Computer Randomly Freezing

pilotpine · March 8, 2021

I am stumped and am in need of some advice. Apologies for the rambling backstory.

Looking back the weirdness started probably a few weeks ago. Upon starting up my desktop I noticed my icons were all out of order and somewhat jumbled up. After dragging one to a new location they snapped to normal and I decided to ignore it. (This still happens every start-up). A few days went by and while watching a live stream I encountered my first freeze. No BSOD, cursor still moving, file explorer working. I opened task manager to kill chrome and nothing happened. After closing task manager to retry I was left with the ghost of the 'task manager' dialogue box on my desktop. (I like to right click the task bar and select task manager). Completely unable to reopen task manager and the rest of my computer beginning to lock up I decided to restart. After opening the start menu and clicking on restart, my computer refused to restart. I was able to open and close the start menu and click shutdown, restart and sleep to my hearts content and nothing. After hard restarting, I went several more days issue free. By this time Nvidia released a new driver which I downloaded and installed. I figured it was a fluke and maybe this new driver would confirm that a video driver was not the issue, and low and behold the issue persists. The next freeze was while browsing the internet with Spotify playing in the background. This time all the same things happened except my audio was stuck in a 1 second repeating loop and I was unable to close or kill Spotify in task manager. One hard restart later and I was freeze free for another week. I have had two more "incidents" exactly the same as the previous, all occurring completely at random, one while watching a video and the most recent while working on a PowerPoint and listening to Spotify. Same audio loop, unable to kill it, but was able to save my work right before PowerPoint froze up.

Upon restarting and moving one desktop icon to fix the 'jumble' I ran a memtest which came out clean. I plan on running a windows defender deep scan and a chckdsk tonight and will reply to this post with the results. I also run NZXT's new CAM software with an overclock and will be switching over to the old version to see if that has any effect. (Never has frozen while playing games which makes me think the overclock is not the problem, have also had the same overclock for ~2 years no problem).

Otherwise I am grasping at straws at this point. I am in need of thoughts and opinions.

Thanks

Chris Cook · March 10, 2021

@pilotpine When was the last time that you reinstalled your OS from a clean slate. I know it can be a pain in the butt to do. But it is something that recently done. I was having system crashed (BSOD and lockups) and my system is now running rock solid again with no issues.

pilotpine · March 12, 2021

On 3/10/2021 at 1:19 PM, Chris Cook said:

@pilotpine When was the last time that you reinstalled your OS from a clean slate. I know it can be a pain in the butt to do. But it is something that recently done. I was having system crashed (BSOD and lockups) and my system is now running rock solid again with no issues.

Technically I never have since I built the machine back in 2018. I did recently clone my C drive to a better SSD but I have had 3 months of flawless operation before this problem started. Probably not a bad plan, just really super don't want to...

Since the last post everything has come out clean and I have had no problems. Been running old NZXT cam and have removed some chrome plugins that may have been slightly dicey. (General PSA to those in the trenches for 30 series, probably auto refresh plugins are not safe.)