Windows 10 random freezes

J

Jim Logajan

Administrator
Staff member
I have an 11 year old Windows 10 machine that runs pretty much all the time because I'm running Blue Iris software on it to record video from two surveillance cameras. In the last two weeks it has suddenly started freezing at random times. Sometimes a couple hours after a reboot, sometimes within minutes. USB keyboard and mouse become non-responsive as well as network access. There was a recent upgrade that MS released. There was also a small bug fix for Blue Iris, so I shut it down to see if that was the cause. At first that seemed to resolve things for a day or so - until the machine froze again, indicating either an OS issue or a hardware problem.

I'm running memtest86 to see if it finds problems with the ram. So far 6 hours in with no errors - will let it run for at least 18 or more hours since it had taken as much as a day before freezing. If that doesn't find any problem I'll check the hard drive, though I would think the OS should handle drive errors more graciously than memory going bad.

First time in 11 years I've had such a problem with that machine.
 
While tempting to blame an "upgrade" from MS, I would first suspect old hardware starting have problems (e.g., overheating). Have you cleaned the guts of the computer?

Any insight into the drive r/w errors occuring, if any? Is it a rotating drive or an SSD? And, sure, you'd like to think the OS could handle drive r/w errors with some robustness, but, ya know, ms isn't known for robustness.

oh, and just to get it out of the way: get a mac.

:)
 
Bob Noel said:
While tempting to blame an "upgrade" from MS, I would first suspect old hardware starting have problems (e.g., overheating). Have you cleaned the guts of the computer?

Any insight into the drive r/w errors occuring, if any? Is it a rotating drive or an SSD? And, sure, you'd like to think the OS could handle drive r/w errors with some robustness, but, ya know, ms isn't known for robustness.

oh, and just to get it out of the way: get a mac.

:)
Click to expand...

Overnight memory test found no problems with the ram. A two hour test of the SSD drive claimed it was good.

While mucking about in the BIOS settings I noticed the CPU temp at 97° C. That seemed high for mostly running at idle - and on inspection discovered the CPU cooling fan had died. The fan and the heat sink cooling fins were jammed up with dust. Likely the CPU was overheating. Removed the dead fan and vacuumed the dust from between the heat sink cooling fins. Fortunately I had kept another 12V 4 pin PWM cooling fan from a CPU upgrade to another machine. It was a few mm smaller than the dead fan so it wouldn't screw into to the old mounting holes. After some literal plastic surgery on the fan I used tape to hold it in place temporarily, which seems to be working. CPU temps seem to have stabilized at ~40° C.

New cooling fan on order.
 
Jim Logajan said:
Overnight memory test found no problems with the ram. A two hour test of the SSD drive claimed it was good.

While mucking about in the BIOS settings I noticed the CPU temp at 97° C. That seemed high for mostly running at idle - and on inspection discovered the CPU cooling fan had died. The fan and the heat sink cooling fins were jammed up with dust. Likely the CPU was overheating. Removed the dead fan and vacuumed the dust from between the heat sink cooling fins. Fortunately I had kept another 12V 4 pin PWM cooling fan from a CPU upgrade to another machine. It was a few mm smaller than the dead fan so it wouldn't screw into to the old mounting holes. After some literal plastic surgery on the fan I used tape to hold it in place temporarily, which seems to be working. CPU temps seem to have stabilized at ~40° C.

New cooling fan on order.
Click to expand...

lots of muck in old computers... it's good that you found the dead fan.

wrt the SSD, don't forget that with wear leveling, the drive will eventually fall off the cliff...
 
Bob Noel said:
lots of muck in old computers... it's good that you found the dead fan.

wrt the SSD, don't forget that with wear leveling, the drive will eventually fall off the cliff...
Click to expand...
It's obviously been a while since I cleaned or even looked at the inside of that machine. It actually has a plexiglass cover so the motherboard is visible (it is a tower that was sold as a "gaming computer" when I bought it - I guess gamers like to see the inside of their machines. Blinking LEDs and such.)

I replaced the original HDD with an SSD a few years back to speed things up knowing about the life limit on SSDs. I've been through HDD failures before, so I have Macrium Reflect that does a complete disk image backup to a second SSD on that machine once a week and a nightly backup of all user folders to a NAS (ioSafe.com) machine.

I don't have a Mac (although my wife has a very old one in storage which she used to write an iPhone app) but my main second computer is a Redhat Linux system (previously had Centos.) I prefer Unix systems over Windows, but I have a bunch of commercial software that was only available on Windows. For example, when I bought Rhino3D CAD its support for Macs was very limited. Likewise with control software for my 3D printer, and so on.

Speaking of Unix, I have worked on kernel modules for both Linux and FreeBSD and found FreeBSD to be easier to follow. But then FreeBSD has a direct lineage back to the original Unix while Linux was written from scratch.
 
I also backup to a NAS drive nightly but I also take a further step and have the NAS backed up to a set of portable drives every 2 weeks and they are stored offsite, the real job office in a fireproof safe

Overkill maybe
 
Jim Logajan said:
It's obviously been a while since I cleaned or even looked at the inside of that machine. It actually has a plexiglass cover so the motherboard is visible (it is a tower that was sold as a "gaming computer" when I bought it - I guess gamers like to see the inside of their machines. Blinking LEDs and such.)

I replaced the original HDD with an SSD a few years back to speed things up knowing about the life limit on SSDs. I've been through HDD failures before, so I have Macrium Reflect that does a complete disk image backup to a second SSD on that machine once a week and a nightly backup of all user folders to a NAS (ioSafe.com) machine.

I don't have a Mac (although my wife has a very old one in storage which she used to write an iPhone app) but my main second computer is a Redhat Linux system (previously had Centos.) I prefer Unix systems over Windows, but I have a bunch of commercial software that was only available on Windows. For example, when I bought Rhino3D CAD its support for Macs was very limited. Likewise with control software for my 3D printer, and so on.

Speaking of Unix, I have worked on kernel modules for both Linux and FreeBSD and found FreeBSD to be easier to follow. But then FreeBSD has a direct lineage back to the original Unix while Linux was written from scratch.
Click to expand...
That’s like me, I don’t look in my case anymore unfortunately. I did back when I was gaming, even built my own machines. Most recently after quitting gaming and starting my business I just bought one. Don’t have time anymore to fool with it, no space in this house, no interest. I was going to suggest power supply could be the problem. The cheap ones that come with the case can be unstable, I replaced mine with higher quality power supplies.
 
I forgot to add that i also a $1.99 iOS app called file browser that I can manually backup/restore photos from iDevice to the NAS
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top