Windows 10 freezes randomly

If you have an NVIDIA graphics card, make sure its setting (Power management) is set to use "maximum performance" rather than "Adaptive".

Start using Windows10 : 29 Dec 2015

Freezes 4 times until today!
8 Jan 2016
15 Jan 2016 (3.50 pm)
15 Jan 2016 (11.24 pm)
17 Jan 2016

Today trying to fix by sfc /scannow
Let's see will it fix !

My specs: Core i7-6700 | Gigabyte H170-D3HP (BIOS F3) | Kingston Hyper-X 2133 (4GBX2) | SAMSUNG 850 EVO 250GB | Windows10 Pro (1511)

I had same problem. My computer randomly lockup when I was using. browser on windows 10. I figure. it has to do with my network drivers. My network card is Qualcomm Atheros AR9485 802.11b/g/n WiFi Adapter. I updated driver from their website to 10.0.0.326 and updated driver from Realtek PCIe FE Family Controller from their website to 10.6.1001.2015 for win 10 64 bit. The freezing stopped. Running all day browsers and did not freeze yet. usually freezes between 5 to 15 minutes of browsing.

Keepoman said:

Nope.. i reverted back to Windows 8.1 again and the freezing just vanished.. it's really weird

Same here, 3 times I had to revert back and everything worked great until win 10 upgraded!

Intel is stating on their forums there is a problem with the 6th generation Skylake locking up!
They are working on it, hopefully by the end of this month updates will be available!
My skylake i5 froze today with no one using it, so its not a load problem!

bbear said:

Intel is stating on their forums there is a problem with the 6th generation Skylake locking up!
They are working on it, hopefully by the end of this month updates will be available!
My skylake i5 froze today with no one using it, so its not a load problem!

I don't think your problem is related to Skylake's bug. (Skylake's bug is occuring while running Prime 95)

I think you have to update latest VGA driver and Mainboard's BIOS .

UPDATE: No need to even respond now. I've reverted to running Windows 7 Pro and it's running great. I kept the drive with 10 loaded on it separate from my build by just disconnecting it so maybe one day when I'm feeling like I need some punishment from Microsoft I'll try to get 10 working again.

Keepoman said:

Yeah it's a darn shame it has to freeze because i actually started to like Windows 10

I know discussion is old, I am posting to help others since this post is the first result after typing in "Windows 10 Freezing".

Step 1: Click on Start Button, search "uac".
Step 2: Click on "Change User Account Control Settings"
Step 3: Slide bar up to the top or second from the top. (This will prevents programs or apps from hurting or changing you computer, like things that are not compatible)

Thank you nitzer40. Its good to know someone with your background in IT had the same issue.

I eventuall gave up and then did a fresh install of Win10 TH2 10586 a month or so later, and so far have had no problems.

nitzer40 said:

Been following this thread because I just built a new machine and have been trying to get my Windows 10 Pro x64 install to stop randomly locking up. I signed for the forum because of this. I'm a Windows System Administrator for a very large company and have been working in IT for 22 years and never in my life had this much trouble loading a Windows OS and getting it stable. Been building my own PC's since the days of the AMD Athlon K7 1.3GHz processors. Most of them have been dual socket machines before the advent of the dual core processor.

Enough background...on to the issue. New machine, not an upgrade. No previous OS loaded on the machine. I followed this thread and for the 5th time I have freshly loaded the OS I did this:

1. Updated BIOS on my ASRock motherboard to the latest BIOS

2. Made a bootable USB drive with the Win10 Pro .iso using the Microsoft tool

3. Booted off the .iso and selected new install (not upgrade) - entered my purchased OS key

4. Formatted the hard drive and loaded to my drive

5. Once the install was complete I selected express setup

6. After all of the initial setup stuff was finished I loaded my chipset drivers, then the IMEI driver, Intel RST drivers, then my GPU drivers (no integrated video). Before I was able to load my audio drivers, the machine locked up solid.

7. Rebooted machine and ran the DISM commands from an elevated CMD prompt:

Dism /Online /Cleanup-Image /CheckHealth

Dism /Online /Cleanup-Image /ScanHealth

Dism /Online /Cleanup-Image /RestoreHealth

Then an SFC /scannow

then cleanmgr.exe

8. Set power setting to performance and turned off all hibernation and sleep functions.

9. Set a fixed page file on the primary drive at twice my system ram (64GB)

10. Since all of this...nothing but constant lockups. No other software loaded at all. All of the drivers I loaded came from the latest copies available from the ASRock website. My audio and network drivers were never loaded, but Windows picked up the chipsets and loaded a Windows driver for them. Being that the audio was not being used yet I really can't see a reason in hell that it would be causing a problem. The NIC is from Intel and it's been detected as an Intel NIC and driver applied from Windows. It is working. Nothing useful in event viewer to point to a problem.

My laptop that this is replacing died last night so it is pretty urgent that I get this machine working. Any ideas? Not running RAID, no other cards installed besides the graphics card (960 GTX) with drivers directly from the Nvidia website.

BTW, loaded Windows 7 Pro on the machine as a test (since I don't have a retail key to use it) and everything works great. I've been working on this thing for like a week. I'm so tempted just to buy a Win7 Pro key, be done with 10, and try to get my money back or have MS downgrade my license to 7 Pro.