Windows locking up when saving settings and other times.

Reflexwolf · 15 Sep 2021

Hi, I'm having some serious problem and I cant find out whats going on, its happening fairly randomly as I work, the programs I have running will suddenly stop working, Chrome some times will freeze when showing a video. then other programs will stop working one after another, and if I try to close the program to start over it will hang till the system crashes and when it comes back up my settings are wiped out. This happens so much now the main programs I use I now have back ups of the settings and will often have to reload them just to get any work done.

I hope someone knows a fix to this, it almost feels like the main C drive (over 400 gig free on it) is just locking up or going to sleep on me.

dalchina · 15 Sep 2021

Hi, sorry to hear of this.

History (rarely provided):
a. when did this start?
b. what happened that might have led to this?
(installation/uninstallation/hardware change/update/lightning strike....)

Your MOBO appears to be from around 2014-2015- is that correct?

The forum prompted you (twice) to provide you build number (so we don't have to keep asking):

Windows locking up when saving settings and other times.-win-10-version.png

Do you use disk imaging regularly and routinely so you can recover from bad situations, as is endlessly recommended by tenforums members? Most people ignore this question- if no answer I will assume you haven't taken this precaution which would have given you the opportunity to recover to a previous good state without help.

Have you tried using a System Restore point?

Please run a disk check- download and run Hard Disk Sentinel (good for SSDs too) - excellent. Green is good. Report any problem drives.

If ok, then run
chkdsk c: /scan
from an admin command prompt.

If ok, similarly run
SFC /SCANNOW

Report if these pass or fail.

If ok, check your RAM. There are tenforums tutorials to help or advice via Google.

If all these pass, create a new user for test purposes. Log in as that user, and advise if you see the same problems.

Are you overclocking?

Reflexwolf · 15 Sep 2021

Thank you,
Ok I did as asked here are the results.

MOBO = Gigabyte GA-Z97X-Gaming 7 made in 2014+
CPU Intel Core i7 4790K @ 4.00GHz

Windows Version 21H1 os Build 19043, 1237

I have not done a full disc image in several years now, and at this point I don’ t think it would help as what ever is going on might just get added to it.

As for system restore points the last one I did was about 4 months back and would do more damage to all the changes that have been done by me (program updates, system updates, and settings changes in many of the programs I use daily)

Scan disc of C drive is good,
SFC /scannow came up with "Windows Resource Protection found corrupt files and successfully repaired them."

ran it again and it shows all good, so I'm going to let the system run and hope for the best, if I DO have more problems I'll come back and let you all know. If not in a while I'll come back and close the thread.

Thank you for the help so far!

AddRAM · 15 Sep 2021

I was about to ask you if you installed the new update but I see you did.

I updated both of mine and they are running great, so I`m thinking it`s not the update.

Reflexwolf · 15 Sep 2021

No it was happening for a while now, it has happened after the update though if that helps.

AddRAM · 15 Sep 2021

I would do a clean boot, and see how it runs.

dalchina · 16 Sep 2021

I have not done a full disc image in several years now, and at this point I don’ t think it would help as what ever is going on might just get added to it.

Of course the point is to have a recent image of when your PC or partition was problem-free.

If your PC is now running ok, then now's the time to create a disk image- and continue doing that regularly.The very act of creating one checks your disk for consistency too, and is a full backup from which you can retried files as well as restoring partitions.

Once the job is set up, a subsequent differential (or perhaps incremental) image takes a few minutes (e.g. SSD-USB3-> HDD) and you can potentially save yourself clean installs.

What would you do if your disk failed?

Macrium Reflect (free or paid) + large enough external storage. (Don't use Backup and Restore (Windows 7)).