Windows vista freezes / crashes / becomes unresponsive

G

Guest

Hello,

Could someone please help me. Windows Vista froze several times on me
already(the mouse pointer and everything else just won't move and I have to
manually poweroff the computer). I'm doing all kinds of things when the
computer freezes (browsing, watching a video clip using wmv...).

I don't think it's heat or a defective hardware because I had a Windows XP
on this machine and it works fine.

Here are my specs:
Intel e6600 core 2 duo
Intel D975Xbx2 (with integrated sigmatel audio and some lan card)
Sony DVD-rw DW-G120A ATA
NVIDIA geforce 7900 GS
a Lynksis wireless adapter
2048 dual channel ram

*i'm running the 32 bit vista.
 
C

Chad Harris

tnecro--

Your system is a new one. It didn't freeze at the beginning did it? You
have a nice box with a high end new video card and plenty of ram. Try
this--cut services and processes you don't need to run and the rest of the
Vista hygeine steps:

Speed PC and Control CPU Tips/Steps
SPEED AND CPU:
_______________
1) Trim processes you don't need in TM. Google them or "search engine of
your choice them" if you have to.


*Vista Services*

Part One
http://www.tweakvista.com/article38662.aspx

Part Two
http://www.tweakvista.com/article38664.aspx

Windows Vista Services Tweak Guide v1.0
http://www.msfn.org/board/index.php?showtopic=87443

2) Go to

services.msc in run box and turn off services not needed and there are some.

3) Run System File Checker.

SFC: http://www.updatexp.com/scannow-sfc.html

In Vista run it from an elevated command prompt. Right click command on
start and run as administrator.

4) Run 3 or so spyware scans Windows Defender, , Adaware, and Spybot

5) Probably the most important for speed consistently and efficient resource
use DEFRAG with www.raxco.com or www.diskeeeper.com with 15% free space on
drive if DK and or >5% if Raxco's Perfect Disk.
http://groups.msn.com/windowsxpcentral/spyware.msnw Download Adaware and

Spybot from here.
GOOD Overall Review for Defending Your PC:
http://defendingyourmachine.blogspot.com/
MSFT Defense Site MSFT Security:
http://www.microsoft.com/security/default.mspx
Protect Your PC from MSFT Security:
http://www.microsoft.com/athome/security/protect/default.mspx
MSFT Windows Defender
http://www.microsoft.com/athome/security/spyware/software/default.mspx
MSFT MSRT: (Malicious Software Removal Tool)
http://www.microsoft.com/security/malwareremove/default.mspx
MSFT "Windows One Care" in Wings (AV and Spyware Scans)
http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2005/may05/05-13WindowsOneCarePR.mspx


6) Unck items from msconfig start tab you don't need starting and some
won't start--peoiple who think just uncking for many are naive because there
are 12 places things can be started including several reg keys like Run Once
keys and there are serveral.

7) Turn off Messaging service--it's a security vulnerability and it slows
you

8) Defrag very often every other day actually.

9) Turn off indexing.

10) Clear TIF and %temp% files (delete) and go to safe mode to get as many
as u can.

10) Do troubleshooting with msconfig.

11) Do Clean boot with msconfig utility and search for the directions here:

SERVICE CONFIGURATION REFERENCES*


Vista RTM Tweak Guide (Tweaks to Improve Performances)
http://www.google.com/search?source...,GGLJ:2006-47,GGLJ:en&q=vista+rtm+tweak+guide

1) Task Manager lists the services on the services tab in Vista.

2) Type services.msc in run box and using the list of services, click the
service and you'll get a description of services.

3) There is a list here of the default services and a description>>click
"default settings for services" in the left pane.
http://technet2.microsoft.com/Windo...afb8-43ce-b39d-50e6d5b89bf81033.mspx?mfr=true

4) To view service dependencies
1.
Open Services.

2.
In the details pane, right-click the service that you want to view
dependencies for, and then click Properties.

3.
Click the Dependencies tab.

4.
To view services that are associated dependencies of the selected service,
in the list on the Dependencies tab, click the plus sign next to the
service.

Many of the services but not all in Vista are the same as in XP, so in that
context:

http://www.mvps.org/winhelp2002/services.htm

Also see the extremely helpful site:
Black Viper's Service List

http://www.dead-eye.net/WinXP Services.htm


Black Viper's Site (Many of the same services in Vista)
http://www.dead-eye.net/WinXP Services.htm

http://www.z123.org/techsupport/xpservices.htm
http://www.geocities.com/ziyadhosein/xpserv1.htm
http://www.pacs-portal.co.uk/startup_content.php
This will be helpful
http://web.archive.org/web/20041128084144/www.blackviper.com/WinXP/servicecfg.htm
______________________________________________________________________________________________
How to troubleshoot by using the System Configuration utility in Windows XP
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/310560/
Resources for troubleshooting startup problems in Windows XP
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/308041/
How to perform advanced clean-boot troubleshooting in Windows XP
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;316434
How to perform a clean boot in Windows XP
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/310353/
How to Disable a Service or Device that Prevents Windows from Starting
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/310602/

Also ck out these references:
http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,1558,5155,00.asp
http://www.speedupyourcomputer.windowsreinstall.com/index.htm and
http://www.extremetech.com/search_r...=how+to+speed+windows+xp&filterapp=&site=4P.S.

Defragging with a decent defrag every day will make a huge dent inefficient
resource/CPU use.Good luck,CH
Perfect Disk has a 5 month full functionality trial on now for Windows
Vista.

Good luck,

CH
____________________________________

Get a Follow the Scooter Libby Bus to Prison Icon for your website and read
Frank Rich one of the best essayists today:

Saturday, February 03, 2007
FRANK RICH: Why Dick Cheney Cracked Up
IN the days since Dick Cheney lost it on CNN, our nation's armchair shrinks
have had a blast. The vice president who boasted of "enormous successes" in
Iraq and barked "hogwash" at the congenitally mild Wolf Blitzer has been
roundly judged delusional, pathologically dishonest or just plain nuts. But
what else is new? We identified those diagnoses long ago.
The more intriguing question is what ignited this particularly violent
public flare-up.The answer can be found in the timing of the CNN interview,
which was conducted the day after the start of the perjury trial of Mr.
Cheney's former top aide, Scooter Libby. The vice president's on-camera
crackup reflected his understandable fear that a White House cover-up was
crumbling. He knew that sworn testimony in a Washington courtroom would
reveal still more sordid details about how the administration lied to take
the country into war in Iraq.
He knew that those revelations could cripple the White House's current
campaign to escalate that war and foment apocalyptic scenarios about Iran.
Scariest of all, he knew that he might yet have to testify under oath
himself.Mr. Cheney, in other words, understands the danger this trial poses
to the White House even as some of Washington remains oblivious. From the
start, the capital has belittled the Joseph and Valerie Wilson affair as "a
tempest in a teapot," as David Broder of The Washington Post reiterated just
five months ago.
When "all of the facts come out in this case, it's going to be laughable
because the consequences are not that great," Bob Woodward said in 2005. Or,
as Robert Novak suggested in 2003 before he revealed Ms. Wilson's identity
as a C.I.A. officer in his column, "weapons of mass destruction or uranium
from Niger" are "little elitist issues that don't bother most of the
people." Those issues may not trouble Mr. Novak, but they do loom large to
other people, especially those who sent their kids off to war over
nonexistent weapons of mass destruction and nonexistent uranium.
In terms of the big issues, the question of who first leaked Ms. Wilson's
identity (whether Mr. Libby, Richard Armitage, Ari Fleischer or Karl Rove)
to which journalist (whether Mr. Woodward, Mr. Novak, Judith Miller or Matt
Cooper) has always been a red herring. It's entirely possible that the White
House has always been telling the truth when it says that no one intended to
unmask a secret agent. (No one has been charged with that crime.)
The White House is also telling the truth when it repeatedly says that Mr.
Cheney did not send Mr. Wilson on his C.I.A.-sponsored African trip to check
out a supposed Iraq-Niger uranium transaction. (Another red herring, since
Mr. Wilson didn't make that accusation in the first place.) But if the
administration is telling the truth on these narrow questions and had little
to hide about the Wilson trip per se, its wild overreaction to the episode
was an incriminating sign it was hiding something else.
According to testimony in the Libby case, the White House went berserk when
Mr. Wilson published his Op-Ed article in The Times in July 2003 about what
he didn't find in Africa. Top officials gossiped incessantly about both
Wilsons to anyone who would listen, Mr. Cheney and Mr. Libby conferred about
them several times a day, and finally Mr. Libby, known as an exceptionally
discreet White House courtier, became so sloppy that his alleged lying
landed him with five felony counts.
The explanation for the hysteria has long been obvious. The White House was
terrified about being found guilty of a far greater crime than outing a
C.I.A. officer: lying to the nation to hype its case for war. When Mr.
Wilson, an obscure retired diplomat, touched that raw nerve, all the
president's men panicked because they knew Mr. Wilson's modest finding in
Africa was the tip of a far larger iceberg. They knew that there was still
far more damning evidence of the administration's W.M.D. lies lurking in the
bowels of the bureaucracy.
Thanks to the commotion caused by the leak case, that damning evidence has
slowly dribbled out. By my count we now know of at least a half-dozen
instances before the start of the Iraq war when various intelligence
agencies and others signaled that evidence of Iraq's purchase of uranium in
Africa might be dubious or fabricated. (These are detailed in the timelines
at frankrich.com/timeline.htm.) The culmination of these warnings arrived in
January 2003, the same month as the president's State of the Union address,
when the White House received a memo from the National Intelligence Council,
the coordinating body for all American spy agencies, stating unequivocally
that the claim was baseless.
Nonetheless President Bush brandished that fearful "uranium from Africa" in
his speech to Congress as he hustled the country into war in Iraq.If the war
had been a cakewalk, few would have cared to investigate the administration's
deceit at its inception. But by the time Mr. Wilson's Op-Ed article
appeared - some five months after the State of the Union and two months
after "Mission Accomplished" - there was something terribly wrong with the
White House's triumphal picture.
More than 60 American troops had been killed since Mr. Bush celebrated the
end of "major combat operations" by prancing about an aircraft carrier. No
W.M.D. had been found, and we weren't even able to turn on the lights in
Baghdad. For the first time, more than half of Americans told a Washington
Post-ABC News poll that the level of casualties was "unacceptable." It was
urgent, therefore, that the awkward questions raised by Mr. Wilson's
revelation of his Africa trip be squelched as quickly as possible. He had to
be smeared as an inconsequential has-been whose mission was merely a trivial
boondoggle arranged by his wife.
The C.I.A., which had actually resisted the uranium fictions, had to be
strong-armed into taking the blame for the 16 errant words in the State of
the Union speech. What we are learning from Mr. Libby's trial is just what a
herculean effort it took to execute this two-pronged cover-up after Mr.
Wilson's article appeared. Mr. Cheney was the hands-on manager of the 24/7
campaign of press manipulation and high-stakes character assassination, with
Mr. Libby as his chief hatchet man. Though Mr. Libby's lawyers are now
arguing that their client was a sacrificial lamb thrown to the feds to
shield Mr. Rove, Mr. Libby actually was - and still is - a stooge for the
vice president.
Whether he will go to jail for his misplaced loyalty is the human drama of
his trial. But for the country there are bigger issues at stake, and they
are not, as the White House would have us believe, ancient history. The
administration propaganda flimflams that sold us the war are now being
retrofitted to expand and extend it.In a replay of the run-up to the
original invasion, a new National Intelligence Estimate, requested by
Congress in August to summarize all intelligence assessments on Iraq, was
mysteriously delayed until last week, well after the president had set his
surge.
Even the declassified passages released on Friday - the grim takes on the
weak Iraqi security forces and the spiraling sectarian violence - foretell
that the latest plan for victory is doomed. (As a White House communications
aide testified at the Libby trial, this administration habitually releases
bad news on Fridays because "fewer people pay attention when it's reported
on Saturday.") A Pentagon inspector general's report, uncovered by Business
Week last week, was also kept on the q.t.: it shows that even as more
American troops are being thrown into the grinder in Iraq, existing troops
lack the guns and ammunition to "effectively complete their missions." Army
and Marine Corps commanders told The Washington Post that both armor and
trucks were in such short supply that their best hope is that "five brigades
of up-armored Humvees fall out of the sky."
Tomorrow is the fourth anniversary of Colin Powell's notorious W.M.D.
pantomime before the United Nations Security Council, a fair amount of it a
Cheney-Libby production. To mark this milestone, the White House is reviving
the same script to rev up the war's escalation, this time hyping Iran-Iraq
connections instead of Al Qaeda-Iraq connections. In his Jan. 10 prime-time
speech on Iraq, Mr. Bush said that Iran was supplying "advanced weaponry and
training to our enemies," even though the evidence suggests that Iran is
actually in bed with our "friends" in Iraq, the Maliki government.
The administration promised a dossier to back up its claims, but that too
has been delayed twice amid reports of what The Times calls "a continuing
debate about how well the information proved the Bush administration's
case." Call it a coincidence - though there are no coincidences - but it's
only fitting that the Libby trial began as news arrived of the death of E.
Howard Hunt, the former C.I.A. agent whose bungling of the Watergate
break-in sent him to jail and led to the unraveling of the Nixon presidency
two years later.
Still, we can't push the parallels too far. No one died in Watergate. This
time around our country can't wait two more years for the White House to be
stopped from playing its games with American blood.
 
G

Guest

I had similar problems with the earlier versions of Vista. Try updating the
video drivers with the Vista one's at the nVidia website.

- John
 
G

Guest

Usasma,
I tried using the very driver that vista loaded for my gfx card and the
latest nvidia driver(WDDM) which is 97.46. Both drivers crashed.

I also tried disabling some of the hardware devices such as my lan card,
dvd-rw, soundcard. My machine still froze.

Chad Harris,
Thanks for the lengthy reply. I tried stopping as many services as I could.
My system still crashed. I also tried scanning for spyware. Both did not help
as my machine still crashed. I don't think that it's a spyware problem
because i try really hard to avoid spyware and my computer just came from a
fresh format and OS installation. I don't think it's the services either
because I have plenty of ram and at most, I only use up to 35% of my phys
ram.

Any other suggestions?
 
G

Guest

I fixed my problem. THe problem was the Sigma Tel integrated audio card in my
intel d975xbx2 motherboard. To fix it, I rolled back the sound card's driver
to the default driver that Vista assigned to it. My computer hasn't froze
from then...
 
G

Guest

I became very frustrated with many of the same symptoms. After a great deal
of research, I learned that Vista handles system memory much differently than
XP. I too could run XP Pro flawlessly, but Vista would crash and give errors
that I could not replicate. I downloaded Memtest86 which is free and learned
that I had a bad stick of memory. Since it was new memory, I swapped it for
two new sticks and just like magic everything works. Don't be fooled by XP
working and Vista not.
 
G

Guest

i am trying to download flight simulator 2004,and sidewinder 2, it just does
not let me do.
 
D

Don

MissMuffitt said:
- am also having the same problem. I have to do a reset every time as
nothing will respond on my keyboard. Does anyone have any ideas about
why this is happening? My Vista is an upgrade from XP home.-

Hi MM,

I can't tell what/who you are responding to because the original post
has expired from the MS news server. You would be much better off to
start your own new post, including all the details of your problem.
 
T

the wharf rat

I am encountering freezing problems recently and even if I restored a
previous restore point I know was good, the freeze still happens.

You obviously need a nice warm hairdryer!

After you finish blowing your multimeter with that dryer you might
check the event logs. Freezes are typically heat or drive related.
Memeory problems usually manifest as crashes rather than freezes.

Is your single 80mm fan spinning? Also check the single 80mm fan
in the power supply and the single 80mm fan stuck on top of the cpu.
 
G

Gis Bun

Not really surprised that it's from an Acer system. :)

If it's recent enough, *maybe* they can help if you got it under a warranty.

I'd pull out anything that didn't come with the system.

While it's still running, backup your data....

Power supply would probably shut down your system immediately or rebooting.

Bad memory normally would give a blue screen. You could get into the Vista
boot manager and run the memory diagnostics to rule it out.
 
R

Rick Rogers

Hi Ryan,

Start by running the memory diagnostic as random freezes can be memory
related. Simply type "memory diagnostic tool" into the search line and
select it from the menu. It will run on a system restart and then give you a
report on the memory's condition. If faulty, replace it.

If it passes, you might want to look at updating video drivers as they are
the next most common cause.

--
Best of Luck,

Rick Rogers, aka "Nutcase" - Microsoft MVP

Windows help - www.rickrogers.org
My thoughts http://rick-mvp.blogspot.com
 
B

Blithe

I've had very similar if not identical issues for months - search on my
handle - Blithe - for my posts.
However - within the last few days - I've seen significant improvement.
Suggestions on this newsgroup and Google hits on 'Vista freezes' (that
previously I had not taken too seriously) had finally succeeded in focusing
my attention on freezes caused by high temperature. My quad CPU ( Intel(R)
Core(TM)2 Extreme CPU Q6850 @ 3.00GHz, 2997 Mhz, 4 Core(s), 4 Logical
Processor) alone must generate considerable heat. So I gave attention to my
desktop's ventilation. I did not add fans - as what I'm running with a 700
watt power supply already seems adequate (my guesstimate) but I simply
opened the front panel on my Antec tower that I had customarily had closed
to muffle the sound. Results - so far have been no freezes.

NOTE: I had been frustrated that Vista Device Mgr. had consistently not
given any useable clues for the freezes. I guess it never had a chance. I
guess what's missing on my PC is a high temperature warning? I will give
that serious thought when shopping for my next PC.

I hope this helps. Try cooling it! Good luck - Blithe
 
B

Blithe

Correction: I had meant to write "Event Viewer" in my explanation below -
not "Vista Device Mgr."
- Blithe
 

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