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Random, Temporary Application/Explorer Hangs.
JamesKeenan
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
I'm getting random, temporary application hangs.
Random as in, "Some days I'll be fine, but some other days (like today), my computer applications will freeze up every few seconds for a random amount of time, mostly 20 seconds."
For instance, Firefox will freeze every 5 seconds for around 20 seconds. And it seems to have a domino effect on other applications. Task manager rarely freeze itself, or the Resource Monitor. If I have music playing, the playing will stop and start at different intervals than the other freezing applications. Start-up and shut-down processes often take longer. I got a "disc read error" once and only once today also, for the first time, upon start-up. I restarted and CHKDSK ran randomly, also for the first time. Computer ran fin for about an hour after that, and then more issues. One time I tried to restart and Vista said it was waiting for Explorer.exe to respond before it could shut down.
It may have started around the time I began playing Epic Mafia. But I don't know if it's related. It wouldn't be the site causing the problem, but it may help diagnose what is causing my computer to go belly up so often. Comp never outright crashes, it just... It catches every now and then, like, inverse hiccups.
It never happens while playing a game, only with, say, Firefox being open. I'm thinking it may be just Firefox, so I may try a reinstall, but would a web browser really affect other applications, and start-up shutdown times? Or is Firefox just a main catalyst to a larger issue?
Watching the Vista Resource Monitor, I never see any application get more than 6 hard faults/minute in memory. Disk will be completely inactive during these hangs, and then solid green as it catches up again, and then the comp will almost immediately freeze again, and again nothing in Disk. CPU spikes widely and then only sometimes goes completely dead, to 0% during hangs.
I have no idea what to do. It is mind wracking that things can occur randomly.
It's like I throw you a ball. 90% of the time the ball follows a predictable pattern right into your hands.
But one out of every ten times I throw you the ball and it turns into a Werebat and dives into the sky, going the opposite direction.
[edit]: May the Search Indexer be the culprit? I've found a description of problems it causes.
Basically, "Users experience severe slowdowns every few days as Search Indexer indexes files for the user."
Sounds about right, but would that problem really persist through multiple restarts?
Random as in, "Some days I'll be fine, but some other days (like today), my computer applications will freeze up every few seconds for a random amount of time, mostly 20 seconds."
For instance, Firefox will freeze every 5 seconds for around 20 seconds. And it seems to have a domino effect on other applications. Task manager rarely freeze itself, or the Resource Monitor. If I have music playing, the playing will stop and start at different intervals than the other freezing applications. Start-up and shut-down processes often take longer. I got a "disc read error" once and only once today also, for the first time, upon start-up. I restarted and CHKDSK ran randomly, also for the first time. Computer ran fin for about an hour after that, and then more issues. One time I tried to restart and Vista said it was waiting for Explorer.exe to respond before it could shut down.
It may have started around the time I began playing Epic Mafia. But I don't know if it's related. It wouldn't be the site causing the problem, but it may help diagnose what is causing my computer to go belly up so often. Comp never outright crashes, it just... It catches every now and then, like, inverse hiccups.
It never happens while playing a game, only with, say, Firefox being open. I'm thinking it may be just Firefox, so I may try a reinstall, but would a web browser really affect other applications, and start-up shutdown times? Or is Firefox just a main catalyst to a larger issue?
Watching the Vista Resource Monitor, I never see any application get more than 6 hard faults/minute in memory. Disk will be completely inactive during these hangs, and then solid green as it catches up again, and then the comp will almost immediately freeze again, and again nothing in Disk. CPU spikes widely and then only sometimes goes completely dead, to 0% during hangs.
I have no idea what to do. It is mind wracking that things can occur randomly.
It's like I throw you a ball. 90% of the time the ball follows a predictable pattern right into your hands.
But one out of every ten times I throw you the ball and it turns into a Werebat and dives into the sky, going the opposite direction.
[edit]: May the Search Indexer be the culprit? I've found a description of problems it causes.
Basically, "Users experience severe slowdowns every few days as Search Indexer indexes files for the user."
Sounds about right, but would that problem really persist through multiple restarts?
JamesKeenan on
0
Posts
Definitely this. Your programs are trying to access the virtual memory paging file, and your hard drive is taking forever to find it, hence the freeze.
I'd suggest backing up your stuff, right now.
Anyhow, I disabled Indexing, and I ran Western Digital's diagnostic tool and my harddrive passed, so...
We'll see.
Empire had been crashing on its own not affecting anything else.
This time it crashed and wasn't going anywhere. So I rebooted my computer.
DISK READ ERROR
PRESS CTRL+ALT+DEL TO RESTART
O_O
Fuck!
That was the second one.
So I hit ctrl+alt+del and waited.
And waited.
And waited.
Nothing, black screen. So I hit the power button and the computer turned off immediately. Turned it back on. "WINDOWS FAILED TO START."
No shit. So I selected "last known good configuration."
Nothing. For 5 minutes. So I rebooted again.
DISC READ ERROR
Repeat the exact steps as above. So I finally inserted my Windows disc and hit repair. Usually it gives me options as what to do, but this time it jumped right into Start-up repair because "Your Computer Was Unable To Start, Detecting Errors".
It found errors! Yay!
It was unable to fix them. They were "external," "unknown" errors.
So I tried to restore my PC to another time. No restore points. :x
So I did memory diagnostic and nothing. And when the memory diag was finished, my computer tried to start again.
Nothing.
So I unhooked my PC, took out my harddrive and just stared at it, angrily.
I didn't do anything to it because I didn't know what to do!
So I just put it back in, and turned on my computer again. I didn't expect anything to happen, I was just out of ideas.
And it turned on. And that was 5 minutes ago.
Why?! Why the hell did that work? temporarily, I'm sure
That shouldn't have worked. I had turned off my computer entirely before.
And problem that persisted through a powering down should not have been temporarily rectified just because I fucking unhooked the drive and put it back in.
COMPUTERS MAKE NO GODDAMN SENSE
Passed again.
So it's either not the hard drive, or the test is just missing the problem.
I've also seen a computer where the HDD just didn't initialize in time to be detected by the system when it was set to quick POST. Disabling quick POST helped that, but it wouldn't help if the system was slowing down like you described.
You could also try running memtest86 to test the RAM, but it takes a while. A bad stick of ram could cause some funky things.
Another thing, Is this HDD SATA or PATA? If it's PATA and you have another drive of some sort on the same channel, that other drive failing could mess with your HDD.