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Windows hard freezing when left idle.
Edit: Fixed. Turns out it was a bad/corrupted file in one of my games that was freezing the defrag process. It was slipping past the scans and the game in question was running perfectly fine. There's a more detailed explanation on page 3 of the thread.
What the title says. This has been going on for months, I've even reinstalled Windows 10 a couple of times, the the issue still persists.
Windows 10 64 bit, Radeon HD 7970 Ghz Ed 6gb x2 [crossfire is usually disabled and makes no difference either way], i7 3770, nothing is overclocked, all power settings are disabled and should never sleep or shut down, I'm using a wired internet connection and all wireless is already disabled, I have a SSD that is set to not power down ever, and all HW monitors [CPUz, Open Hardware Monitor, Sapphire Trixx, HWinfo] show everything is running well within acceptable temps and running smoothly with no spikes or issues.
Windows 10 keeps freezing hard on me, but only if I leave it alone for a few minutes. This happens without fail every time I leave the PC alone for more than 10-15 minutes or so.
It will run fine for days, as long as I'm right in front of it and actively doing something on it, playing a game, watching a video, browsing the internet, whatever. As long as there's some kind of active input, it works fine and doesn't freeze.
I step away for a few minutes, and it freezes hard. No input works, not the mouse, not ctrl-alt-del, nothing. I have to hard reset the stupid thing. I go make something to eat and leave the PC running, take the dog out, or go to the bathroom and I come back to a locked up hard frozen PC every time. It never happens when I'm sitting right in front of it and using it, only when I step away for a few minutes to do something and don't make it back within a few minutes.
I've tried all sorts of fixes. Nothing is overclocked, and my GPU driver has had several new versions while this has been going on. This has been a persistent problem for months and I've spent quite a few hours over that time trying to find a fix. I've seen various threads that refer to this issue, and some of them claim to have fixed it, but none of the solutions work for me. Sometimes it'll get better for a short time, the freezes will be less frequent or take a slightly longer time to hit me, but eventually it just goes right back to this behavior again without fail.
I've adjusted all the power settings several different ways, including setting it so everything never shuts down, made sure the HDD is set to not shut down, clean booted with only the essential bare bones Windows programs running at Startup, checked and rechecked every disk using command prompt commands, run in safe mode, scanned for viruses, malware, and adware repeatedly, disabled the wireless card, unplugged every piece of extra hardware, tried several different keyboards and mice, adjusted the Bios settings in various ways having to do with power and the HDD, uninstalled and reinstalled every driver, rolled them back, used administrator privileges to disable and enable various things, disabled and enabled my AV and firewall, uninstalled my AV, reinstalled it again, adjusted every startup option and tweaked the task manager all sorts of different ways, isolated my PC away from the network and internet, my page file is set up properly for a SSD and I've tweaked it several different ways, nothing works.
It still freezes if I step away from it for more than a few minutes no matter what I do, but only if I step away. I can also prevent it from doing so by playing a video and letting it run while I'm away.
If I pause a game or leave one running while I step away from the PC, it freezes as well. Only video seems to prevent it from crashing like this for some reason, Youtube or a video player running an MP4 or MKV file will keep the PC running if I have something playing and step away, but that's the only reliable way I've found to keep it from locking up.
I shouldn't have to do that though, and I inevitably forget and come back to a frozen PC often losing posts, progress, and it's super annoying. I can't figure out what the hell the issue is despite months of on again off again troubleshooting. Playing with the power settings made it get better briefly, but it never fixed the issue and the PC eventually went right back to behaving the same way regardless of how I set my power settings.
This has been going on for months, so it's not hardware failure. If that had been the issue, whatever it was would have long since died. Everything runs perfectly fine while I'm actively using the PC as well.
Near as I can tell, Windows 10 is ignoring some sort of power setting and trying to go into some sort of sleep mode or something even though I have it set to never do that, and it's causing a hard freeze. That's my best guess here given that it only ever happens when the PC is idle and I'm away from it.
I am currently using an older version of CCC for my GPU, but I am aware of it. I have an Oculus Rift DK2 and the latest drivers do not work with it. They are intentionally rolled back currently and I have already tried the newest drivers. They don't change anything and the PC still freezes if left alone even with the newest Crimson Drivers from AMD.
This is super frustrating and I'm at a bit of a loss here about what to do. Nothing has worked, not even a clean install of Windows 10 with everything wiped from the drive. It persists and refuses to stay running if left idle too long no matter what I do.
Any ideas here? I'm at my wits end. My PC works, but I can't leave it to download anything over a long period of time or pause a game to go do something. That's a bit of a problem and extremely frustrating.
DXdiag attached below.
Last edited by Contrabardus; 23 Apr 2016 at 17:01.