Heya,

I've got a really weird problem going on for over a year now and yeah as the title says my pc is freezing randomly. I even took it to a computer servis but they failed to determine what was wrong with it. At first this thing happened maybe onece a week but now it freezes like a few times/day. The thing is that I dont get any  restart or blue screem, my pc just freezes for a few seconds and then it starts working again At the beginning I didnt care much but now it became annoying. So Im wondering if some1 here had the same problem and how you solved it:S

Here are my specs:

AMD phenom II x4 3.2Ghz

Patriot G-series 4gb ddr3 ram

Asrock 870 extreeme3 rev 2.0

GTX 560

WD 1TB caviar green

Corsair TX650W

Windows 7 Ultimate 64

Anyway I  switched the gpu and my ram with a friend of mine and it still the same thing. So the only things left are: disk,mobo and cpu...

So here is a video how things work when it freezes:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OrZtcqWLmjE&feature=youtu.be

And thanks all for any help.

have you tried reinstalled windows and all that junk?

I've had that happen when a hard-drive had low level format issues.  Machine would hang for a few seconds while the drive recalibrated itself.

Did you test your memory lately on errors? I've had a similar problem a while back and had a couple of faults in my memory. Replacing them (<3 lifetime warrenty of Corssair) removed the problem.

Other thing you might consider is replacing the CPU fan if you're still using the original one. I recently replaced mine and the temp dropped from ~60C to ~40C with the new one.

You also might want to try to your mainboard drivers. Windows is know to drop st!tty ones over the manufacturer's one and that m ight also cause problems (have had that as well on my machine).

It is also worth testing your PSU as a faulty one can cause errors just like this when taxed.

If it only happens when you're doing something write-heavy such as web browsing, then it could be a case of the hard drive cache filling up and insisting that the computer stop until it has time to clear out some cache by writing stuff to the hard drive platters.  You've got a really slow hard drive meant for bulk data only, and running real programs off of it isn't going to end well.  Getting a good SSD will fix that.

Does the freezing commonly happen while playing games?

Originally posted by Mako89

GTX 560

Silly Q. What brand GTX560 do you have? A EVGA by any chance? ANd you're using Precision to OC it? I've had odd hangups as well whenplaying games when I used PrecisionX (1st release) in combination with the OSD tool. Turning off the whole OSD thing resolved my hanging problem.

Am neah, its not happening while Im playing games. Maybe it happens while Im alt tabet out of the game and Im browsing something on the net, then everything crashes including skype, the game etc. So is this comon for for the caviar green or its a faulty disk? Becouse I've got one more year of warranty and I can return it but if they're really that bad I'll just get a 128 GB SSD for programs and a few games.

Atm I've got in my friends memory, 4gb ddr3 kingston and it still freezes so I doubt it its a memory fault.

 The cooler that I've got is an afrermarket one(Akasa Venom) + I've got a Cooler Master Storm trooper case so the temps are quiet low actually:)

About the gpu its a MSI GTX 560 Twin Frozr II/OC. A few months back I had some driver issues with it becouse they were crashing every day but that was a common driver issue by Nvidia becouse a lott of people were complaining about it on the official Nvidia forums but guess they fixed that.

"Green" drives are meant for mass storage and not constant read/writes.  Could be the issue.

-edit- Yeah, what Quizzical said.

If the problem were the processor, video card, or power supply, then games would probably cause the freezing, too, not just web browsing.

Here's what I think is probably going on.  The basic problem with hard drives is that they're really slow.  To read or write anything, you have to wait something on the order of 10 ms.  10 ms doesn't sound long, but if you have to read or write hundreds of things at a time, then it adds up.

To combat this, hard drives have some DRAM cache.  It's similar to system memory, so they can write to it very quickly.  One problem is that it's vastly more expensive per GB, so a hard drive doesn't have very much of it.  The amount of cache varies from one hard drive to the next, but around 32 MB is common.  Another problem with cache is that DRAM is volatile, so if you suddenly lose power, anything you thought you had saved but was only in cache is gone.

The idea is that if a program wants to write something to your hard drive, the hard drive sticks it in cache very quickly and says, okay, I'm done, go ahead and continue.  And then when the hard drive isn't otherwise in use, it takes the file from cache and writes it onto the hard drive platters properly, which frees up the cache and makes sure that the data is stored permanently.

This works great until either cache fills up or you unexpectedly lose power.  The latter isn't your problem here, but the former might be.  If this happens, a program wants to write something to the hard drive, and the hard drive says, there isn't room in cache.  So it says, wait, stop, let me clear some stuff out of cache, and then I can accept what you want to write.  The entire point of having cache was to try to prevent this from happening, but cache can only do so much.

The idea was that the program wanted to write something to the hard drive, and then move on and do something else.  But the hard drive says wait, I'm not ready.  So the program has to stop and wait for the hard drive.  Then Windows sees that the program isn't doing anything, and thinks that the program has hung.  Windows then reports to you that the program isn't responding, and suggests that you close it.

This can make several programs lock up at once.  If the hard drive cache is full, then any program that wants to write to the hard drive will be told to sit and wait.  That makes Windows think that they're all being unresponsive at once.

Additionally, if the problem is that the hard drive cache is full, then the programs haven't completely locked up forever.  Eventually the hard drive will free up enough cache space to accept the requested writes, and then the programs will continue working.  Depending on circumstances, this could easily take seconds or minutes.

The slower that the hard drive can read or write, the worse this problem is likely to be.  All else equal, a WD Caviar Green will have a much worse case of it than a WD Caviar Black, because the latter can read and write a lot faster than the former.  If a hard drive is badly fragmented (which makes reads take a lot longer) or nearly full (which makes it take longer to find spaces to accept writes, and also makes the hard drive tend to get fragmented faster), then that slows things down a lot and can greatly exacerbate the problem of cache filling up.

The simplest fix is to get a good SSD.  If an SSD takes 0.1 ms to write a small file rather than 10 ms, then even if you did manage to fill up the SSD cache (which is hard to do because it gets cleared out so fast), it might only take a second or two to clear out the cache entirely and write all of its contents onto the NAND flash properly.  (And that's ignoring that some of the cache might be for read purposes, which means less yet to write.)  SSDs may still want DRAM cache to cover up some latency issues so that you don't have to wait a small fraction of a second here and there, but it's not nearly as critical as hard drives.

Other partial fixes would be to defragment your hard drive regularly, clear up more space on it, replace the hard drive by a faster one (which costs enough that you'd be better off just getting an SSD), or not use your computer as aggressively as you've become accustomed to.  The last one isn't really recommended.

Im defragmenting my disk at least once a week with Defraggler and its always the same thing. And it totaly I've maybe got like 300GB of used space:/ anyway here is a thing that happened yesterday while I was playing Diablo III. So I was having a skype conference with my friends cz we were play together and suddenly my game and skype crashed so the only thing that was left for me to do was to restart my pc. I just hope that an SSD is going to solve this problem otherwise hammer time^^...

Caviar Green drives are the super-energy saving model. I use them a good bit for bulk data.

They go to sleep very early, and when they spin up very slowly. I know on one computer I tried to run one for the main drive; when the hard drive would go to sleep it would take almost 30 seconds for the hard drive to spin back up and for the computer to respond to simple things (like opening a file folder or expanding a menu).

They are fine for backup drives, they are very frustrating for main drives. The sleep timer is set in firmware, so far as I know, I wasn't able to adjust it any longer/better with the Energy settings in the control panel.

This is what you are seeing, I can almost guarantee it. The only way to fix it is to use a different model hard drive (SSD would be great, but it doesn't have to be, even a Caviar Blue doesn't hiccup nearly as bad), and then use the Caviar Green for a secondary bulk data drive.