dpc watchdog violation

[Kobi Reese Jr]

need fast help. every 10 minutes my computer freezes for 2 minutes then the blue screen comes up and says there are errors we will fix and restart your computer, and dpc watchdog violation is in small font under it. after it restarts it does the same thing within 10 minutes of restarting. this is really bugging me. i have an HP Envy 360 touchsmart laptop. just got it like less than 2 months ago. someone please help me!!!

 

[johnbl]

-a watchdog error indicates that a driver/hardware took too long to respond.

It can be caused by several issues so I would start by going to your motherboard vendor site and update the various drivers for your mother board.
Also, if you have a solid state drive be sure you check for firmware updates. lots of the older drives have firmware bugs where the drive ends up getting behind on it internal cleanup calls and makes the device take too long to respond to windows.
In this case, you would want to clean up your hard drive by deleting the internet cache files, old memory dumps and programs you don't use.
and make sure you have plenty of free space on the drive (20% should be fine) empty the recycle bin, and reboot and go into BIOS and let the machine go idle over night. After 5 mins the Solid state drive will start its internal clean up routines. They will run much faster if the files are not in use by windows, or the windows does not tell the system to put the drive to sleep after 20 mins.

anyway, do that and if there is a firmware update apply it after the drive has completed its cleanup (sat full power in BIOS for a few hours)

-There are other conditions that will also cause the same error, UBS devices tend to cause a lot of the problems. The driver hangs during the install, while some software is running waiting for the driver install to complete. These take more effort to fix, generally you have to do a BIOS update, then a chipset driver update, and maybe a USB 3.0 chipset driver update. Then a update for the usb device driver for the USB device that failed to install correctly.
(most often caused by a certain brand of USB wireless ethernet devices)

 

[SerioSound]

First, all the info already offered is valid. The Watch Dog Timer function goes back to the earliest days of microprocessors (including the 8080, 8086 and even the 4 bit versions) and even earlier when processing cores were designed with ASM and gate level components. I know, I was one of those designing and developing computing and sequencing circuits before uPs even existed.

I just recently had a similar problem to the one described here in my stepson's Toshiba Satellite running Win 8.1 Pro 64. The main difference was that his laptop was freezing up and giving the same error message within a few minutes of signing on. What I discovered was that he had recently installed a key logger application. I don't recall which one but it was the cause of the problem. My best guess is that it was interfering with the system's ability to handshake with the keyboard and that is what caused the watch dog timer error to occur.

Funny thing . . . the key logger would not uninstall so I went to restore the machine to a point just prior to that application being installed. I used the Win 8.1 install DVD to boot from and when the restore operation reached its end I got an error message stating the restore was not completed due to an antivirus program. The machine runs the full AVG suite.

I disabled the regular AV function and tried again only to end up wit the same result. So, I disabled the AVG firewall as well and gave it another try - sure enough, the same result. I ended up having to turn off every feature of the AVG suite including the net protection and email scanner. Every AVG suite function was turned off and I once again started the restore operation after booting from the install disk. Viola! That time the restore completed successfully. Upon booting again from the C:/ drive I found that the AVG suite was back to full functionality and the key logger program was no longer present.

I don't know if any of this helps anyone else who ever has a problem with restoring to an earlier date/time but thought I would mention it as it was the first time I ever saw a restore fail due to an AV program.

If any of you think this info should be placed elsewhere then by all means please do copy and paste it where ever you think it may be helpful.

~ Mike Serio, Serious Sound Studios and Productions