Question about system hangs (freezes)

titaniumx3 · 16 Jan 2013 at 00:00

I recently had my system completely freeze on me today, where everything froze completely (including mouse cursor) and the music I was playing went into an infinite loop (like a buzzing sound). This happened almost completely out of the blue whilst just browsing the net on firefox and listening to music. I say 'almost' because it happened precisely when I clicked a link on this forum (the awesome gif thread

), but that could just be coincidence.

I hard resetted, did the usual checks and everything seems to be fine, only an error in event viewer regarding the unexpected system shutdown. I tried to recreate the freeze but couldn't. I even ran some torture tests and 3D benchmarks, but nothing ... everything seems stable. Totally puzzled as to what caused this and have never had anything like this happen on this computer since I built it over a year ago. My CPU is overclocked, but as I said its rock stable as far as I am concerned.

Anyway, long story short, what can cause the system to freeze/hang like this? Is it necessarily a hardware fault? Can software cause such an issue? Also, why would it happen just on a one off, under very light usage if it were a hardware issue? Hate having doubts about the stability of my computer, especially when it can't be explained.

bremen1874 · 16 Jan 2013 at 05:00

If it just happens once shrug it off.

If it happens again start looking at your overclock/voltages/temperatures. My previous machine started doing this when I forgot to reset the memory voltages correctly after a bios reset. Easily fixed, but briefly concerning.

Bromhead · 16 Jan 2013 at 05:23

Sounds just like a hiccup, could have been anything, but if it doesn't happen again and you can't re-create it nothing to worry about.

titaniumx3 · 16 Jan 2013 at 10:45

Thanks, it does indeed seem to be a hiccup as I can't recreate it, nor explain why it happened. I'm a little paranoid about these things as I've always thought that a proper system freeze such as this is due to a hardware fault or at least the start of one.

Anyway, as much as I hate not having an explanation for this, I'd prefer it didn't happen again. So much hassle trying to pin point random freezes like this!

titaniumx3 · 23 Jan 2013 at 23:23

Sigh, it's happened again after a full week no issues.

Been playing games for hours on end, watching movies, running benchmarks, the whole lot, no problems whatsoever ... yet today, I'm just casually browsing the web and it just freezes completely out of the blue. This time I opened a new webpage (anandtech.com) and whilst I scrolled down the page, the mouse went all stuttery and after 2 seconds everything froze completely. What the hell is causing this type of freeze?

The only common thing is that I was using Firefox during both crashes, but I use that all the time. Could Firefox cause such a system hang? If so, why is it happening now all of a sudden. My hardware has been the same for the past 6-7 months. The only relevant changes are installing new graphics drivers (nvidia) and the automatic Firefox updates. Not sure when Firefox updated last (updates all the time) but I last updated my graphics drivers about a month ago. The only other change I can think of is the cold weather.

Totally baffled here. :confused: