My windows pc keeps freezing 2 minutes after startup

I hope someone can help me with some problems I have with my windows PC. It keeps freezing after startup and I have been trying to find out what it is but nothing works.

So what happens is the following: whenever I start my pc it does okay, untill I load in some programs (not really heavy programs, just things like FireFox, sublime text editor, task manager). After loading the programs it tends to freeze and it won't unfreeze, which makes me force a restart. It mostly happens just 1 or 2 times in the morning and then proceeds to do fine the rest of the day without any freezes.

Some important facts:

- I think my CPU usage is at 100% while the freezes happen, temperature is around 40-50 degrees Celsius after startup

- About 2 months ago it started with a message showing up that windows kernel mode driver was crashing (I still used windows 8 back then), nowadays I do not get this message anymore (I upgraded to windows 10) but it still freezes the same way

- Specs: Intel i5 4460 @ 3.2Ghz quadcore / 8gb RAM / 125gbSSD (with windows installed on it) / 1tb HDD / GeForce 760 / Gigabyte Z97P-D3 motherboard

- Audio as well as video output will freeze

- I already tried scanning all hardware and software, already installed a fresh copy of windows, already applied new cooling paste. Malwarebytes, sfc scannow, other antiviruses etc all give nothing.


I have built this pc myself and have never had any problems with it untill 2 months ago, I know quite a lot about pc's and hardware but this seems to be something out of my reach, and that's why I am asking here now. Thanks in advance for the help!

Welcome to the forum. When you installed did you have just the one drive in or two? If there are two drives it often puts files on the wrong drive. Run a full disk check on both drives wrong shutdown down corrupt the file system. In task manager on the startup tab disable any none Microsoft start-up see if that helps

Samuria said:

Welcome to the forum. When you installed did you have just the one drive in or two? If there are two drives it often puts files on the wrong drive. Run a full disk check on both drives wrong shutdown down corrupt the file system. In task manager on the startup tab disable any none Microsoft start-up see if that helps

Thanks for the welcome and thanks for the reply :)

I have 2 drives installed in my pc indeed. I installed windows on my SSD and my HDD is still completely empty aside from 2 maps with files I put in there myself. Will do a check right away though. Already disabled everything to see if it was a program, but that does not seem to be the problem either.

Hello Stokvisss, and welcome to Ten Forums.

Can you boot your computer with bootable Ubuntu USB stick to see issue persists this way we can tell what is the cause of the problem.

Create a bootable USB stick on Windows | Ubuntu tutorials

Hi Stokvisss,

Did you check in Task Manager if there's a specific program or service causing the surge?
I ask this because I had a similar problem which turned out to be caused by RuntimeBroker.exe

Check your Reliability History for any problems.My GTX 760 has active cooling,a fan,which operated intermittently because of dust affectjng it's running.A clean and reseat worked.
Also check Device Manager>display adapter to see if there is any report.
Have a look at your DirectX,in the search box type in "dxdiag".There are only 5 small pages which include reports on audio and video.