[SOLVED] Windows unresponsive but can still move mouse

[Crenkle]

System:

• Windows 10 Home
• Gigabyte B550 Aorus Elite V2 Motherboard
• AMD Ryzen 5 5600X
• ASUS ROG Strix GeForce RTX 3070 8GB
• G.Skill Ripjaws V 16GB (2x8GB) 3600MHz CL16 DDR4
• Crucial P1 M.2 NVMe SSD 1TB
• Corsair RM650 Gold 650W Power Supply

Recently I've been dealing with an issue where over the course of ~15 seconds my PC becomes increasingly unresponsive. The first symptom I notice is that my wireless headset audio cuts out, whether it's from a YouTube video, Spotify or a video game I am playing. At this point I can still do some things, e.g. open a new Chrome tab, close/move an app window, any YouTube video/the video game I am playing continue playing, etc. This only lasts ~15 seconds before all of that stops being responsive too. At this point any videos stop playing and I can no longer close/move app windows. However I can still move my cursor around the screen, but clicking does nothing. Any keyboard shortcuts e.g. Windows + L or Ctrl + Shift + Esc do nothing, but I can still toggle my capslock/numlock keyboard lights on/off by pressing their respective buttons. I've tried waiting 30+ minutes and it seems to stay in this state of a functional cursor and nothing else indefinitely. Eventually I just reboot the system.

I haven't noticed any sort of pattern with when this issue happens. Sometimes it is 20 minutes after booting my computer and having done nothing but browse using Chrome, other times it happens after my computer has been running fine for 8+ hours and I am in the middle of playing a video game. I've been keeping NZXT CAM and Task Manager up on one of my monitors so I can see the stats at the time of the freeze, and my CPU/GPU temperatures are fine (<55° C for both). I've checked Event Viewer after rebooting and there is usually nothing for 30 mins+ before the freeze, and only the usual booting messages and an unexpected shutdown message (from holding down the power button) from after the reboot.

The issue began several months after completing my build, which makes me think it is unlikely to be a hardware fault, but I can't work out what could have changed. I tried doing a full fresh install of Windows but the issue persisted. I also tried resetting my BIOS to the default settings but unfortunately that did not fix the issue either. I also tried rolling my GPU drivers back to their factory defaults, as I had updated them shortly before this issue started, but even on the factory defaults the issue still happens. The way things quickly progress from slight loss of functionality to nothing is working makes me think it is a RAM issue, but I've run MemTest86 and everything was fine.

Any suggestions anyone has would be greatly appreciated.

 

[Ralston18]

In addition to Task Manager also look in Resource Monitor.

In addition to Event Viewer also look in Reliability History. (Timeline format may prove very helpful.)

Likewise try Process Explorer (free from Microsoft's website).

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/downloads/process-explorer

= = = =

Power down, unplug, open the case.

Clean out dust and debris.

Verify by sight and feel that all cards, connectors, RAM, and jumpers are fully and firmly in place.

Could be just a loose, intermittent, connection problem.

 

[Crenkle]

In addition to Task Manager also look in Resource Monitor.

In addition to Event Viewer also look in Reliability History. (Timeline format may prove very helpful.)

Likewise try Process Explorer (free from Microsoft's website).

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/downloads/process-explorer

= = = =

Power down, unplug, open the case.

Clean out dust and debris.

Verify by sight and feel that all cards, connectors, RAM, and jumpers are fully and firmly in place.

Could be just a loose, intermittent, connection problem.

Thanks. I've verified that everything is in place and reseated the PSU cables which will hopefully resolve the issue, but if not I will investigate with your other suggestions. I'll update this post if I still can't resolve the issue or if I do resolve it and post what the problem/solution ended up being.

 

[Quanticriver]

Thanks. I've verified that everything is in place and reseated the PSU cables which will hopefully resolve the issue, but if not I will investigate with your other suggestions. I'll update this post if I still can't resolve the issue or if I do resolve it and post what the problem/solution ended up being.

Its hard to pinpoint a cause here, could be your boot drive, could be your gpu, mobo, ram or even software related

I would do the following:
1. reinstall windows from scratch, see if the issue persists, (this almost rules out a software issue)
(yes you can also troubleshoot further, but it can take a long while, this is the nuke option)

2. if it persists; try with only one ramstick, try to get a lender gpu etc etc
To see if the issue persists with different hardware

also, install windows on a DIFFERENT ssd and try that

if have tried these, come back and let us know, we can go from there

 

[dorsai]

Make sure you're running the latest BIOS for the B550 motherboard...there was an issue with Ryzen 5000 series USB 2.0 functionality they resolved with a BIOS update.

 

[Crenkle]

In addition to Task Manager also look in Resource Monitor.

In addition to Event Viewer also look in Reliability History. (Timeline format may prove very helpful.)

Likewise try Process Explorer (free from Microsoft's website).

Unfortunately Resource Monitor, Reliability History and Process Explorer didn't yield any useful information. This image was taken during a freeze (apologies for the camera photo, I can't take screenshots during a freeze). There didn't seem to be any spikes leading up to the freeze.

Make sure you're running the latest BIOS for the B550 motherboard...there was an issue with Ryzen 5000 series USB 2.0 functionality they resolved with a BIOS update.

I had already previously updated my BIOS to 13h (which seems to have since been rolled back? The latest on the Gigabyte website is currently 13g). I reverted to version 12 but still encountered the issue. I might try 13g but since I had the issue on 13h I'm not optimistic 13g will help.

Its hard to pinpoint a cause here, could be your boot drive, could be your gpu, mobo, ram or even software related

I would do the following:
1. reinstall windows from scratch, see if the issue persists, (this almost rules out a software issue)
(yes you can also troubleshoot further, but it can take a long while, this is the nuke option)

2. if it persists; try with only one ramstick, try to get a lender gpu etc etc
To see if the issue persists with different hardware

also, install windows on a DIFFERENT ssd and try that

if have tried these, come back and let us know, we can go from there

I have already tried a complete reinstall of Windows, but unfortunately it didn't resolve issue. I've just tried using only one stick of RAM, but still ran into the freeze. I then switched it for the other RAM stick, and encountered the freeze with that stick too. Next I'll try using my old PC's GPU and if the issue persists the SSD instead, but as before since I can't make the freeze happen at will it will likely take several days to know if the issue is resolved or not.

Thanks for the suggestions everyone.

 

[dorsai]

Have you tried simply moving your USB connections around to different ports ?

Have you disabled the "sleep" feature for USB on your system ?

 

[Crenkle]

Hi all,
I believe I've discovered the cause of the issue. I realised that the freezes only happened when I had 'NZXT CAM' running, and sure enough after Googling it I'm far from the only person to have noticed this issue. After uninstalling it I've gone over a week without a freeze, and I'm fairly certain it was the cause.

Thanks to everyone that offered suggestions/advice. I'm going to send a report to NZXT on the issue, but by the looks of Google searching I wont be the first to do so and I'm not optimistic it will resolve anything.

 

[leeshanhau]

Hi all,
I believe I've discovered the cause of the issue. I realised that the freezes only happened when I had 'NZXT CAM' running, and sure enough after Googling it I'm far from the only person to have noticed this issue. After uninstalling it I've gone over a week without a freeze, and I'm fairly certain it was the cause.

Thanks to everyone that offered suggestions/advice. I'm going to send a report to NZXT on the issue, but by the looks of Google searching I wont be the first to do so and I'm not optimistic it will resolve anything.

Hi do you mean the problem is your webcam? Im facing the issue too, and i have a rapoo webcam connected. But it freezes when im not using the webcam too.

 

[Crenkle]

Hi do you mean the problem is your webcam? Im facing the issue too, and i have a rapoo webcam connected. But it freezes when im not using the webcam too.

No, the problem was with a PC monitoring program named 'NZXT CAM', which you shouldn't use because as I discovered it can cause your PC to freeze. If you aren't already running the program then your issue is different to what caused mine.

 

[leeshanhau]

No, the problem was with a PC monitoring program named 'NZXT CAM', which you shouldn't use because as I discovered it can cause your PC to freeze. If you aren't already running the program then your issue is different to what caused mine.

Yup im not running that, but im still having the same problem.