Windows hard freezing when left idle.

Hmm, in this thread, the solution was a bad file in a game that W10 didn't catch. I wonder if my solution is similar but all I do is play music and view YouTube videos.

Contrabardus said:

Fixed. Turns out it was a bad file in my Steam Folder causing defrag to freeze my PC. It was in a game called Wreckfest, which is a driving sim game by Bugbear. I have most of my Steam Folder in its own drive.

I don't think that turning off scheduling works with Windows 10. It was still doing it even if I disabled defragging as a scheduled event. The options are there to turn it off in the system menus, but it was still doing it anyway and locking up the PC in the process. It still tries to do disk maintenance anyway when the system is idle apparently, because I'm certain I disabled all scheduling and settings related to defrag and the issue still persisted.

None of the various scans my PC could do were picking up that there was anything wrong with the file. I did the usual, SFC, ScanDisk, DISM, etc. for each of my drives individually several times and it always came up clean and the scans ran fine. None of them were catching anything wrong with anything on any of my drives. It wasn't a virus or malware either because I was able to recreate the issue by defragging the drive with the game on it manually.

I noticed the Defragger was always locking up at a specific point once I tried to manually defrag after trying to individually defrag each of my drives again [with the exception of my SSD, which I optimized]. It was always freezing at around the same percentage. So I went to a more advanced view and discovered it was always locking up when it reached the same folder, but not always on the exact same file. Verifying the files on the game came up as them all being present, and the game ran fine if I tried to play it. The HDD itself also had plenty of space for a defrag operation, it's only about half full.

The freeze was sudden enough that it was keeping anything from being logged as a crash or failure on any system monitor, there was no unusual hardware activity and there were no error messages, so I actually had to sit and watch for it, which took quite a while. It was a pain, but after a couple of defrag failures it was pretty apparent as the detailed view showed it was left it hanging in the same area each time.

Deleted the game and my PC hasn't locked up since. If you're having the same issue, manually defrag your drives and make note of where it is when it locks up. If it's always in the same folder or file, delete or move the program to another drive and try again. Quick defrags don't work very well for this unfortunately. It would still lock up trying to do that, but was a lot more random about where it locked up and didn't always show the same folder or files.

I now have everything on scheduled defrag again and it's all working fine and has been for several days. Even quick defrag works like it should despite the freeze being more random in nature using that method prior to ridding my system of the offending file. I even left my PC on overnight just to test this and be sure and it stayed unfrozen for the whole night and worked fine in the morning. The issue is probably a bad file that your defrag is hanging up on if you're having the same symptoms as I was.

TLR: A bad file in one of my Steam Games was freezing the defrag operation and disk scans weren't catching it. Windows 10 does not actually turn off disk maintenance when idle no matter how you set the settings for scheduling or defragging. It does the quick scan version in the background anyway when the system is idle, which was causing my freezes despite having everything related to defrag disabled.

I have a question about your solution. You mentioned an "advanced view" of the defragmentation process that let's you see exactly which file got you locked up. How did you bring up this view?

Hi, i have the same problem, but i tried to install windows 10 several times, bought a new ssd ( Samsung 980 to Samsung 980 pro), changed the ram as well, did the defragment manually but nothing happened
My specs are:
I5-12600kf
Rtx3070ti
Corsair vengeance 32gb (8x4)
Rm 850w +80gold