PC randomly freezing

iCobble

Baseband Member
Messages
92
Location
England
So for a while now my computer has been randomly freezing. Sometimes it's a short blip and there is a whirring sound followed by a click. This doesn't lead to a hard reset; eventually the computer responds (after the click sound).
The bigger issue is occasionally it freezes and I can't do anything other than a hard reset. Yesterday it happened twice one after another. At the time I was just browsing firefox with nothing else open.
On event viewer, there's 24 Critical errors, all error 41. The source is "Kernel-Power".
I have no idea what is causing the problem, so any help is greatly appreciated (Specs in my signature).

Thanks.
 
First, check to make sure that everything is connected on your motherboard. Sometimes things can come loose, and cause a short (so-to-speak)

Second, check to make sure all your drivers are up to date.

If all else fails, I would repair/reload the OS and see if that fixes the issues.
 
iCobble said:
On event viewer, there's 24 Critical errors, all error 41. The source is "Kernel-Power".
I have no idea what is causing the problem, so any help is greatly appreciated (Specs in my signature).
Just to tell you, "Kernel-Power" events in event viewer just means that you performed a hard reset on your computer. It creates a critical error because the OS had no prior warning before you did it.

However, if you receive those messages with a time-stamp of when you did *not* hard reset it, then you have a problem.
 
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Thanks for all your help. I've checked all connections and everything seems to be fine. Also I've updated all my drivers.
Hopefully this will solve the problem, but I may not know for a while as it's not a daily occurrence. I'll keep on eye on the event viewer, as far as I can tell all the Kernel Power errors have been due to me resetting my computer.
Thanks again.
 
My computer just froze again. I was listening to music at the time on iTunes and when it froze the sound sort of stuttered and buzzed. I had to do a hard reset again.
I use to have this problem when playing Battlefield 3, exactly like this video (skip to 2:46), but this time I was literally just listening to music when it happened. Battfield 3 for PC lock up freeze crash fail - YouTube
Thanks.
 
My computer just froze again. I was listening to music at the time on iTunes and when it froze the sound sort of stuttered and buzzed. I had to do a hard reset again.
I use to have this problem when playing Battlefield 3, exactly like this video (skip to 2:46), but this time I was literally just listening to music when it happened. Battfield 3 for PC lock up freeze crash fail.
Thanks.

Anytime you have that freeze with stuttering buzzing noise it could be one out of three things.

VGA drivers that are currently installed and maybe unstable. :/
Sound Card drivers if it isnt working right and chokes up when playing music and other system sounds.
God forbid it maybe a cpu issue, open up taskmanager and see how much cpu usage is going up.

If I had to guess directly, I say something maybe wrong with the vga drivers or cpu is spiking up to high.
Also nice video I had to laugh at it at 2:46. :D
Its just one of those moments like this where you don't give a **** anymore and hit the machine off and look for something better.
 
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I had similar cut outs due to incorrectly timed G. Skill ram, that buzzing humming noise is probably not characteristic to one problem or another tbh. I had made the mistake of leaving my ram at the default motherboards timing, and this caused quite a few freeze and black screens as well as blue screens, once I timed my ram the way it was listed on the sticks instead of auto setting through mboard, the freezes stopped, but the sticks still had inversion errors on memtest so I had to replace them.

I suppose you could check your mem timings for kicks, see if your ram is timed manually as per the CA settings on the stick, I noticed through cpuid I believe, that my ram had incorrect timing and eventually solved my issue with random freezes, I actually remember this bf video, I had viewed it aswell when I was trying to trouble shoot the issues, to compound the matter when I replaced the PSU the freezes changed quite a bit, so it had lead me to believe it wasn't Ram related, took like 1-2 years of freezing before I finally did memtest and seen there was issues, and noticed my timing I had left on the default setting for the gigabyte mboard assuming it would auto detect and render the correct settings/voltages.
 
Anytime you have that freeze with stuttering buzzing noise it could be one out of three things.

VGA drivers that are currently installed and maybe unstable. :/
Sound Card drivers if it isnt working right and chokes up when playing music and other system sounds.
God forbid it maybe a cpu issue, open up taskmanager and see how much cpu usage is going up.

If I had to guess directly, I say something maybe wrong with the vga drivers or cpu is spiking up to high.

Thanks for your help. I don't think it's a sound card issue as I bought a cheap sound card a while back and tried it out (when I was trying to fix BF3) and it didn't solve the problem.
On CPU usage, while I type this it's at 0% and when I open something, e.g. Steam it goes to around 25% before dropping quickly. I'm not sure how to measure if it is the CPU as when it freezes I can't do anything (and it freezes randomly).
Also nice video I had to laugh at it at 2:46. :big_smile:
Its just one of those moments like this where you don't give a **** anymore and hit the machine off and look for something better.
Yep that pretty much sums it up:). (Just so you know the video isn't mine.)
 
I had similar cut outs due to incorrectly timed G. Skill ram, that buzzing humming noise is probably not characteristic to one problem or another tbh. I had made the mistake of leaving my ram at the default motherboards timing, and this caused quite a few freeze and black screens as well as blue screens, once I timed my ram the way it was listed on the sticks instead of auto setting through mboard, the freezes stopped, but the sticks still had inversion errors on memtest so I had to replace them.

I suppose you could check your mem timings for kicks, see if your ram is timed manually as per the CA settings on the stick, I noticed through cpuid I believe, that my ram had incorrect timing and eventually solved my issue with random freezes, I actually remember this bf video, I had viewed it aswell when I was trying to trouble shoot the issues, to compound the matter when I replaced the PSU the freezes changed quite a bit, so it had lead me to believe it wasn't Ram related, took like 1-2 years of freezing before I finally did memtest and seen there was issues, and noticed my timing I had left on the default setting for the gigabyte mboard assuming it would auto detect and render the correct settings/voltages.
Thanks for this. I'll run memtest overnight (hopefully I'll remember tonight) to check for any problems.
 
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