I often use the hibernate function in between sessions. My last actual boot was Saturday evening, when I installed several Windows updates. It was working perfectly fine this morning; get home for lunch, and the browser was hanging for upwards of a minute at a time. So I try to reboot, it hung up, so I hit the cold reboot button. Seemed to start up fine, so I got around to finally updating to Firefox 3.63 (from 3.5X), figuring that would solve the problem. Nope-and in fact it seems to be affecting all Windows processes.
Would this appear to be a harddrive issue, a processor issue, or something else (like a virus)? I am about to run a scan as soon as this message posts. I’ll probably also try a system restore.
When I was having similar problems with my creaky Pentium-4 machine, it turned out to be the hard drive that was locking the machine. AVG (which has become a resource hog) + ancient 250 GB drive = lock-ups that lasted anywhere from 5 to 40 seconds at a time. It drove me crazy. Turning off Windows Search (which runs a background indexing thread) and switching to Security Essentials made things more bearable, but didn’t eliminate it altogether. Luckily, I upgraded to a spiffy new computer, and the P4 is now a leg rest.
Hard drive seems the most likely, when a write fails it tends to hang until the ‘failed’ status returns. If you look in the event manager you may find multiple disk errors. Either way I would run through chkdsk if I were you and see if that sorts the issue, it should let you know after the scan if there were any errors it was not able to fix.
When I was experiencing problems, there were no messages in the Event Log (which is what I presume you meant, rather than Event Manager). Hardware errors are normally dealt with by the hard drive firmware by reissuing a read or write request a few times before failing back to the OS. In the case of my machine, it seemed that the hard drive was getting failures on every operation for huge blocks of the drive, but that the retries succeeded before the drive registered a failure. That was the only explanation that I could think of that explained the lack of errors in the OS (i.e., no failures showing up in Event Viewer, no apparently corrupted files in chkdsk) combined with the long lock-ups. When it was happening, even the Task Manager performance graphs froze.
The OS usually logs HDD write errors with something telling you that the operation succeeded but took longer than expected and then listing the time to complete in ms. Not always of course, it doesn’t have to be the HDD when things like this occur but it is the most likely culprit so should be ruled out first, preferably with a copy of Spinrite if you can lay your hands on one.
Well, I checked check disc, and it found nothing. I am now trying to access this Event Log/Manager/Viewer thing, which I never knew existed until now (so thanks for that at least). However, it didn’t show any errors with the hard drive per se. Guess I’ll take it into the shop on Friday and see what they think…
Random hangs could also point to overheating. Have you dusted the insides of your computer recently ? Dust bunnies add up, and once they cake the fans/radiators/air intakes/outtakes they can easily choke a system to death. You might want to download SpeedFan or a similar app to check on your machines internal temperatures - as a general rule, a CPU temp higher than ~50, GPU temp higher than ~70 and hard drive temps higher than ~40 are worrysome (though it also depends on your actual specs, of course).
Yeah, I blasted it with one of those cans yesterday just to be sure, even tho I did so a few months ago and yesterday I didn’t notice much dust build up. That Speedfan thing looks useful tho.