Windows Vista 64bit Freezing

[Kougar]

Alright, usually I don't make posts asking for help, but as y'all are pretty good guys and mostly all seem to be pro Vista, I could use a bit of help.

I just installed Vista 64bit Ultimate onto the rig in my sig. All motherboard drivers, OS patches, and BIOS are updated and set specifically for 64bit.

The issue with every hour (or 2 hours?) or so the system freezes for 3 seconds, then comes back as if nothing ever happened. It is like someone pressed the pause button, then unpauses it. If I have any sounds playing the sound locks in a repeating loop, but resumes where it left off after the system comes back.

I looked at the BIOS, played with the overclock, reinstalled the mainboard drivers, made sure the latest RAID drivers were installed, made sure the OS was fully updated, checked everything I could in the Event Logs (nothing there to show this is occuring), and basically googling for this doesn't get me anywhere for obvious reasons. Anyone have any ideas before I get ticked off at Vista again? Vista32bit and XP both never did this.

It would be nice if MS could design an OS that simply freaking worked for a change, I have had some unique, absurd problem every single Vista install that I have to solve, and it is always something new...

Edit: I should better add this IS an SP1 install, in fact this was an SP1 install out of the box. I found another user describing this exact problem a year ago. Someone said it was a DNS issue so just to rule that out I configured the DNS servers I use manually, and that did nothing but I wanted to rule it out.

 

[b1lk1]

Try keeping a task manager window open or the CPU meter going and see what the CPU is doing when this happens. If it pegs 100% at the start of the freeze then there is something running full tilt that should not be. Sounds like some sort of incompatibility, but I have never had any issues with 64-Bit Vista. I want to blame the RAID, but that is just a pure hunch. Search the installed programs and such and make sure nothing bad installed itself. Also, run a virus scan and such just to rule that out. Sorry to hear the issue. I myself have never had a 32-bit install of Vista work worth a shit while 64-Bit has always been flawless and painless.

 

[Merlin]

Could it be the GTX260 over heating.
Mine did that untill I added another fan at the GPU ( GTX280 )

Merlin

 

[Rob Williams]

I hate these problems, because it could really be anything. The first thing I'd blame would be the memory, so I'd scan that just to make sure it's a-ok. Not that memory should just go bad, but it does happen from time to time, and it could be just a small portion of one of the RAM sticks that's affected.

I am not sure if it's all a coincidence or not, but I have found the 32-bit Vista to be more lenient when it comes to overclocks. For the heck of it, you might just want to go back to stock settings for a day or two and see if the problem persists. If it does, then at least the overclock/RAM combination can be ruled out entirely.

I'll have to ponder more solutions... this is a tough one.

 

[b1lk1]

Again for me, I have found 64-bit Vista to be far better in handling ANYTHING I throw at it. I even changed my motherboard last week without a fresh install and it is running as good as ever. In fact, my CPU is overclocking better now than before.

Memory is a good possibility. I will say you will have your hands full diagnosing this properly.

 

[Kougar]

Okay, those are good ideas. I've already been monitoring Task Manager though, the only programs I notice are those I usually run, Folding@home GPU and SMP clients. Opera seems to constantly use 1-8% of the CPU for whatever odd reason, but the issue occurs even with the GPU2 client and Opera closed while I'm in a game.

I have McAfee Enterprise (no-nonsense console program), Ad-aware, and Spybot along with Windows Defender, nothing could find anything.

As for overheating, that WAS a major issue when I first built the system as the stock GPU cooler didn't work properly, the GPU got to 104c just scanning it for artifacts. Now that I use the Fuzion block+unisink the GPU usually sticks to 59c despite the 650/1400 overclock, CPU sticks to roughly ~45c. GPU PCB temp is 42.5c, I have the unisink + a fan below it, and a fan above pointed at the NB+RAM.

I am not sure if it's all a coincidence or not, but I have found the 32-bit Vista to be more lenient when it comes to overclocks. For the heck of it, you might just want to go back to stock settings for a day or two and see if the problem persists. If it does, then at least the overclock/RAM combination can be ruled out entirely.

I'll have to ponder more solutions... this is a tough one.

That's a very valid point. I saw Anandtech test this theory out, and it is quite true. With 64bit OS's the CPU must use all 64 bit registers, so nothing is left idle verses 32bit systems. Difference was only roughly 100MHz though by their opinion. I kicked the CPU voltage to 1.34v, didn't seem to do anything. RAM is actually operating at exact stock specs and voltage, but I'll give that a scan to rule it out.

The only odd thing I noticed was that the board is using a tRD of 7 now... it used to always run at 6. No idea why, and trying to force the board to run at tRD of 6 just results in no OS loading.

I'm running out of things to test, I was going to check out the IRQ settings, although there is no reason it should be that because I disabled half of the motherboard anyway in the BIOS. Don't need hardware 1394, serial, parallel ports or the onboard audio chip, etc. Oh, and I will try swapping one of the SATA drive cables that is SATA 1 spec and cross my fingers...

 

[Merlin]

I was interested in the folding@home aspect, could it be that that is eating up CPU usage?

Just a thought
Merlin

 

[Kougar]

I've been gone for a day, but as I was typing this up the machine froze again, so I guess I got my answer and the SATA cable wasn't it either.

Memory tested fine, IRQ settings in the BIOS were pretty much useless though, doesn't tell you what IRQ is assigned to anything.

I was interested in the folding@home aspect, could it be that that is eating up CPU usage?

Just a thought
Merlin

It is designed to use 100% of the CPU. My system is run at 100% CPU / GPU load 24/7. It's not causing the freezes though. I run the F@H programs in the background because I never notice them, or can shut them off if I need the absolute best performance.

 

[Kougar]

Well, the freezing occurs every couple hours. Finally caught it twice with Task Manger visible in the background, however no processes were visible that would explain the issue.

To be logical this points to a hardware issue or a kernel issue, so I killed the GPU overclock. No joy.

I found a new program that appears to give Prime 95 the boot, but even that tells me the CPU is fine. I've run this overclock for almost a year, so there is no way it can be that anyway.

I also had Intel's Matrix Storage Manager program re-verify data integrity on the RAID array, zero issues found.

That leaves me with the Vista 64bit OS or kernel... which is the only thing I have changed between when I was running XP SP3 which did not exhibit this problem.

 

[Rory Buszka]

Three seconds...sounds like about the time it takes for a hard drive to spin up.

Do you have hard drive spin-down enabled in your power settings?

You mentioned that you have a RAID array. What other storage devices are built into your PC? I'm not sure if Windows spins down individual volumes based on their inactivity, or spins them all down together, but who knows? It may be some Vista issue, combined with your particular storage complement.

Have you checked the Microsoft Support Knowledge Base for articles under the Vista 64 category that match the search terms "Stops Responding"?

 

[Kougar]

Okay, brief update before I respond to Rory's post.

I forgot about Checkdisk, spent 4+ hours letting it check every single drive and do it's thing. It didn't find much. I almost wish I hadn't. After doing so now the freezing sometimes repeats, 3-4 seconds, then the system freezes again after 1 second before resuming normalcy.

On a theory I reorganized the drive arrangement, RAID 0 drives got slots #1, 2, old XP drive and what is left of the Vista 32bit install got slots 3 and 4, and the SATA burner got slot 5. All of my drives in this PC are Seagate 320GB 7200.10 drives, ALL are jumpered to the same SATA 3.0 Gb/s setting, and all now use identical latching cables rated for 3.0 Gb/s. Didn't make a difference.

I once used a RAID 10 config with these exact drives using Vista 32bit using the same jumper config, didn't have any sort of problem like this.

I've also been able to verify the issue occurs without any of my usual programs running, rules them out completely.

-----

Rory... brilliant idea! The first thing I do with Vista is set the power profile to "High performance", but I completely forgot that it does not change the HDD power down setting. I set the HDD spin down setting to 2 years since it lacks an disabled option. Will see if this works!

The thing is... the main RAID 0 drives are in near constant use (such as in the middle of a game, DLing a torrent, logfile+checkpoint writes for F@H, etc) so I have no idea why it would be spinning down the drives. The other two are however almost never used, so maybe that has something to do with it...?

Not to cut down your second idea any, but I'm afraid searching for "stops responding " on their site is akin to searching for "Vista freezing" in Google. Could spend an eon sorting results and trying different search words... But yes I've tried the obvious ones I could thing of, but honestly it would take me less time to reinstall Vista 64bit than hammer away at all those results. Or give Vista the middle finger and boot back to the XP SP3 drive.

I am crossing my fingers that the drive power down setting was it. I was down to my last idea of juicing up the NB voltage and seeing if that did anything since it is overclocked + RAID'd, but if that was honestly the issue I think the system would be unstable... was completely out of ideas.

 

[Rob Williams]

Wow, I don't envy the hassle you are dealing with. Those are some intense issues man, and really not needed. I guess what you could do, if you really felt like wasting time, would be to install 32-bit Vista on a separate partition, use it for an hour or two and see if the halting continues.

I do admit that's a last-resort though, and I feel ridiculous for even recommending it.

Hope you can get this sorted out... I'm about out of ideas (or perhaps I am).

 

[Kougar]

Well, I debated holding off posting but I figured if it doesn't freeze shortly after I post (just to make me eat my words) then it probably did actually work.

Rory, I think that was exactly the problem. All of this hassle and grief because Vista was spinning down one or two rarely used drives and it somehow affected all of them including the RAID 0 array, halting the system while it synced everything back up. The problem often occured only after 2-4 hours, occasionally it would occur back to back within just a few minutes, no rhyme or reason.

When I was using a RAID 10 Vista install one of the first things I did when configuring the system was change the spindown value, so that might be why I never ran into this issue before. It simply never crossed my mind and I'd forgotten to change it like usual. I wonder what part of the "High Performance" setting involves spinning down hard drives after 20 minutes?

I did have the system freeze during a TF2 game, but figured out that was due to Windows Update being it's usual helpful, disruptive self. It's major setting flaws like these that turned me negative towards Vista, but at least it's working now.

Rory, I owe your a cold one (or something). :techgage:

 

[Rob Williams]

Has it been keeping up? So it was for sure the power saving scheme that was causing the issues?

If so, then wow. How didn't that effect you with the 32-bit version though? I'm confused about that part, since I'm sure you didn't touch the power scheme there (who would ever think to, except on a notebook?).

 

[Kougar]

Nope, Rory found the cause of the freezing! It has not occured again.

There's some fruity issue with the spindown, even though it wasn't affecting the RAID 0 array directly (as that was in constant use). I guess that after spinning down the other drives Vista would hang the entire system while it spun them back up, even though there was no reason to affect the RAID 0 array. I can't hear the drives anymore so didn't have that clue.

I mentioned it (somewhere) in one of my posts. When I had the RAID 10 array I remembered to modify the advanced power settings, as opposed to this time when I set the High Performance profile but I forgot to go in and change the drive spindown time. I remember how XP's power schemes affected system performance and processor speed, so usually power profiles is the first thing I modify on a new install.