Utility to capture activity when Windows freezes?

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Darth Evader

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Sep 22, 2006
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Hello. I am wondering if anyone knows of a utility that I could run that would log processes and disk activity so that when my PC freezes I can review to logs to try to determine the culprit.

I have:
Asus P5B-E
E6400 Core2Duo
Corsair Twin2x2048-6400C4 set to Corsairs recommended BIOS settings for this MB
Thermaltake 750 Watt PSU
ATI x1950
Thermaltake Xaser III Case with all intake and exhaust fans on high

In both XP and Vista...but more prevalent in Vista, I am experiencing random freezes, especially under heavy disk activity (running backup software to external drive, backing up DVD's) and when there are multiple programs running. When I say freeze, I mean that it completely freezes...the mouse freezes, the Num and Caps lock keys stop functioning and it requires a hard reset to reboot the PC. If there happens to be a sound playing when it freezes, like and MP3, then the sound will turn into a single tone.

I've tested the memory with Memtest86+ with no errors, tried running with either stick individually, and still experienced this same issue. My temperatures are good. Windows does not record any error logs, my Event Manager is clean...it freezes instantly before Windows even knows it's coming.

Anyway, I was hoping that someone might know of a tool that I could run in the background to keep a running log so that when it does freeze I can see the exact system activity. This would allow me to compare between freeze points to see if there is a common denominator.
 
sounds like a hardware problem to me. have you run any other stability tests, thats not really what memtest is for.
 
I'd suggest starting with a diagnostic disc utility, preferably one provided by the HDD manufacturer.

Almost every HDD manufacturer provides a free utility to download.
 
I had a similar problem. It was the power going to the Hard drive.

You should check your hard drive.

When i do very intensive task the computer would freeze and i hear a single tone repeating.
 
Thanks for your suggestions all. I will run the Seagate utilities to check the hard drive tonight and also verify that the power connections to the hard drive are secure.
 
I ran the Seagate tools and the hard drive has a clean bill of health. Then I ran Prime95 overnight and there were no errors there.

However, I may be on to something. This morning, immediately when I tried to launch DVD Fab, it froze again. After rebooting, I went through the Event Viewer and found some errors from yesterday that came up every 10 seconds over a 40-minute period...and the drive wasn't even being used at that time. The error was: Event 11 - The driver detected a controller error on \Device\CdRom0.

I am hoping this might be related to the freezing I experience. My burner is an IDE 16x Samsung and it is a couple years old, so I ordered a new SATA 20x burner from Newegg today. I'm hoping that this might be
 
Well, I am stumped. I downloaded the program suggested by Mithent and it does log the active processes and saves to an output file. My PC froze several times while the logging was enabled, but unfortunately...when I try to open the log file, the Process Monitor says that the log file isn't valid or corrupted. I'm sure this is because it didn't close properly.

The DVD burner was not causing the freezes becasue I removed it and Vista was still freezing up.

I also ran Prime95 again overnight and it didn't have any errors. Vista has become unusable and I am now booting into my Win XP Pro partition instead (which hasn't frozen on me all day).

Any other ideas?
 
in vista in the control panel search for "reliability"

Reliability and performance monitor should appear, select that. Select reliability monitor under monitoring tools and show us the last reported events after a crash
 
From the Performance and Reliability Monitor after a freeze:
Miscellaneous Failures
"Disruptive Shutdown - 6.0.6001 Service Pack 1 - The Computer was not Shut down properly - 4/17/2008"

Like I said, this isn't a system crash...rather it is just completly freezing...mouse, keyboard, Num Lock, Caps Lock...
 
Check on the PSU I was having a similar problem that ended up being my PSU. Even if you have a good PSU check it out. I just RMAed a Corsair.
 
I had a pc that would randomly crash in vista constantly but ran fine when I booted into XP. Drove me nuts. Turned out to be the video card. It was a older ATI card. I swapped it out for another video card and suddenly the restart problem stopped.

May not work for you but worth a try.
 
I've made a few changes and it hasn't frozen since. I'm not sure if it's fixed, but if it is, I'm not also not sure which of these might have done it:

-Installed newest ATI software and driver

-There are six SATA ports on the Asus P5B motherboard. Four ports are red (SATA1, 2, 4, 5) and two are black (SATA 3, 6). According to the manual, when using IDE mode, bootable hard drives should be connected to the red (Master) ports and storage drives connect to the black (Slave) ports. Since I do have a secondary, non-bootable, drive for storage I moved it to SATA3. Note: There is also a seventh Jmicron RAID port that is not being used because I don't use a RAID.

-Took the PC into my garage and blew out all of the dust with an air compressor.

According to Asus PC Probe, here are my vital signs:

Vcore: 1.20v
+3.3: 3.23v
+5: 5.04v
+12: 11.98v
CPU: 43 deg C
MB: 41 deg C
CPU Fan: 2537 rpm

Do you see any issues with these values?
 
Darth Evader said:
I've made a few changes and it hasn't frozen since. I'm not sure if it's fixed, but if it is, I'm not also not sure which of these might have done it:

-Installed newest ATI software and driver

-There are six SATA ports on the Asus P5B motherboard. Four ports are red (SATA1, 2, 4, 5) and two are black (SATA 3, 6). According to the manual, when using IDE mode, bootable hard drives should be connected to the red (Master) ports and storage drives connect to the black (Slave) ports. Since I do have a secondary, non-bootable, drive for storage I moved it to SATA3. Note: There is also a seventh Jmicron RAID port that is not being used because I don't use a RAID.

-Took the PC into my garage and blew out all of the dust with an air compressor.

According to Asus PC Probe, here are my vital signs:

Vcore: 1.20v
+3.3: 3.23v
+5: 5.04v
+12: 11.98v
CPU: 43 deg C
MB: 41 deg C
CPU Fan: 2537 rpm

Do you see any issues with these values?
Click to expand...

Your voltages look fine. The cpu temp is a little warm for a stock clocked e6300 but not all that bad.

If I had to guess, I would say what fixed the reboot problem in Vista is the updated ATI drivers.
 
Apparently the problem hasn't been fixed...it froze again tonight while browsing through pages on a message forum (clicking the Back and Forward buttons in Internet Explorer).

The only thing different tonight is that I notice the temps are little higher:

CPU is 47 C degrees
MB is 46 C degrees

I beginning to think this may be a heat issue afterall. I say this because prior to blowing the dust out of the entire case with an air compressor, it was freezing multiple times per day...and now it has ran almost a week without a single freeze.

Are these temps excessive enough to cause freezing? Maybe the MB itself is causing the problem rather than the CPU temp?


I am going to try what Oscalcido mentioned and relax the memory timings to 5-5-5-15 from 4-4-4-12 and see what happens.
 
It looks like osalcido had the correct answer. I changed the mem timings from 4-4-4-12 to 5-5-5-15 and this PC has been running for over 2 weeks straight now.
 
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