Screen freezing but sound continues

Over the past week or so I'm getting occasional screen freezes - at first it was while gaming (World of Warcraft), but I'm finding the same thing can occur when I'm only using a web browser (Firefox), without WoW running at all.

Today this happened while I was watching a Youtube video in Firefox, and I noticed that - while the screen was frozen and unresponsive (the video itself froze, cursor was there but with blue circle and nothing responded, couldn't ctrl+alt+del to get to task manager, etc.) - the sound from the video kept going. In the end, as with other freezes, I had to hard reset by holding down the PC's power button.

Does anyone have advice on what might be causing this? Maybe it's a hardware issue - graphics card perhaps, but I'm not sure how to diagnose it. I've made sure the drivers are up to date, and likewise with Windows updates. Haven't had any recent hardware changes at all.

Although I'm not getting a BSOD, I've run the diagnostic tool from that sub-forum, and zipped and uploaded the results here. Could someone possibly take a quick look and see if anything stands out, or give me some pointers on what to look for myself?

Thanks.

Sami

SAMI-PC-21_11_2016_195542_54.zip

Hello BugMeister,

Yes of course - that would help wouldn't it! I've filled out as much as I can at the moment, but please let me know if there's anything important missing. I could open the case up and see who manufacutred my other hard drive for example.

I've run a full scan with Windows Defender already - no issues there. But what do you mean by using Control Panel to detect screen problems? I'd typically just go there to change resolutions or update drivers etc.

Have a look at your Reliability History and if there are any red flags,then view the Tech Details and it should give you sufficient info to find an answer.Also,if possible,download WHOCRASHED,from resplendence,com,it too will give details about the problem.Freezing is nearly always a problem with the display adapter and may require driver replacement.

Thank you very much for the information guys. I didn't know about the View Reliability History function in Control Panel. I've been in there now and had a look around - there are quite a lot of Critical Events of the form "Windows stopped working" and "Windows was not not properly shut down", which will be me having to hard restart my PC when the screen freezes. No technical details for these though.

However, there are a couple of hardware errors, and Windows errors of the form "Shut down unexpectedly" which do have some techncial details.

For example, for the hardware errors:

Description
A problem with your hardware caused Windows to stop working correctly.

Problem signature
Problem Event Name: LiveKernelEvent
Code: ab
Parameter 1: 1
Parameter 2: 350
Parameter 3: 8e0
Parameter 4: 600000005
OS version: 10_0_14393
Service Pack: 0_0
Product: 768_1
OS Version: 10.0.14393.2.0.0.768.101
Locale ID: 2057

For Windows shutdown errors:

Problem signature
Problem Event Name: BlueScreen
Code: 154
Parameter 1: ffffab86faad7000
Parameter 2: ffffc5813b52cff0
Parameter 3: 2
Parameter 4: 0
OS version: 10_0_14393
Service Pack: 0_0
Product: 768_1
OS Version: 10.0.14393.2.0.0.768.101
Locale ID: 2057

Extra information about the problem
Bucket ID: 0x154_c0000006_c0000185_nt!SMKM_STORE_MGR_struct_SM_TRAITS_::SmIoCtxQueueWork

I'm still not able to make much sense of these unfortunately. Does anyone know how to interpret them? I'll see what I can find out online about doing so - and will try the whocrashed utility that joeandmarg0 mentioned too, thank you.

I've had the same graphics card for the past three years, and not much has changed there or in terms of the games I'm playing - and in any event these freezes can still occur when there's no game running. So it's hopefully not an issue with the card being pushed too hard. I've also updated the drivers for it, but this didn't help.

However, it's likely this is still a graphics card issue as you guys say - I'll try everything I can with it and, if nothing else works, can always get a new one. Something at the same spec won't be costly.

Hey that's great - thanks very much. My RAM is on two 4GB sticks, so I could always try running with just one of them at a time for a while, see if that helps. If so, the other stick is suspect.

I did run a Windows Memory Diagnostic just there and it didn't turn anything up, but it's probably not in-depth enough.

Thanks again for the tip about RAM. That sounds promising, especially since you had what sounds like the same issue yourself.