freezing and audio loop

[two waltz]

Hey

so recently (last night) i updated to the 20H2 windows 10 version from my previous 1909. Today, when i run my pc, i have had 3 different occasions (in game, watching twitch and idle on discord) where i had a weird freeze and audio loop. This forced me to force shut down my pc. are there anyways to fix this?

Specs: Ryzen 5 2600, MSI Radeon 570, asrock b450 steel legend, corsair vengeance rgb pro and corsair cxm750m

OS Build: 19042.867

Any help would be greatly appreciated

[SupaKomputa]

update / reinstall all drivers.

Ryzen chipset drivers, Radeon & Realtek hd drivers.

[Nathanpete]

A freeze and audio loop like that usually occurs when something audio-related has crashed. Either the driver or a piece of software. I am going to guess software because a driver crash would lead to a BSOD (speaking from experience, had an XP laptop bluescreen on me while watching YT like 7 years ago. It was late at night, and during the bluescreen it played the last like .5 seconds of the yt video on repeat for around 15 seconds, at max volume. Was wearing earbuds, and it really stung)

 

And by software I mean like a windows service that handles audio inside W10. And when a necessary service like that crashes, it either eats up all the CPU cycles trying to restart, but just can't for whatever reason, which then causes the computer to lock up and freeze, or it blue screens. I think you got the former. 

 

Just a theory, I know very little about Window's background processes, much less about audio. 

 

Did you say this has happened at three different times? If so, I would do like @SupaKomputasaid and uninstall, and reinstall all of the ryzen, chipset, radeon, and audio drivers. And if that doesn't work, go back to a former restore point if you had one from before the update. Or you can go into advanced repair options by pressing shift+restart in the start menu, and uninstall windows updates. This last part only works if you updated to 20H2 less than I think a week ago. 

[two waltz]

1 hour ago, SupaKomputa said:

update / reinstall all drivers.

Ryzen chipset drivers, Radeon & Realtek hd drivers.

 

1 hour ago, Nathanpete said:

A freeze and audio loop like that usually occurs when something audio-related has crashed. Either the driver or a piece of software. I am going to guess software because a driver crash would lead to a BSOD (speaking from experience, had an XP laptop bluescreen on me while watching YT like 7 years ago. It was late at night, and during the bluescreen it played the last like .5 seconds of the yt video on repeat for around 15 seconds, at max volume. Was wearing earbuds, and it really stung)

 

And by software I mean like a windows service that handles audio inside W10. And when a necessary service like that crashes, it either eats up all the CPU cycles trying to restart, but just can't for whatever reason, which then causes the computer to lock up and freeze, or it blue screens. I think you got the former. 

 

Just a theory, I know very little about Window's background processes, much less about audio. 

 

Did you say this has happened at three different times? If so, I would do like @SupaKomputasaid and uninstall, and reinstall all of the ryzen, chipset, radeon, and audio drivers. And if that doesn't work, go back to a former restore point if you had one from before the update. Or you can go into advanced repair options by pressing shift+restart in the start menu, and uninstall windows updates. This last part only works if you updated to 20H2 less than I think a week ago. 

Just a quick question. Would the night light filter on windows be the problem to this? Yesterday I ran my computer without night light on and no crashes happened. While today, like 4 hours into being on with night light I crashed. I will also try your methods later on tonight, i will edit back when i do it. Thanks!

[SupaKomputa]

I don't think it would, it only reduce the amount of blue color in the output. Nothing processing intensive.

[Nathanpete]

20 hours ago, swagswag said:

Just a quick question. Would the night light filter on windows be the problem to this? Yesterday I ran my computer without night light on and no crashes happened. While today, like 4 hours into being on with night light I crashed. I will also try your methods later on tonight, i will edit back when i do it. Thanks!

Absolutely not, trust me, 99.9% of BSOD's and freezes like this occur because something in the background that you probably didn't even know existed unless you are a W10 dev failed. Or it could freeze if something happened in the CPU, such as a freak measurement reading (flipped bit sometimes), sudden overheat that the motherboard failed to handle, or a windows scheduler (not Task Scheduler, but the piece of software in Windows that controls how the CPUs divides up processor cycles) error where a program was using so much of the CPU that it choked out some other process that was time sensitive. 

 

Fun fact: never, never, EVER set any sort of CPU intensive program (such as handbrake, blender, or cinebench all core) to Realtime priority in Task Manager -> Details -> Right click -> Set priority. It will cause your computer to immediately freeze, and possibly bluescreen if the program isn't bottlenecked by something else such as bandwidth. In fact, if you are planning to use the computer in any capacity, I actually recommend that you turn down the priority to below normal.

 

The scheduler places a program's instructions in a queue for each thread, and if the program is CPU intensive, but single threaded, such as Cinebench 1T or Euro Truck Simulator 2 on mobile CPUs (from personal experience), then it will have an entire thread's queue completed, then give a program basically exclusivity to that thread, of course, if a program only needs 80% of a single thread, windows has the option to populate the other 20% with the instructions of other programs. But programs like HandBrake transcoding are perfectly multi-threaded and will use up 99-100% of all remaining CPU cycles. But by setting the priority to realtime, what windows does is ignore almost all other programs and places any instruction requests from handbrake to next in queue. They basically are a line skipper. So if you give Handbrake realtime priority while you have Spotify playing, then your internet connection, audio, and video will freeze and your computer will fail to update the screen at all.