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Hi guys, if anyone can help very much appreciated!
These are my specs:
Operating System
Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit SP1
CPU
Intel Core i7 4790 @ 3.60GHz
Haswell 22nm Technology
RAM
16.0GB Dual-Channel DDR3 @ 798MHz (11-11-11-28)
Motherboard
ASUSTeK COMPUTER INC. H81M-PLUS (SOCKET 1150)
Graphics
ZOWIE XL LCD (1920x1080@144Hz)
S23B350 (1920x1080@60Hz)
2047MB NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980 Ti (ZOTAC International)
Storage
447GB KINGSTON SV300S37A480G SCSI Disk Device (SSD)
Fairly beasty computer, but having a very strange problem. Occasionally when im playing games, my game will "freeze" for about 1 minute. During this minute, i can alt-tab, my net (and discord+voicechat) still works.
The biggest oddity is if i have chrome open, i can alt-tab to chrome and try to open some new tabs, however when i do this the tabs will just be "loading" and wont show anything (chrome says something about cache, i've tried clearing cache before, idk if it helps)
once the "freeze" is over, everything catches up really quickly and my computer runs as normal.
I think i've had this problem since getting the computer, though it's extremely rare, until i started stressing it out with PUBG/high end games at which point it's happening every day now
A few things that seem to make this occur more often:
- pretty much only when playing games - the higher the performance, the more likely (mostly happening PUBG atm, but has happened much rarer on gwent)
- i think closing things beforehand helps (so not having extraneous stuff running, similar to above)
Additional info:
I updated all my drivers (driver boostered to try to cover all angles)
Use MSE and windows 7. Never had a virus on this PC, scans always come up clean on malwarebytes)
I have a feeling it could be to do with my graphics card, maybe some incompatability with windows 7? (i've seen issues with this specific card 980TI that it might not be using the full amount of RAM on the card, it might show anywhere between 2-6gb of the actual ram or something??) - should i try updating to windows 10?
Reason i haven't updated to wd10 is because i like using classic mode (no aero, no v-sync, means i can windowless fullscreen a lot of stuff with no problems and lag)
Haven't tried disabling MSE whilst playing (maybe it's doing some scans? idk)
Haven't tried messing around with CPU priority
I use displayfusion to manage my multiple monitors, disabled that but it didn't help
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So yeah, any help massively appreciated. After updating all drivers, trying different amount of stuff being open/not open, checking if it's my network (it's not), the only next step would be to upgrade to windows 10?
I have an (irrational?) fear that WD10 might cause more incompatibility issues with stuff on my computer which is why i've held off upgrading, but idk, all opinions appreciated
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United Kingdom20326 Posts
Sounds like it could be a storage drive issue, try clean uninstall and install of older GPU drivers as well. This kind of thing can be awkward to diagnose but i'd personally nuke everything and reinstall win7 before going to 10
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I want to install *older* drivers? regardless i will try a complete uninstall/reinstall of my GPU drivers
When i first installled win7 on this machine it actually came with no drivers... including no network driver (>_>) so i got some driver package online and installed on that. Seemed to work fine except for this hanging issue (it used to actually have network problems where my computer would "freeze" before being able to connect to a network, though now it seems that it just freezes randomly during games)
If anyone has a suggested (ahem) link for win7 install, lmk...
edit:
tried a full uninstall --> install of graphics drivers, did a minimal install (just the driver)
didn't help 
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United Kingdom20326 Posts
Yeah, newer drivers break things sometimes
In the resource monitor - Disk section you can see the queue length on your storage drives, that might spike during some issues. If that doesn't show anything then there could still be a storage drive issue
Even though i have 2 SSD's, OS on SSD, everything set to SSD i get occasional system lock ups for 5-10 seconds because programs inexplicably try to access something on another hard drive which has to spin up. I used to get weird problems like yours for a while before my other ssd died (something would try to access it and a bunch of programs would go unresponsive for a long time before it responded) so that's why i think storage maybe. It could be something else entirely unrelated, i don't have the knowledge to diagnose that
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Alright i'll keep my resource monitor open and see what it does on the next freeze
edit:
alright, so i caught it on the resource monitor, but i still don't know what's wrong
Before it looked like chrome was doing a ton of stuff, but then i turned off chrome in the background to make it empty. The only things im running at that point is pubg and discord
any diagnosis help T__T
idk maybe if it's the way windows can't handle the amount of memory, or i might just need to update to windows 10 and try my luck there
As you can see in the disk monitor, the only thing i saw was that the blue line spiked up all the way to the top. Then after the freeze was over i took a screenshot as you can see
Is it possible i have a faulty SSD? this doesn't happen in normal browsing/work, only when i play intensive games
Or is there something wrong with my graphics card
![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/5yEkvfV.png)
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United Kingdom20326 Posts
Huh i don't even know how to read that
maybe waiting for disk until the blue line drops to 0 again (that line goes up when disk is busy, down to 0 when it's idle)
there's another tab "disk activity" near the middle which you can expand for some more information but this is still just lots of guessing 
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Alright i'll try again tomorrow, i'll make it freeze with the disk activity tab open and see what happens haha
![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/fbf1ydz.png)
well idk.. this is during the freeze, there's actually a massive lack of activity if anything
halp T___T
i don't think there's something wrong with my SSD cause this only happens when i play games, is there a way to monitor my GPU memory?
edit: gonna get GPU-Z and try and monitor my GPU memory. if no bueno then i guess i'll have to update to windoze 10 :-/
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Well new update
I had GPU-Z running the whole time to see what the issue is, but then it happened... after i closed my game just browsing the internet wtf >_>
My GPU wasn't being used much at all, so i think that isn't the problem, so i guess it might be my SSD?
Any experts here can shed some light, maybe could i try plugging the SSD into a new slot or something idk?
edit:
had a check in my bios, AHCI was on already (good, but means it wasn't IDE being the problem..)
Then i saw "aggressive LPM" enabled. Since i'm using a desktop, i've turned it off now. Perhaps this might be the fix?
double edit:
So yeah, after searching online, it seems like googling "SSD freeze" exactly matches my problems. So i guess i'll try disabling this LPM, after that i need to update my sata drivers? (never done that before, didn't know it was a thing)
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Ok so, disabling LPM didn't work
It looks like i need to do something with the drivers connecting to my SSD, or i need to downgrade to IDE?
At this point i'm getting into areas where i don't want to screw up my computer, so any advice from someone who knows better (like how to update my sata drivers) appreciated
Device manager thinks it's up to date so idk...
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United Kingdom20326 Posts
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Well what should i do then? I don't see any other options right now and having random freezes throughout the day seems kind of unacceptable
What kind of downsides am i taking on that justify the freezes
edit:
so more research learned some fruit
it seems the asus official drivers actually are no good (according to one anecdote who got the same problems)
tried updating to a new driver using some drivepack software, no idea where it came from but cross fingers
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go in power settings/power plan; see the one you're running under and set the HDD's/SDD's to never turn off.
(could also be something hardware related)
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Tried that already
Good news though! Haven't had any issues since installing this new driver!
who would have known that the manufacturers drivers would have bugs like this huh...
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United Kingdom20326 Posts
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EPT
