Win 10 freezes

My father in law has a Dell Inspiron 24-3455 all in one with the following key specs:

1. CPU: AMD A6-7310 APU with AMD Radeon R4 Graphics, 2000 Mhz, 4 Core(s), 4 Logical Processor(s)
2. DRAM: 6 GB Dual Channel DDR3L 1600MHz (4GBx1 + 2GBx1)
3. Hard Drive: now a SanDisk Ultra 3D NAND 2TB Internal SSD - SATA III 6 Gb/s, 2.5"
4. OS: Microsoft Windows 10 Home, 10.0.17763.678

He has complained to me several times over the last year that his computer is prone to freezing. When it freezes, he can move his mouse and see the cursor move, but there is no response when he clicks on something. If he types something on the keyboard (e.g. ctrl-alt-delete), it does not respond to that either (e.g. by opening Task Manager).

This problem used to occur maybe once a month, but recently has been happening more frequently, sometimes a couple times a day.

There are only 2 ways that he knows to get it working again. The first is to hard kill it (e.g. unplug it). The second is to simply wait: surprisingly, he has seen many times that the computer suddenly unfreezes after ~10 minutes! He knows when it unfreezes because it will suddenly start to respond to the last couple of mouse clicks he did when it was frozen!

This behavior is very hard for me to remotely diagnose (I live 100s of miles away, and now with WuFlu, cannot visit at all).

So, I would greatly appreciate if you guys have any suggestions on what the issue could be.

I have one guess: his computer's 6 GB of DRAM is low. Could Windows have gotten low on DRAM, but then is taking forever to free up DRAM?

I am not sure if this is related, but the reason why he is running that now old build of Win 10 is that because both times that I tried to update his computer to the latest version, the update process has failed. It was several months ago when I last tried, but my recollection is that the update process simply stalled and did not complete after many hours. Infuriating...

Try a Clean Boot. If this works you can leave it at that. Or you can add one Startup or Service at a time until the computer starts freezing, then you will know the culprit.

spunk said:

Try a Clean Boot. If this works you can leave it at that. Or you can add one Startup or Service at a time until the computer starts freezing, then you will know the culprit.

That was a great suggestion, thanks. My father in law did a Clean Boot about 3 days ago, and he has seen no freezes since. Indeed, he says that his computer is more responsive than before.

I have told him that he will now need to start the painful process of finding the miscreant software.

Adding one service or startup program at a time might be too slow. I will tell him to activate 50% of one of those categories and see if the problem occurs. If it does, then to look at 50% of what he activated, else move on to stuff he did not look at before. This technique is suggested here. It is a logarithmic reduction in steps required compared to a linear search, assuming that there is but one bad piece of software. If there are multiple bad softwares, or the problem only manifests when multiple are active at the same time, then diagnosis is a nightmare.

You can leave it as a Clean Boot, there will be no harm done, but if you want to find the culprit, you have to do it one at a time.

spunk said:

...if you want to find the culprit, you have to do it one at a time.

I want to find the culprit, but think that one at a time is unnecessarily inefficient.

To illustrate this concretely, in case my original explanation was unclear, suppose that you have n = 32 startup programs and exactly 1 of them is bad, you just do not know which one.

Your approach of testing 1 by 1 would mean that in theory you need to do a min of 1 test, a mean of 16 tests, and a max of 32 tests.

The divide and conquer algorithm would reactivate 50% = 16 of those startup programs on its first step. If the problem occurs, then you know that the bad program is among those 16, but if it does not, then you know that the bad program is among the 16 that you did NOT activate. On the next round, you pick 50% = 8 of those programs from the group of 16 which you know contain the bad program. In similar fashion, the next 3 rounds will look at 4, 2, and 1 programs (I would do that that final test of 1 to confirm for sure that you found the bad program).

So, for n = 32, the divide and conquer algorithm always does exactly log2(32) = 5 tests; its min, mean and max = 5. While its min is slightly worse than the linear (1 by 1) search, its mean and max are vastly better (smaller). And the advantage over a linear search only gets better as the n grows: the linear search is of order n, but divide and conquer is log2(n).

Now, assuming a single bad program is the best case, since it is the simplest. A nightmare to diagnose would be if there are interaction effects, say, the problem, only manifests if 5 of the 32 startup programs are all running at the same time. The approach above might not detect this at all.

Please see this article: https://www.dell.com/support/article...in-one?lang=en

Jacee said:

Please see this article: https://www.dell.com/support/article...in-one?lang=en

Jacee: was there a particular section in that link that you would draw my attention to?

I looked at that link and did not see anything relevant for my father in law. The closest was the section "The Computer Stops Responding" which describes steps like hit the Power button to force a reboot, run SupportAssist.

Dell Windows Support Center

This link takes you to the Dell Windows Support Center. Select the operating system you need help with.

My father in law has been doing that divide and conquer search algorithm for many days now to find the offending service or startup app that causes his freezes.

It has a very slow process because, for a given configuration, a freeze can take 1-2 days before it manifests.

It seems that he has finally tentatively determined that the culprit is the "Dell client management service". He has seen his computer free with just that service enabled.

I told him this evening to re-enable all other services and startup apps and let his computer run for a week to see if there are no more freezes. If there are none, then we likely nailed the culprit.

Has anyone else seen "Dell client management service" cause problems? I did a web search and found nothing, except maybe this case.

Is it safe to leave it permanently disabled?

I vaguely recall the last time that I was at my father in law's apt, that I tried to update the Dell software, but it failed...