💻 TOTALLY unresponsive (no ⌨/🐁/screensaver,🕞frozen), DON'T want2restart (have ~30-50+ untitled/unsaved 📒/gimp/VLC open), how2kill🔥🦊& PCBuildSim?

[PianoPlayer88Key]

Okay, first off, I was going to post this in Discord's #tech-support section, cause I thought I'd get a faster response there than I would on the forums, but as I was typing it out, it was getting a bit too long for there.

 

Let me see if I can come up with a TLDR besides the one in the title, although a LOT of things will be left out:

 

My laptop is COMPLETELY frozen - no mouse, screensaver, keyboard activity, clock is frozen too.

Do NOT want to restart, as I have several dozen untitled projects open in various apps that don't properly support crash recovery.

Is there ANY way to kill the last 2 or 3 apps I had running (PC Building Simulator & FireFox, maybe also several Chrome processes) so I can get back to work on stuff, or at least save the aforementioned untitled things?
(For example ... connect remotely via my other PC, or maybe the graphics driver crashed & didn't restart, idk)

 

 

 

 

 

 

Hey .... so I got a little issue with my main PC (the laptop across the room, using my desktop right now - why is laptop main & not desktop, you ask? Laptop has 64GB RAM, desktop only 32GB, I do a lot of multitasking.)

 

Anyway ... I was doing stuff in PC Building Simulator (the free build section), and also had pcpartpicker & other sites open in Firefox to research various parts....

 

And ... the system suddenly became completely unresponsive.  Mouse cursor completely disappeared from the screen, keyboard doesn't respond (it won't even toggle the capslock light).
(Also I'll mention here, although I mentioned farther down: clock in taskbar/systray is frozen at 3:39 AM even though, as I'm typing this sentence, my desktop says it's 10:23:16 AM.)

It didn't blue screen or anything like that.  Fans are running just as normal (considering the load it was under), it has a static image on the screen from what I was last doing right before it stopped responding.  (In PCBS, I was browsing the cases in inventory, and in Firefox, I was using pcpartpicker (or google for ones that pcpp didn't have) to find how many drive bays the cases have.)

 

It's been sitting like this for probably a couple hours or so now, while I've been doing other things, waiting for it to hopefully finish up whatever caused it to have to take ALL possible resources (so I couldn't even have keyboard/mouse input) but it's still just sitting there.  (Also the screen saver / display power saving hasn't activated, normally that starts after like 10 or 30 minutes of inactivity or so, I forget exactly what I set it at.)

 

 

Laptop specs:

Clevo P750DM-G (bought December 2015, have upgraded a few parts since then)

CPU: Intel Core i7-6700K (yes, a laptop with an LGA1151 v1 socket)

RAM: 4x G.Skill Ripjaws 16GB DDR4-2133 CL15 SO-DIMM

OS drive: 1TB WD Blue 3D SATA 2.5" SSD

Storage: 1TB & 2TB Silicon Power P34A80 NVMe M.2 SSDs, 2TB Seagate Barracuda 120 SATA 2.5" SSD

GPU: Nvidia GeForce GTX 970M 6GB

Display: plugged into Asus VG289Q (28" 4K) ; internal = 15.6" 1920x1080 IPS G-Sync 60Hz

Keyboard: Logitech K360

Mouse: Logitech G602

OS: Windows 10, don't remember if it's 2004 or 20H2 and I can't access it to check for sure.

BIOS: stock, have never updated.  (I haven't been able to find updates anyway; one thing I've maybe wanted to do was put a higher core count, more efficient CPU in, but the i9-9900K, besides requiring special trickery to get working, is still using the same 14nm process the 6700K uses, so I don't think I'd get double the compute / multitasking performance (because double the cores, before factoring in faster clocks) in the same thermal envelope.)

Battery: OEM had died, replaced with one from Sager which actually seems to be working much better than the original did.  (The Sager battery still seems to have a lot of life left according to HWInfo64 last I checked, when it's now the same age that the OEM Clevo battery was almost dead - unplug it, and it died in like 20-30 seconds under heavier load (running Time Spy), or if under light load (office apps, web browser, etc), would drain to like 45% battery in like 30-45 minutes or so then shut off completely, no warning at all.)

Power brick is 230W Clevo, came with the laptop.

 

 

I'm not running any OC at all (was able to do 4.6 GHz with a test a few years ago, and with detailed finessing could do 1 or 2 runs at 4.7 but the Cinebench scores were identical like it hit a wall), the only thing I've touched was undervolting the CPU to -150 mV, and that hadn't given me any issues.  I had tested a while back (several months, or a year or two, I forget now) to see how far I could undervolt before it crashed in Cinebench / Prime95, and I *think* it was either -185 mV or -210 mV.  In either case, I would think -150 mV is fairly conservative, but is it possible that could have caused the issue?

 

 

 

 

I've included a photo and several screenshots.  First, the photo, taken with my phone (Pixel 3a, cause I can't screenshot a frozen PC) shows its current state.

 

 

Also I just noticed the clock is frozen at 3:39 AM, and according to this PC, it is now 8:35:39 AM as I'm typing that portion of this sentence.  (The frozen clock seems to be sapping my hope of possibly salvaging the session without a forced reboot. )  Update, while still composing this: it's now 10:16:18 AM according to my desktop PC's clock, and the laptop's clock is still frozen at 3:39 AM.

 

 

The screenshots, in reverse chronological order, are in the spoiler; maybe they too might give a little idea of the load the laptop has been subjected to.

 

 

Spoiler

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I believe the PC was last restarted around the time of the previous screenshot or two, although I'm not exactly sure when.  (Using the timeanddate.com calculator to calculate, from a few other screenshots, the clock time in systray minus uptime, gave me conflicting results of 11/22/2020 at 3:40 or 4:41 pm.)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I *REALLY* do NOT want to restart the PC (even though uptime is like 152 days, it's still way too soon, has not remotely approached the multi-year uptimes I've heard of on some servers/workstations), as I have probably a few dozen EACH of untitled (translation: unsaved, cause I didn't know what to name the files or where to put them) notepad, GIMP, VLC playlists, etc. projects open (apps that don't have proper crash recovery), as well as several incognito Chrome windows (no, not naughty stuff, just pcpartpicker; it's just that newegg won't work properly in normal windows but does work in incognito, and I have other stuff going in FF)

 

What can I do, WITHOUT rebooting, to regain access to the PC, and at least kill PC Building Simulator?  (I'd also be okay with killing Firefox, and several Chrome processes, as long as I don't close Chrome's incognito windows.  Don't remember if I have any private Firefox windows open right now.)

 

One thing I thought of was ... maybe I could somehow remotely access the laptop from my desktop .... but ... idk how to figure out the desktop's IP address.  ("arp -a" in cmd does give me a list of IPs on the LAN, but doesn't say what devices they are.)  (And of course, since it's my own PC, I have the admin login credentials.)  One issue though is that I never set up any kind of remote access or anything.

 

Also another thing that came to mind, if possible, would be somehow restarting the graphics driver ... I wonder if there's a possibility of that or something like it being the culprit?

(Opening the laptop lid doesn't turn the laptop screen on though, whereas normally it would.  Primary display right now is the external Asus VG289Q I mentioned earlier.)

 

 

Also this issue (and similar ones like it that I've had in the past, for example has anyone ever had a PC that had its internal speaker start chattering at them whenever they try typing, or move the mouse, when it's frozen like that, like I have?) got me thinking of something I'd like implemented on my next PC....  if I have enough CPU cores, RAM, etc .....
Have 1 core/thread (or maybe 2, especially if it's "little" cores) that are *ALWAYS* reserved for administrative / troubleshooting tasks.
That way, even if the system becomes COMPLETELY unresponsive like that, I could still go into task manager and kill the offending process, or better yet, reverse actions to before it started acting up, then take a different course of action (and if possible, implement a block on the action that caused the issue "you are not allowed to do this now, it caused a system crash which was rolled back" or something like that).

Also with my next PC, I'll want to be able to do updates WITHOUT having to restart applications or the entire PC, unlike my current one which requires me to close, update, and restart.

 

Whenever I have to reboot, it completely effs with my workflow, takes forever (like days or weeks sometimes) to get things back open anywhere close to the way I had them, and even then I can't ever perfectly resume where I left off (to say nothing of restoring my undo/redo history, etc).

 

 

[emosun]

you may want to add a tldr to this

[Levent]

I had assignments shorter than this in my final semester in university. Can we get a TLDR version? otherwise I wouldnt expect to get much help.

[PiberiusWilde]

NGL! You lost me in the title... So colorful LOL!!!

[Kanna]

I thought this was a advertising bot when I saw the title and the huge amount of text, please add a TLDR

[IkeaGnome]

9 minutes ago, PianoPlayer88Key said:

RAM: 4x G.Skill Ripjaws 16GB DDR4-2133 CL15 SO-DIMM

This is why it's slow and unresponsive. You have WAY too many things open for 16 GB of RAM.

 

Edit:

Also, can we get a title change. First notification and I'm annoyed with how long it is.

[PianoPlayer88Key]

7 minutes ago, Levent said:

I had assignments shorter than this in my final semester in university. Can we get a TLDR version? otherwise I wouldnt expect to get much help.

 

5 minutes ago, Kanna said:

I thought this was a advertising bot when I saw the title and the huge amount of text, please add a TLDR

I wish I could, although a stickied topic did say not to leave details out.
Closest thing I could come up with to a TLDR is bolding / underlining some text in the post.

 

 

Also I'm remembering another thing I left out....

"(Also what's your typical motus operandi for where to save files that you don't know what to name them or where to put them?  Often in my case I have multiple different things in the same document / GIMP project / VLC playlist.))"

 

6 minutes ago, PiberiusWilde said:

NGL! You lost me in the title... So colorful LOL!!!

About the title ... I had to use some emojis, and still ran out of room.

 

 

 

 

4 minutes ago, IkeaGnome said:

This is why it's slow and unresponsive. You have WAY too many things open for 16 GB of RAM.

 

 

Edit:

Also, can we get a title change. First notification and I'm annoyed with how long it is.

 

You read the RAM wrong: it's 4x 16 GB (total 64 GB).
Also I was trying to put a TLDR in the title.  (I didn't think "help my computer froze" would be very informative, without saying what happened.)

 

 

 

[Kanna]

1 minute ago, PianoPlayer88Key said:

I wish I could, although a stickied topic did say not to leave details out.
Closest thing I could come up with to a TLDR is bolding / underlining some text in the post.

I don't think you get what a TLDR means in it's full you won't replace the post just add it at the bottom or top of it

TLDR : add short info on bottom or top

[PianoPlayer88Key]

2 minutes ago, Kanna said:

I don't think you get what a TLDR means in it's full you won't replace the post just add it at the bottom or top of it

TLDR : add short info on bottom or top

Ahh, well I tried to put a few sentences of TLDR near the top, although I'm afraid that if that's the ONLY thing people read, they'll miss out on some crucial info that would completely change the answer they give.

[IkeaGnome]

19 minutes ago, PianoPlayer88Key said:

What can I do, WITHOUT rebooting, to regain access to the PC, and at least kill PC Building Simulator?  (I'd also be okay with killing Firefox, and several Chrome processes, as long as I don't close Chrome's incognito windows.  Don't remember if I have any private Firefox windows open right now.)

I don't think there's much you're going to be able to do without rebooting. 

If I were you, I'd look at optimizing workflow and doing regular restarts/killing background tasks periodically. 

[PianoPlayer88Key]

10 minutes ago, IkeaGnome said:

I don't think there's much you're going to be able to do without rebooting. 

If I were you, I'd look at optimizing workflow and doing regular restarts/killing background tasks periodically. 

Yeah, I'm kind-of afraid of that.   If I end up rebooting, I wonder if there's a way to see what might have caused the issue?  Maybe some windows admin event log might say something around 3:39 am?

 

And I'd like to learn how to better optimize workflow.  One problem I have is not knowing what to save some files as, or where to save them, as there's often many unrelated projects open in the same GIMP project, notepad document, etc.  (Then I might forget something's open somewhere, and open another file with the same thing ... happens with my web browser too, I've actually had my IP blocked in the past from pcpartpicker once or twice cause of trying to restart the browser and it loading like a thousand tabs all at once, they didn't like that.)

 

I'd like my next system (tentatively 11-25-2022, maybe later) to 1 - be better at not needing to close apps to to program / OS updates, 2 - be able to have a little bit of reserved resources so that even with a complete freeze, I can still open admin tools like task manager & kill / undo, 3 - in case of a big crash, be able to actually recover from it, including everything I had open, regardless of what OS I happened to be running.  (Bonus points for being able to hot-unplug my boot drive from one PC and plug it into a different PC, and resume work there.)

 

Also to me "regular restarts" would still mean I'd have the uptime that some server / linux admins brag about ... like ... multiple years. (I heard of one that was up for a bit over 24 years, that might be a bit hard to top though; for one thing I'm not aware atm if there's even any servers that have hot-swappable CPUs and RAM or hot-swappable motherboards. I've heard of hot-swappable PSUs, PCIe slots, storage though.)

[IkeaGnome]

7 minutes ago, PianoPlayer88Key said:

Maybe some windows admin event log might say something around 3:39 am?

That's where I'd start. 

7 minutes ago, PianoPlayer88Key said:

And I'd like to learn how to better optimize workflow.  One problem I have is not knowing what to save some files as, or where to save them, as there's often many unrelated projects open in the same GIMP project, notepad document, etc.  (Then I might forget something's open somewhere, and open another file with the same thing ... happens with my web browser too, I've actually had my IP blocked in the past from pcpartpicker once or twice cause of trying to restart the browser and it loading like a thousand tabs all at once, they didn't like that.)

With you working around GIMP projects, I'm assuming you have clients. What if you had separate folders. "Client 1", "Client 2", then folders in that Client 1 Folder. "Project 1". Each project folder could have it's own notepad document. Instead of leaving tabs open, cut the link from the browser, throw it in the notepad. "C1P1 Bookmarks", "C2P1 Bookmarks" etc.

[PianoPlayer88Key]

14 minutes ago, IkeaGnome said:

That's where I'd start. 

With you working around GIMP projects, I'm assuming you have clients. What if you had separate folders. "Client 1", "Client 2", then folders in that Client 1 Folder. "Project 1". Each project folder could have it's own notepad document. Instead of leaving tabs open, cut the link from the browser, throw it in the notepad. "C1P1 Bookmarks", "C2P1 Bookmarks" etc.

Actually no clients, they're all personal projects.  But thanks for the tips.  (Now if I could wrap my brain around stuff ... maybe that too is a sign that I'm stretching myself too thin, as well as having too many things going at once, not just on the computer but projects at home; also doesn't help that i'm a multi-decades packrat, I'm trying to break myself of that but it's not as easy as running Cyberpunk 2077 at max settings on one of these:   ....)