Freezes at night

JemyM

Okay, now roll sanity.
Joined
October 26, 2006
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My computer is on 24/7, every night at 01:00 AVG does an automatic viruscheck on the entire computer.

Recently almost every day when I turn on the screen on the morning, the machine have frozen during the night, and I cannot explain why. The crash come a few hours after the viruscheck begins. Awhile ago my 1tb drive started to die, and I replaced it with a 1,5tb drive. I thought this was the reason why my computer crashed during the weekly defrag (scheduled every monday night).

I have no way to errorcheck this problem. Event Viewer tells me nothing. HDD Health claims all my harddrives are in good condition, and they are around 40 degrees average. I have excellent cooling. One 23cm fan, 6 14cm fans and the CPU is cooled with a CFM effective 12cm fan. Still I am worried about the heat in our apartment since the crashes begun when the summer came.

Any idea how to errorcheck?
 
Joined
Oct 26, 2006
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Still I am worried about the heat in our apartment since the crashes begun when the summer came.

Any idea how to errorcheck?

Normally I would say that you are 100% on the right track looking for a heat related problem since freezes are very, very, very often a cause of an overheating system but with that kind of cooling that you mentioned, there is almost no way that heat is at fault here. Besides you're probably not running any apps that require 100% CPU load at night, right? Anyway, to be absolutely sure and to exclude heat as the cause of the freezes you could leave the side panel off the case at night and let all fans run at their max speed. Then monitor your temps and see if the problem goes away.

However, in the very likely case that it isn't overheating, well, then good luck finding the bugger ;) . Could be just about anything. It might be a good idea to start with excluding driver issues so you could try booting into safe mode a few nights in a row and see if that changes anything. If it doesn't... tough. Then you won't get around the usual elimination routine where you remove one component at a time to see if the problem goes away. If you have absolutely no other issues (like the occasional blue screen) but "only" the freezes then I'd take a very close look at the power supply and the mainboard since freezes can sometimes be power issues, too (PS not supplying sufficient or steady currents or the board not converting the power correctly). If you do get the occasional blue screen, however, then you might want to start with elimiating the RAM and the HDDs first but as I said it could really be just about anything...
 
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Oct 18, 2006
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Addendum: Since it got warmer in your apartment, have you added any fans to your system that were not there previously or that were disabled? I just remembered that I once had a freezing issue when using certain 80x80x25 fans (of Enermax). It was a power related issue then (those particular fans were incompatible with my power supply). So in case you added any fans this summer you could start unplugging the ones you added most recently to see if that gets rid of the freezing. Your cooling should be decent enough anyway even if you remove a couple of fans (except the CPU fan obviously ;) ).
 
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Whenever I had freezing issues it was the graphics card, I think. I still find it peculiar that PCs can "freeze" due to "overheating".
 
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It's just a guess, but it sounds like your anti-virus program may be having a memory problem, eventually causing Windows to hang. You might try scanning the drive with a different virus checker. Or you might try uninstalling / reinstalling your current AV software. It could be a known issue, but I assume you've already checked that, right?

Edit: I re-read this and noticed how you also had the problem during defrag. Hmmmmm. It does act like a memory leak, though, doesn't it? Fresh Windows install...maybe something else you have running?
 
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