Annoying Freezing Issue

WizardCM

New Member
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Edit: I've noticed a number of other threads talking about the same issue. Seems it's more widespread than I thought.

So I'm having a very weird issue in the Release Preview that I never had on the Consumer Preview. This is running natively on my laptop (all specs here).

Basically, almost at random but usually during downloads/installations, the operating system freezes program-by-program, starting with the taskbar. It's not the kind of freezing that turns white and gives the options to 'End Task,' but one where it seems more like an image overlay. Usually you can also tell by the frozen cursor animation, but the cursor can still be moved (for a time. Usually the last thing to go is the active application or the desktop (as in the icon selection box or the context menu).

I have attempted to look through Event Viewer, but other than the forced shutdown I have to perform to fix the issue, there doesn't seem to be anything else of use.

For one run I had Task Manager running on my secondary monitor, but on the freeze there was no unusual spike in any of the sections.

At first I thought it was a graphics driver issue, so I updated both the Intel and NVIDIA graphics drivers. This has not improved the issue.

Any suggestions are greatly appreciated.
 

My Computer

System One

  • OS
    Windows 8 Release Preview
Same here. I have not found a fix for it yet.

Things I've tried:
- Reinstalling Windows
- Updating drivers
- Disabling AHCI and reinstalling

It happens every time I'm trying to update a game on Origin or by browsing internet. Eventually the system locks up, but there is no crash dump.

Hardware:
CPU: Intel Celeron G530
Motherboard: Gigabyte GA-H61M-D2-B3
RAM: Kingstom 4gb DDR3 1066MHz
HDD: 120gb Sata
GPU: Nvidia Geforce GTX 550 Ti


Attached some logs if anyone wants to take a look.
 
Last edited:

My Computer

System One

  • OS
    Windows 8 Release Preview
Apparently Rafael Rivera knows at least part of the cause, but doesn't seem to know of a solution.
You can see his response and his suggestion that could help us all at this thread.
 

My Computer

System One

  • OS
    Windows 8 Release Preview
This is what fixed the freezing for me...
I have a GTX590 and I had to update the video driver to 301.42 in order to fix the freezing. The Win8 version on nvidia's site is for the Win8 CP and not Win8 RP, so download the Win7 driver instead, 301.42.
A new nvidia RP driver is said to be being released next week.
New Windows 8 drivers from NVIDIA coming next week - Neowin
 

My Computer

System One

  • OS
    Windows 8 Pro x64
    CPU
    Intel 2600K @4.2GHz
    Motherboard
    Asus Maximus V Gene
    Memory
    16GB DDR3 1600MHz
    Graphics Card(s)
    eVGA GTX 590
    Monitor(s) Displays
    Dell 3008WFP
    Screen Resolution
    2560x1600
    Hard Drives
    2x Intel 510 SSD - RAID 0 512GB
    PSU
    Antec HCP-1200
    Internet Speed
    60Mbit D 8Mbit U

My Computer

System One

  • OS
    Windows 8 Release Preview
Same here. Constant freezes in a seperate partition and in Virtual Box. Never had this problem with CP. Unfortunately new Nvidea drivers do not help since I have an ATI card. If that continues, I will skip this one.
 

My Computer

System One

  • OS
    Vista and Win7
    System Manufacturer/Model
    2xHP, 2xGateway, 1xDell, 1xSony
    Hard Drives
    5 SSDs and 12 HDs
The problem with freezing is that there's usually no BSOD to pinpoint the cause, and the hang probably occurs some time after the initial memory fault has occurred. In all events, the system is useless for critical work, and is not much fun either!

Since Windows 7 was introduced, BSODs have become much less common, due to a Mark Russinovich modification to Windows.

In Windows 7, to prevent crashes, the concept of the "fault tolerant heap" (FTH) was introduced, and in Windows 8, it is probably getting in the way of identifying the conflicts which are due to badly behaved drivers interacting with sensitive new code in the OS. FTH operates by delaying the crash, sandboxing an area of memory that is wrongly written to, in the expectation that the faulty process will have terminated before the memory is legitimately used by another process. Or something like that. Instead of a crash, everything locks up and no memory dump is written.

On a machine that is freezing on a regular basis, making the delinquent process more likely to crash instead of freeze, may result in a machine that does not even boot properly, so only on a system that is dual-booting, or you have skills to restore the registry when your windows 8 is offline would this be any use.

So don't do this if you have any doubts, or if you don't want to have to reinstall windows 8 again, or if you can't do an offline registry repair, or if the problem is too advanced that you can't run safe mode. Don't do it if your system is generally running without issues, or if you can live with the problem. This is a last resort measure to get a crash dump out of a failing or failed system where you cant get a crashdump another way.

Make sure you have your system set to

a) produce crash dumps
b) reboot to safe mode

Start, type msconfig.exe and open it.

You might want to first go to the tools tab find the system information entry and launch it, and save the information about your system.

Start, type sysdm.cpl and open it.

Set your configuration to reboot in safe mode, and your system recovery options to give a crash dump:View attachment 6464 Save and shut down both apps.

Start, type regedit and open it.

In regedit navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\FTH (I would recommend you File, Export the key to FTH.reg.)

Modify the value of enabled to 0:View attachment 6465 and close the registry editor.

You may experience an immediate BSOD, or you may need to restart and do some things, but with any luck the random freeze you have been experiencing will be translated into a BSOD, with corresponding diagnostic dump file, which you can send to the crashes and debugging experts here.

The dump file is located in the Windows folder as a file MEMORY.DMP or in the windows\minidump folder with a .dmp extension. choose the latest date if there are more than one files.

If you want some return to Windows 8 after this, you will need to undo the mischief created earlier.

How to edit an offline registry.

If you have a dual booting system, boot to windows 7, vista or XP and open regedit or regedt32

You can also do this from the windows PE available on Windows 7 and 8 installation disks or Bart PE, Hirens, UBCD etc, or from windows or RE repair recovery options if your machine has them in the boot menu options. It is often as easy as opening regedit from the command prompt. You may need to press shift F10 to open the command prompt window.

Click HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE, click File, Load Hive..., select the windows 8 windir - windows\system32\config\SOFTWARE and type a name like Win8 (any name will do, as long as it is different from the names already there under HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE) in the dialog.

Navigate down through Microsoft to FTH and change the value of Enabled back to 1.
Click back to the Win8 key and click File, Unload hive... and regedit should post the edited hive back to the location it came from.

Then things should be back to the state they were, and hopefully the crash analysis should pinpoint the problem(s) that have been plaguing your windows 8 installation.
 

My Computer

System One

  • OS
    Windows 8.1 Pro with Media Center
    Computer type
    PC/Desktop
    System Manufacturer/Model
    HP COMPAQ Presario CQ57
    CPU
    AMD E- 300 APU with Radion HD Graphics 1.30GHz
    Motherboard
    inbuilt
    Memory
    4GB
    Graphics Card(s)
    ATI
    Sound Card
    High Definition Audio on-board
    Monitor(s) Displays
    notebook
    Screen Resolution
    1366x768
    Hard Drives
    Seagate ST9500325AS
    Google drive 15GB
    Skydrive 25GB
    BT Cloud
    PSU
    external 20v
    Case
    Laptop
    Cooling
    pretty good
    Keyboard
    inbuilt
    Mouse
    touchpad
    Internet Speed
    BT Infinity Unlimited - 80 up 20 down =70/16 really
    Browser
    Chrome Canary usually
    Antivirus
    Windows Defender and Malwarebytes
    Other Info
    no Start menu modifications
    Upgraded with no issues to 8.0 and to 8.1
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