Windows 10: Win 10 freezes for a few seconds randomly

Hello:


For a long time, my PC would freeze for a couple seconds and then the display would fail to render. After a lot of poking, it turns out that there is some kind of weirdness between the Spotify program downloaded from the website and some video cards. When I downloaded Spotify from the Win 10 store, the rendering crash stopped.


However, I am still getting these freezes where the PC will just stop for a couple seconds and then continue. I can't help wondering if it is still related to Spotify somehow, but after some experimenting, it seems to happen even when Spotify is not running at all.


A few notes:

• I have completely wiped and reinstalled drivers for the video card
• No inputs occur during the freeze. So, if I type "zzzzzzzzzzzzzz" during the freeze, the PC doesn't catch up when it returns to functionality, as if sitting in a cache somewhere. It just stops taking input at all.
• I can't detect any pattern at all. It _may_ happen more often when I am switching contexts e.g. going from Outlook to Notepad, but honestly, I am not 100% sure that is the case.
• When I go to the OS event viewer and reliability monitor, I am not noticing any errors that correspond with the freezes. The performance monitor doesn't go haywire when it happens.

So there's two questions here:


1. Has anyone run into this problem before?

2. I am reasonably competent around PC's. Where else can I look for clues re what his happening? Crash dump files? Which ones? How to view them? etc. I would rather not have to install and uninstall individual programs to figure out what might be the culprit.


A quick snapshot of my setup:


Operating System

Windows 10 Home 64-bit

CPU

Intel Core i9 9900K @ 3.60GHz 29 °C

Coffee Lake 14nm Technology

RAM

32.0GB Dual-Channel Unknown @ 1329MHz 19-19-19-43

Motherboard

Alienware 0R3FWM U3E1

Graphics

XB271HK 3840x2160@60Hz

XB271HK 3840x2160@60Hz

Intel UHD Graphics 630 Dell

3071MB NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080 Ti Dell 34 °C

SLI Disabled

Storage

1863GB Seagate ST2000DM001-1ER164 SATA 28 °C

953GB NVMe Samsung SSD 970 RAID SSD

Optical Drives

HL-DT-ST BD-RE BU40N

Audio

NVIDIA Virtual Audio Device Wave Extensible WDM

:)

 

Windows 10 freezes randomly

I had already tried turning off fast startup, to no avail.
Will look at the list you provided, thanks. Hard to do when computer freezes on the Windows loading screen though. *Biggrin

I had tried that as well... no result.

 

Windows 10 freezes randomly


Turning off fast startup helped with this issue for another user on a different forum. For newbies, see steps Windows 10 Freezes Randomly.

 

Windows 10 freezes randomly

Hi,

To better assist you regarding Windows 10 which freezes randomly, please provide the following:

• Which is the last Windows update build you've applied to the computer?
• Are there any third party applications that are currently installed?

Furthermore, we suggest that you do a BIOS update to your computer. Here are the steps:

• Check the motherboard manufacturer's website to find the specific model of your motherboard.
• Go to the computer manufacturer's website.
• Look for the computer model that you're using.
• You should find any available BIOS update.

Let us know how it goes.