Strange Freeze/Crashing (W10)

chrismscotland · 1 Mar 2021 at 12:04

Folks - looking for a little help/advice.
I built a new gaming rig before Christmas and generally its been running fine; however it has from time to time started crashing.

However its an "odd" sort of crash; it doesn't just BSOD which I think would be easier to diagnose! It seems to part-freeze leaving me in a situation where I can move the mouse and even alt-tab between windows but no clicks are recognised; it then eventually just freezes and I need to do a hard-reboot (power off on the machine).

I'm really struggling to tell what the problem could be as it doesn't seem to occur at any obvious point where I would be stressing the CPU or GPU (fine when gaming); I've almost begun to wonder if its USB device related but there don't appear to be any crashdump logs...

Just wondered if anyone has seen a similar issue?

Jay85 · 1 Mar 2021 at 12:17

Have you checked Event viewer to see if theres anything thats popped up there.

chrismscotland · 1 Mar 2021 at 12:28

Jay85 said:
Have you checked Event viewer to see if theres anything thats popped up there.

I've had a look and there are a few "critical" but these relate to the re-boot after the freeze; not the freeze itself.

The only thing I can see that is mentioned around the time of the freeze/crash is a "Warning" for DistributedCOM event 10016 but that doesn't look like something that would cause this issue.

Jay85 · 1 Mar 2021 at 12:33

chrismscotland said:
I've had a look and there are a few "critical" but these relate to the re-boot after the freeze; not the freeze itself.

The only thing I can see that is mentioned around the time of the freeze/crash is a "Warning" for DistributedCOM event 10016 but that doesn't look like something that would cause this issue.

Yeah just had a look at the code and its something that can be safely ignored.

At this point i would be looking at 2 things. A fresh reinstall of windows to see if its software related. If that doesn't resolve it then i know its hardware.

But i would start with simple things like reseating Ram, check connectors are all in tight. Check Sata cables and maybe even replace them as they're cheap anyway. I use to get similar behavior when one of the Sata cables were on its way out. The computer would freeze but not completely but eventually would lock up. Like you i didn't get any BSOD's and i would need to hard reset.

chrismscotland · 2 Mar 2021 at 11:30

Jay85 said:
Yeah just had a look at the code and its something that can be safely ignored.

At this point i would be looking at 2 things. A fresh reinstall of windows to see if its software related. If that doesn't resolve it then i know its hardware.

But i would start with simple things like reseating Ram, check connectors are all in tight. Check Sata cables and maybe even replace them as they're cheap anyway. I use to get similar behavior when one of the Sata cables were on its way out. The computer would freeze but not completely but eventually would lock up. Like you i didn't get any BSOD's and i would need to hard reset.

Hopefully I'll get some time this weekend to do all that; funny though - I stopped using my Razer wireless mouse (with a USB receiver) and switched to my bluetooth MX Master 3 and I've not had a single issue now for 24 hours....

bagleyboy · 2 Mar 2021 at 12:57

Could be a driver issue with the Razer mouse then, tried reinstalling the driver and/or razer synapse?

chrismscotland · 2 Mar 2021 at 14:54

bagleyboy said:
Could be a driver issue with the Razer mouse then, tried reinstalling the driver and/or razer synapse?

I'll give that a go! Keyboard is Razer too (although its USB wired; not wireless); I don't remember having the issue straigh after I built the rig; only at Christmas after I got the mouse