HELP with computer freezes!

[Sigleaf]

My computer over the past 8 months or so will randomly lock up during just about anything. The lock-ups are different sometimes but I do not ever get a blue screen. Usually I will be playing a game and my screen will freeze and my speakers will emit a screech until I force a restart on my computer. Other times I will have a freeze and blotches show up on my screen. There are other times where I freeze just idleing on the desktop! I have tried several things thus far such as:

Reformatted several times switching between both Vista and Windows 7 (problem started when I had windows 7 installed, originally had vista on computer) but still got freezes with both.

Swapped out my videocard with a cheapo one and still got same freezes

Ran Memtest and everything came up normal

Monitored CPU/Vid card temps and nothing ever got over 70 C


My home built Computer Specs are as follows:

CPU: AMD Phenom II X4 955
Video: XFX Raedon 4800 Series
Ram: 2 2GB sticks of pretty decent DDR3 ram forgot name exactly.

Also to note is that my sound card is built into motherboard.

I have kept up to date on all drivers from both the ASUS motherboard website which sucks btw, and also windows update.


Also, this problem happens with all games, not just a few.


If ANYONE can give me some ideas of what to try next please give me some wisdom. Also, if you need more information just let me know and thanks for your time!

 

[Saga Lout]

That screech seems to indicate sound is ahead of the graphics so it's graphics that's
running slow. Press your Windows key and R together then into the open box, type dxdiag and press Enter. Run all the tests and see what shows up.

 

[Sigleaf]

Ran the dxdiag and no problems were detected on any of the tabs.

 

[flaminggerbil]

Have you tried switching sound drivers or have you stuck with the latest ones?

If it's not a driver issue I'd be tempted to say you've got a buggered motherboard.

Also on the off chance it says something useful, had a look in event viewer? Also action center in Win7 occasionally has things which dont appear in event viewer, such as certain hardware failures.

 

[JackNaylorPE]

What does Event Viewer say happened at the time of the freeze ?

 

[Sigleaf]

As for the sound issue and its a bad sound driver or perhaps a faulty sound board, how would I test it exactly? Seeing as its built in motherboard could I just purchase a new soundcard and run it from that.

Also how do I use event viewer. Do i run it after a crash and then it logs what caused the crash?

Thanks for the responses btw!

 

[Saga Lout]

Event Viewer is in Control Panel>Administrative Tools and you want the System and Application logs. Look there before buying a sound card because I can't see how sound failing could slow the graphics side of things down.

Another factor could be bandwidth if this game you're playing is online but if you're offline, some other application might be running in the background which stalls your game. Keeping Task Manager in the systray will help show you if that's the case - if the little square box fills up bright green, something has cut in and taking a lot of resources.

 

[Sigleaf]

Well as far as event viewer goes, nothing is showing up as a problem. I have tried switching around memory, still no go. The crashes happen outside of games too. If it freezes on desktop I can be doing nothing, and no sound is present. Any ideas?

 

[Sigleaf]

Okay I got the event viewer to work and some error's actually a lot of errors are poping up but none are critical. Any one that I should focus on?

 

[Sigleaf]

okay I cleared logs on my event viewer, then got another freeze, this one was on desktop. Looking at it I have only 2 errors shown. One was for the event with an unknown shutdown, which I am assuming is when I had to force reboot. The other is a http error. I was on a website when teh freeze occured. Any useful information from this?

 

[Sigleaf]

Also got a crash in game and logged it under WIMI error as:

Event filter with query "SELECT * FROM __InstanceModificationEvent WITHIN 60 WHERE TargetInstance ISA "Win32_Processor" AND TargetInstance.LoadPercentage > 99" could not be reactivated in namespace "//./root/CIMV2" because of error 0x80041003. Events cannot be delivered through this filter until the problem is corrected.


Crashes happened within 15 min of one another.....

 

[Saga Lout]

If the freezes are happening when you're online, it could be a bandwidth problem. It would be interesting to know how long you're leaving a "freeze" before deciding to shut the system down and also whether the same websites are involved every time. For example, could you run Google searches for various things for half an hour without causing a freeze.