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This is ridiculous (Windows 8 randomly semi-freezing)
Saeris
Borb EnthusiastflapflapflapflapRegistered User regular
Borb EnthusiastflapflapflapflapRegistered User regular
Okay, I've dealt with a lot of perplexing bullshit over the years, but I have not been this confused in over a decade. Maybe one of you has some amazing insight, because over the past week I've certainly found none, and have reached wit's end.
Symptoms
System
Useless crap that I've tried/checked five times
It's been a long time since I've had to ask: what in the smoldering hells is going on here? Any ideas?
Symptoms
I can't find a pattern to it, but between 10 minutes and 4 hours after booting up, this happens:
If I don't leave it idle, and instead try to do anything that accesses the disk, Windows will freeze waiting for reads/writes and eventually bluescreen with either CRITICAL_PROCESS_DIED or KERNEL_INPAGE_DATA_ERROR.
Other than that, the system keeps working fine. CPU usage is 0-5%, memory is 15-20%, network is as expected. A PS/2 keyboard keeps working. Onscreen video will even keep playing with no jitter (if it's all buffered to memory).
- all USB devices stop working... sort of (Windows keeps trying to reinstall them very slowly, but always fails)
- audio crackles and pops constantly, with the quality sounding like it's been run through an 8-bit MIDI chip
- drive usage jumps to 100% (according to task manager), and read latency spikes to ~15s (yes, seconds), and throughput plummets (max read speed of ~1MB/s)
If I don't leave it idle, and instead try to do anything that accesses the disk, Windows will freeze waiting for reads/writes and eventually bluescreen with either CRITICAL_PROCESS_DIED or KERNEL_INPAGE_DATA_ERROR.
Other than that, the system keeps working fine. CPU usage is 0-5%, memory is 15-20%, network is as expected. A PS/2 keyboard keeps working. Onscreen video will even keep playing with no jitter (if it's all buffered to memory).
System
I just built this a week ago.
- ASRock 990FX Extreme4
- AMD FX-6350
- Mushkin 2x4GB DDR3
- MSI Radeon HD 7970
- Corsair 650W PSU
- The drive is an Intel 510 SSD which I've actually had for two years, and has never given me grief.
Useless crap that I've tried/checked five times
(in no particular order)
- reinstalled Windows 8 three times, the third time using a different bootable USB stick just to be sure
- nothing that looks causal is logged in Event Viewer (just Windows saying that USB is timing out, and the standard "unexpected shutdown" events)
- task manager shows low CPU and memory usage, 100% disk usage
- drive's SATA controller is set to AHCI in the BIOS
- chkdsk and sfc both show no errors
- temperatures are normal (the CPU even runs below room temperature when idling downclocked)
- Intel's SSD Toolbox full diagnostic scan shows the drive is completely healthy
- two full passes of memtest86+ showed no errors
- tried chipset, video, audio, and ethernet drivers from ASRock and directly from their manufacturers
- tried WiFi (via USB dongle) and ethernet
- uninstalled all USB devices in Device Manager and rebooted
- changed power settings from Balanced to High Performance
- disconnected all audio and USB devices externally
- no dumps are generated during a bluescreen (it hangs at 0% when creating the dump)
- tried to check latency per this question on SU, and it looks normal right up until the freeze crashes the latency monitor
It's been a long time since I've had to ask: what in the smoldering hells is going on here? Any ideas?
0
Posts
Also, with the USB ports jumping in and out like that I'm gonna go ahead and guess your BSOD code is an F9? (Driver_State_Power_Failure).
This could be bad hardware or a bad PSU.
Do you have an AV installed? Is this behavior persisting while the AV is disabled?
Win8 doesn't list the actual BSOD code anymore, as far as I know (it's "friendlier" now), but the textual code is either CRITICAL_PROCESS_DIED or KERNEL_INPAGE_DATA_ERROR. The latter suggests a memory issue, but memtest86+ would suggest the memory is fine. But it'll only bluescreen later on, after the symptoms have been going on for a while.
I just have Windows Defender (Microsoft Security Essentials) installed. I'll try disabling it.
The SSD has 60GB left of 120GB total, so I can't imagine that's a problem. The pagefile is managed by Windows, which sets it to 75% of physical RAM (6GB of 8GB). But memory usage has never exceeded 30%; would it even be using the pagefile at that point?
Also, after reading this thread I've tried disabling Superfetch. I really doubt this is the issue, but... I'm running out of things to try. I left Superfetch enabled when I used this drive in my prior installations of Windows 7 and 8 (which, again, ran fine for three years, so I doubt it's the drive). So far it hasn't crashed, but it's only been three hours.