Hello I'm recently experiencing hangs and freezes regarding the error application not responding which happens to almost all of my programs, preventing me from ctrl-alt-del so I end up cold booting. This has been happening whenever I play fullscreen games. I've searched for similar problems and I came across a thread talking about dwm.exe being the culprit so I disabled it from startup. After this the problem seemed to have disappeared, at least temporarily. After 2 hours playing Civilization 5, it happened again. I cannot seem to track the source of it because it doesn't show up in event viewer besides the cold booting errors. Though after this one specific cold boot, I did get Event 129, iaStorA which states there was a "Reset to device, \Device\RaidPort0, was issued". This is the first time I've seen this error but I'm not sure if it pertains to this specific issue as I've had to cold boot several times today trying to isolate the source but with no results. Is there a better way of isolating the issue since event viewer can't really find the source? Edit: I forgot to add that I can still hear audio (Skype, game, music..) whenever this happens. It just seems to freeze everything else but audio.
Could be a problem of your Graphic Card. I would firstly check the temperature of that card and also check that the Heatsink is clean and the Fan works well on that Card. also, don't use over clocking on the Card! Graphic Cards get's very hot, more than a CPU! And as you Audio is still working, just facing an frozen Screen, I would firstly check the Graphic Card!
Well it's not really a frozen screen. The game usually starts off with a pause then it goes (not responding). I try ctrl-alt-del and it doesn't work. If I have the task manager opened previously, I would select it and see everything else with (not responding) next to it. It usually gives an error of application not responding then I can't really do anything, however I can still move my mouse. This leads me to cold booting and when I return, there's nothing indicative of the issue in event viewer. I guess I could check the GPU later but I'm watching movies fine so I don't know if it's the issue.
Sorry if I was not being clear I was just frustrated from cold booting all day due to the issue lol. Edit 1 - I just did a 30 minute test with BF3 which usually runs hot for my gpu just to see. It ran at 97C and I didn't get the application hang. This has only happened for two games (Civ 5 & Natural Selection 2) so I'm not sure if it's game specific or not. I'll do more testing just in case.
I ended up getting a BSOD which stated it was a system corrupt hive so I had to reformat. I guess the problem wasn't really hardware related lol. Will there be a chance that this problem will persist through the reformat since it's registry related or am I safe for now?
If it happened once, it can happen again. The only way to tell for absolutely certain if your problem is resolved is to play the games and see. My crystal ball is down so it's hard to see what's in your future at the moment.