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Windows 10 automatic disk maintenance during idle causing hard freeze.
Specs: Windows 10 x64, Radeon HD 7970 Ghz ed 6GB x2 in Xfire [normally only one card is active], i7 3770k, Samsung 500 GB SSD, 16 GB Corsair RAM, Several 1+ TB HDD. I have a SSD with the OS on it, and several large Seagate HDDs with other files. 1 1 TB, 1 700 GB, and 2 2 TB drives. I also have a few external drives, but they usually aren't plugged in unless I'm using them.
What the title says. Windows 10 keeps locking up during idle automatic maintenance. If I leave my PC untouched for too long the idle maintenance starts and locks up the PC. The mouse cursor disappears and I have to hard reset to get it working again.
All my drivers are up to date, as well as all my Windows updates. There's nothing I can update and this has been going on for several months now and has been persistent across several driver and OS updates. I have run a clean installation of Windows 10 twice and it still persists.
It's also worth noting that it never freezes if I'm actively using the PC. As long as I'm inputting something, playing something , streaming something, or otherwise providing some sort of input, everything runs fine. It only ever happens when the system has been idle for a bit and left to sit for a few minutes. Usually around 10 to 15 minutes or so, sometimes it can go a bit longer, but it's always within an hour or so at the absolute most, usually within 30 minutes.
I've already basically disabled every auto update process I can, including in my optimization and defrag menu, and set up power management to prevent sleeping and such trying to keep it from happening, but nothing like that helps. I've even tried just letting it run for a long while to see if it cleared up and that was a no go.
I've run system and hardware monitors, tested my hardware, and everything comes up clean and tells me everything in my PC is working properly. My temps are good and I'm not getting spikes in GPU or CPU usage, all my drives show good ratings as well. I've run every kind of scan and repair my PC can do, including the various command prompt scans and boot scans, and they show no problems with anything. I've run several adware scans, virus scans, malware scans, and have combed through my processes trying to pinpoint this and everything comes up clean, yet I still get these constant freezes.
WhoCrashed and Windows Event Viewer don't show any crashes or failures. The PC doesn't think anything is wrong or failing when it locks up. The only events that show up are failures caused by my forced reset powering down the PC itself.
There is a workaround, but it's kind of a pain. If I start a video and leave it running in a loop it prevents the freezing. I have a video file that I keep on my desktop just for doing this when I have to step away, and it's an annoying way to deal with it as I sometimes forget and come back after a trip to the bathroom or kitchen to find my PC has locked up yet again.
This automatic idle disk maintenance can't be bypassed as far as I know. There is no way to disable it or prevent it from kicking on.
I can 'optimize' my SSD, and all my HDD say they're defragged in my defrag and optimization menu. I've run them all manually and it's done nothing to prevent this issue.
However, there is an oddity there. There is an option to optimize the SSD and it works, but there are two partitions below that on the SSD and I cannot run optimization on either one. They are System Resources and an oddly named \\?\Volume{ followed by a long string of numbers and dashes that I assume is a system partition of some sort. They both say that Optimization has never been run and I cannot do it manually.
The optimize button is there and I can click on it. It isn't greyed out, but clicking on it just gives me a spinning 'busy' icon for a moment and does absolutely nothing. There is no error message and crash reports don't show anything failing. It just fails and acts as if nothing has happened, and the drives continue to say that optimization has never been run and that both of these partitions need it.
I'm thinking these two system partitions are what is causing the freeze. I'm sure it's the idle automatic disk maintenance causing this, because that's the only thing that would be going on, and running a video prevents it from kicking in, but that's the only way I know of that reliably prevents the PC from freezing outside of actually sitting there and using it. It's too frequent and consistent to be something like an update download or install causing it, and checking updates show everything is up to date, not to mention I tried disabling updates and it did nothing to prevent it. It also doesn't happen on a schedule or particular time, but any time I leave the PC running for too long without touching anything for 10-15 minutes or so.
Even leaving something like a game running doesn't work. It even freezes if I play audio files in the same player I use for videos. Running video works to stop it, either streaming or using a video player program to play a video file from one of my drives, but nothing else I know of can reliably prevent it.
Again, this isn't an issue if I'm actively doing something. It doesn't freeze if I'm actively playing a game or providing any kind of input. It only occurs if I leave it running and don't touch anything for a little while. I'm not talking about leaving the PC on over long periods of time here, this is something that occurs within a half hour of leaving it alone.
Any ideas about what to do here? I've kind of run out of ideas and there doesn't seem to be anything I can do to fix this outside of just running a video when I need to step away for a few minutes to keep it from locking up. That's really just a band aid and I shouldn't have to do that to prevent these freezes.