W10 laptop freezing.

[Harry Bloomfield]

It began over a week ago, just freezing. Mouse-pad didn't respond, keyboard didn't respond, no movement on the screen, but the screen remained frozen.

It progressed and got worse, to the point where it happened three times yesterday. I checked CPU temperatures, showing MAX -73C, so decided to blow the cooling system through with compressed air in the garage. That blew a cloud of dust out, but it still froze two more times after that.

I had already run a thorough diagnostic on the HDD, which confirmed it was fine.

I then decided to pull it apart and try some reseating, but before that take a look at the Virtual Memory settings - that was on automatic, with 8Gb of actual memory. As a test I took manual control of that and set it to Min 1.5x, Max 3x the 8Gb. Since when there have been no further lockups.

Assuming that has fixed it - I thought W10 was supposed to let you know if it was running out of Virtual Memory, not just freeze or lockup?

[Adrian Caspersz]

Sit down with Procmon and work out what process is grabbing that much memory.

That will be logged in Event Viewer I expect.

[Harry Bloomfield]

All it seems to have recorded, is 11x 'The system has rebooted without cleanly shutting down first. This error could be caused if the system stopped responding, crashed, or lost power unexpected...' in the past

24 hours..

Nothing else obvious I could see from that..

Memory in use - 46% largest taken by Firefox at 660Mb with a lot of tabs open.

[Martin Brown]

In previous versions of windows it was possible to enable a small concise crash dump that would be saved if it died with a blue screen event or hard system shutdown. If it dies because the disk drive has failed then all bets are off but knowing where the program counter was at the time of failure may shed some light. This may help:

The other thing to try is running a version of Linux and a memory test. If that shows the same sort of symptoms then you have a hardware fault.

How full is the hard disk? ISTR they have announced an intention to reserve some extra space on it for Win10 so that upgrades don't crash.

[Jethro_uk]

You say that, but it used to extend the shutdown by 5 minutes.

[The Natural Philosopher]

Could be a fan gone and CPU overheating

[Martin Brown]

If you have a recurring untraceable OS fault that is a small price to pay. It doesn't always work if the fatal fault is weird enough.

[Chris Bartram]

Pretty much all versions do. I would run a memory test, personally.

[Harry Bloomfield]

It has been absolutely fine since I manually managed the Virtual Memory setting, so it has to be related to memory - odd thing was, I have never seen a complaint about it running low on memory.

[Harry Bloomfield]

The Natural Philosopher formulated on Tuesday :

Fan was running fine and temperature never exceeded 73C, but 10C cooler after I blew a little dust out. However, it still continued to freeze up at 63C, so not heat related.

[Brian Gaff]

I find it hard to imagine a point where 8 gigs of ram is going to push the virtual stuff past its normal default.

I wonder, could there be a dodgy stick of ram in the machine. If you have pulled them out and put them back in different slots they may not have such a catastrophic effect if they are dodgy. Alternatively disturbing things might have temporary fixed the intermittent problem. Brian

[Andy Burns]

It's still worthwhile having a 1 or 2GB paging file, to allow the numerous service processes that start up and then mainly sit dormant to get paged out to disc, meaning more of that 8GB of physical RAM is available for your foreground processes.

[The Natural Philosopher]

Does it pass memtest?

[Harry Bloomfield]

Chris Bartram expressed precisely :

I have used that before, but not this time...

I made up the USB bootable version, then found I was unable to get into the BIOS to set it to first boot USB, due to the password. I eventually hacked in, then it only had USB HDD, USB CD, USB HDD and none of them worked with the USB thumb drive.

So I decided to try W10's Administrative Tools > Windows Memory Test. That froze at 21% on the extended test or at least it sat at 21% for an extremely long time, but still responded to Esc..

I will try it again a bit later. Still no freezes in normal use.

[Harry Bloomfield]

Brian Gaff explained :

I have yet to delve into it, to see what it has in the way of memory sticks.

[Harry Bloomfield]

Harry Bloomfield brought next idea :

I think I simply must have been a bit impatient...

I ran the W10 memory test on reboot again, I tried all three test levels and it reported all three without errors. I have CPU stress tests and HDD tests, all report everything good, so I am inclined to think there must have been some weird issues with its virtual memory, resolved by taking manual control of it..

[Steven]

Because there enough free space on the drive the swap file is on.