Occasional PC freeze

In the past 2 days my PC has frozen a couple of times each day.

Brief system spec.:

• Windows 10 Pro V.1909 (Build 18363.900). Reverted from 2004 10 days ago, suspected Macrium Reflect problem (not the case)
• AV: Kaspersky Free
• Motherboard: Gigabyte P55-USB3 (Socket 1156)
• RAM: 8GB Corsair Vengeance Ram
• CPU: Intel i5 760 2.80GHz
• Graphice: NVIDIA GeForce GT 430
• C: drive - Samsung SSD 850 PRO 512GB ATA
• D: drive - Western Digital 2TB black
• E: drive - (USB) Western Digital 2TB My Passport

Yesterday:

• Some 20 minutes after booting it froze. Mouse LED went out, screen stayed showing whatever it had been. No keyboard response (forgot to see if keyboard lights were on).
• Restarted. After 10 minutes or so the same again.
• Restarted. No problems for the several hours it was on. I kept Speccy running to keep an eye on various temperatures, nothing out of the ordinary.

Today

• Some 8-10 minutes after booting it froze. Same signs & symptoms as yesterday.
• Restarted. Part way through booting, may have still been in BIOS it stopped and restarted.
• No problems in the >6 hours since.

Speccy continues to show no unusual temperatures.

Running Crystal Disk Info appears to be all ok


Crystal Disk Mark also show no problems for the D: drive
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
CrystalDiskMark 7.0.0 x64 (C) 2007-2019 hiyohiyo
Crystal Dew World: Crystal Dew World
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
* MB/s = 1,000,000 bytes/s [SATA/600 = 600,000,000 bytes/s]
* KB = 1000 bytes, KiB = 1024 bytes
[Read]
Sequential 1MiB (Q= 8, T= 1): 174.927 MB/s [ 166.8 IOPS] < 47698.76 us>
Sequential 1MiB (Q= 1, T= 1): 171.960 MB/s [ 164.0 IOPS] < 6094.14 us>
Random 4KiB (Q= 32, T=16): 0.876 MB/s [ 213.9 IOPS] <644905.04 us>
Random 4KiB (Q= 1, T= 1): 0.747 MB/s [ 182.4 IOPS] < 5464.75 us>

[Write]
Sequential 1MiB (Q= 8, T= 1): 169.451 MB/s [ 161.6 IOPS] < 49138.10 us>
Sequential 1MiB (Q= 1, T= 1): 169.462 MB/s [ 161.6 IOPS] < 6180.67 us>
Random 4KiB (Q= 32, T=16): 2.166 MB/s [ 528.8 IOPS] <399412.65 us>
Random 4KiB (Q= 1, T= 1): 2.153 MB/s [ 525.6 IOPS] < 1899.61 us>

Profile: Default
Test: 1 GiB (x5) [Interval: 5 sec] <DefaultAffinity=DISABLED>
Date: 2020/06/21 14:29:59 OS: Windows 10 Professional [10.0 Build 18363] (x64)
Nothing showing in the Event Log apart from during restart a message that the system had closed down unexpectedly, no other information.

One other thing I noticed when digging around I ran msinfo32. It showed

Installed Physical Memory (RAM) 8.00 GBTotal Physical Memory 3.99 GB

Wondering if this suggested a RAM issue I rebooted into BIOS setup to see if there was anything odd. All looked ok so exited without saving any inadvertent changes. On restarting the Total Physical Memory is showing 7.99GB. While the Available Physical Memory will fluctuate depending on system activity, I wouldn't have expected the Total Physical Memory to be anything other than 8GB (near enough).
It occurs to me that seeing that on both days the freezes occurred soon after the morning boot whether there's some system activity that is causing the problem.

I'm not sure where to look further. Any ideas?

Thanks for that. I had tentatively wondered about the AV as it seemed to be a soon after boot event.

I'll follow it up tomorrow and see what happens. Windows Defender will take on the AV role for the time being.

I'll also be curious to see if I get any freezes tomorrow.

A quick question. I use Classic Start menu so don't have the Power button you refer to, the Start menu has Shut Down which is what I normally use. Is that equivalent to your method?

I think... my Shut Down option is the same as you're talking about. These are my settings and what I see from Start menu for the Shut Down option...


I co-lead a walking group and we're often in central Cheshire, Plumley, Nantwich, Budworth, etc. But we're in eastern Cheshire so also have the Peak District very near, we have a great variety of walks available

- - - Updated - - -

Sorry, excessively cropped my screen grab for the Power settings, here's the whole window

Thanks for all the things to progress, I won't be able to follow this up for a few days - though PC has been a good boy today! - as I have some walks to do in the next few days

Have also done Kinder, Bleaklow - with its aircraft wrecks, etc. Fabulous countryside.

Does Reliability History give any information regarding the freeze events?
In the search box,bottom left,type in ---dxdiag---and check to see if you are using DirectX 12,on the System page.I think the gt430 might only support DirectX 11,but the maker's site should tell you.
Also go to the Display page and note all the driver information,then check for a possible update.
Freezing is often caused by the display adapter and can be found in Device manager,normally flagged if it is the cause.
The gt 430 may be getting a bit long in the tooth,from around 2005 or thereabouts.
If you need to uninstall the present driver,then Display Driver Uninstaller,[DDU],used in Safe Mode,is a good choice.