think I've done what you've asked? Is this automatically saved for every boot? Not sure how low to make it, so I can keep it usable.

jpaul · 21 Jul 2016 at 22:39

You could automate setting priority see this but personally I was just setting it when I logged on each time
I did subsequently see you can set priority with task manager too

[ Also found another MS tool ProcDump which would be a bit more involved, but has options very specific to this kind of issue - but getting a stack trace with process explorer will hopefully explain problem.

Write a mini dump for a process named 'hang.exe' when one of it's Windows is unresponsive for more than 5 seconds:

C:\>procdump -h hang.exe hungwindow.dmp

Click to expand...

]