Windows 7 machine (freezes)

[Arimyth]

I posted this on the MalwareBytes infected help forum but they diagnosed me without any sort of infection.

The symptoms are that my computer will periodically freeze up (I still see things update such as live notifications, video feed, or new messages) but everything is unclickable and unresponsive. The hover animations don't appear and no clicks will register. I originally thought this was only when I let my computer idle for a few minutes or more but it happens pretty much any time now (although less common when I'm using it).

This will last until I do ctrl + alt + del and click once. It'll seemingly "jump" or "refresh" the system and the next time I try to click or hover over something (i.e. the task manager) it will work as normal and so will everything else on my computer. This will last for however long it takes for the bug to reappear.

Note that there may be other ways to mitigate the system besides ctrl + alt + del but I haven't found any others.

I'm updated to the latest drivers for my graphics card (Radeon RX 480) and have only experienced this problem for about 2 weeks (though I have had this before on a previous Windows laptop).

[David H. Lipman]

My suggestion...

Perform a System restore ( it is often most successful in Safe Mode )  to a point prior to the  beginning of that 2 week period.  Thus if the problem started on August 23^rd, do a System Restore to a break point on 8/20 or 8/21.

 

[Arimyth]

All my system restore points were deleted when I tried to restore to one of them and it gave me an error of "ran out of space during the restore".

[David H. Lipman]

{ sigh }

That's beat.  That's a loss of a possible workaround.

[Arimyth]

Indeed. What can I do with that possibility out of the question?

Edited September 7, 2018 by Arimyth

[David H. Lipman]

I'm not sure.  You could use Systinternals Process Explorer to find a resource hog or the built-in Resource Monitor to find the system component or sub-system file that is a resource hog causing other running apps to lose their place and appear to "freeze" but are just waiting to get their turn to run the next routine. 

I have often seen this to happen with SVCHOST and Windows Update ( wuauserv ) .

[Arimyth]

Not exactly sure how to do the things you mentioned.

Could you give some info on how to do those steps?

[David H. Lipman]

Sysinternals Process Explorer

Resource Monitor -->

Run Task Manager ( Hit 'Ctrl' + 'Alt' + 'Del' and choose "start Task Manager" )

Choose the "Performance" tab then "Resource Monitor...".

However I don't have any instruction on how to use them to specifically sleuth out the resource hog.  

 

 

Edited September 7, 2018 by David H. Lipman

[exile360]

You could try Kill Frozen Programs by Tweaking.com which is available here to see if it is able to find the culprit.  It creates a log so that may shed some light on the offending process/program that is causing the issue, but of course it is possible that it's a hardware issue or driver issue as well so I don't know how effective it would be in revealing that if that turns out to be the case.  Either way it might be worth a shot if none of the other suggestions do the trick.