Windows 10: Odd intermittent freezing

Hi!

About a month ago I started suffering from BSODs (CRITICAL_PROCESS_DIED, MEMORY_MANAGEMENT, UNEXPECTED_STORE_EXCEPTION) whilst using Prepar3d v5 (Flight Simulator). These occurred within 2-30 minutes of starting a flight and seemed to only affect one particular aircraft. The BSODs would not create a dump file so it was a bit tricky to narrow down, but I did manage to induce a crash that finally created a dump file using driver verifier that pointed towards semav6msr64.sys. This is associated with 'Intel Computing Improvement Program,' that had somehow wormed it's way onto my PC a few days earlier. After uninstalling it, no more BSODs occurred.

Whilst trying to solve the BSOD issue I updated all the drivers I could, as well as my BIOS. I also removed my overclocks (except XMP). I also installed the Samsung NVMe Driver as I had been using the generic Windows NVMe Driver. This may or may not be relevant given the problem I'm now having:


GTA V
After all that, I started replaying GTA V. I had no issues for about 50 hours but then I experienced the first hard freeze I've had for years. The image froze but the sound carried on playing. I noticed that the game was trying to do an autosave at the time. I restarted my PC and shrugged it off as a one off and stopped playing.

The next day I played for about 6 hours, again, no issues. I then went to do a manual save. Usually the game lists all of your saves but the loading wheel just kept spinning as if it couldn't find them. After clicking my mouse the PC locked up again.


Assassin's Creed Brotherhood
After finishing GTA V, I started replaying Assassin's Creed II. I managed to complete the entire game (~30 hours) without a crash.

I'm now on Brotherhood and I'm nearly at the end (~30 hours). Last night I noticed that during a mission the game was autosaving. However, the save icon stayed on the screen and didn't go away. I then carried on playing for 5 minutes before deciding to restart the game. When attempting to exit to Windows, the screen froze and the sound carried on playing. Upon restarting the PC, I discovered that the game hadn't saved.


To me this looks like a storage problem at it seems to occur when a game is trying to save. The two games are on different SSDs so I'm thinking my C: drive is the culprit:

GTA is run off my D: drive (860 EVO 2TB)
ACB is run off my E: drive (850 EVO 1TB)
Save games are on my C: drive (970 EVO Plus NVMe)

Things I've tried:

- Run diagnostics on all drives using Samsung Magician, HD Sentinel, SeaTools, HD Tune...no problems
- CrystalDiskInfo reports 100% health on all drives
- Run CHKDSK on all drives...no problems
- Run MemTest86 (4 passes), Karhu RAM Test (10 hours), HCI Memtest (1000%)...no errors
- Removed an old 2TB storage HDD with bad blocks, but otherwise works fine...no change
- Reseated all physical hardware and cables
- Uninstalling and reinstalling IRST and Samsung NVMe drivers
- The usual sfc scannow, DISM etc.
- Nothing enlightening in Event Viewer, Reliability Monitor


I just wondered if anyone has any other ideas or avenues to explore.

Windows 1909

Many thanks in advance!

:)

 

Intermittent Freezing linked to Cursor movement

That sounds like a more deep seated issue, perhaps something you have installed is intermittently running and using all available resources.

It may be worth you opening Task Manager (Press Ctrl > Shift >Esc together) and see if anything unusual appears. This shows task manager, the spike was when I opened it, all is quiet afterwards. If you have lots of CPU or Disk activity then click the appropriate item and see what is using all the resources. You can also view the 'Processes' tab in Task Manager which will list what is using what.

 

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This is an intermittent problem, and at first I thought it just happened on the desktop, but today the same thing happened when creating a new folder in the music library. System is Windows 10 Pro x64, 2600K 8GB ram, SSD, Classic Shell, temps OK, no malware.

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I've recently built a new Windows 10 PC and have found that the login page intermittently freezes after boot, followed by a reboot.

When the PC freezed, it is generally before I can enter my password/PIN.

I found some similar issues reported here that suggested the following were contributing factors:

• Hardware assisted virtualization extensions
• Avast Antivirus
• Oracle VirtualBox

At this point, I have uninstalled Avast and Virtualbox and have disabled hardware assisted virtualization on the motherboard.

I've had a look through the System events and can see a Kernel-Power message reporting "The system has rebooted without cleanly shutting down first. This error could be caused if the system stopped responding, crashed, or lost power unexpectedly." and an
earlier error reportin that the previous shutdown was unexpected (I was having difficulty yesterday evening as well)

There are a number of other information events logged but I'm not sure how many of these could point to a possible cause.

I am currently running Windows 10 Pro build 18363.657 (No other updates are available at the time of writing)

CPU is an AMD Ryzen 5 3600

Installed RAM 32.0Gb

Motherboard is X570 chipset based (MSI MPG X570 Gaming Plus)

Primary storage is a Crucial SSD (CT1000MX500SSD4)

Secondary storage is a WD Green HDD (pulled from my previous build)

I'm not sure if this is a WIndows issue or if this is a Motherboard (Firmware) or other hardware issue. If I can rule out Windows related issues then it is one less thing to consider (as this is a newly built PC, there are a large number of factors to consider)

Any ideas? (and have I missed any details?)