Why does my Windows 7 system freeze after it sits inactive for a while?

When i try to close a document the explorer does not respond . Why ?
This is Windows 7 starter, manufactured by Hewlett-packard, model:HP mini 110-1100, product ID ********************* . Rating 2.0, system type 32-bit

Message was edited by: admin to remove product ID number from possible misuse by others.

Tell use what you find in "event viewer" and "reliability history"? See "help and support" for information about these.

When was the last time this PC was cleaned out on the inside?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pbkTPvzjQ50&feature=related

I am not endorsing this video, there are many others; this one is for example only.

Do not use a vacuum cleaner on a PC.

Never use water on PC parts.

Discharge all static electricity from yourself before you touch any computer parts inside a PC.

This thread is untracked

Not too sure if this problem is system related? I too have this happen but only when I'm using IE8! - I get told that the program is not responding and if I use the keyboard or mouse after this, the machine goes into a sulk!
However, if I do nothing and wait, the system regains consciousness and works. This indicates to me that two processes have been requested via the keyboard or mouse and the CPU is unable to cope. My CPU is a dual component and should be able cope with two things at the same time, so what gives?

The processor is software driven (Windows7) so Mr Microsoft, how about it? I don't think it is a device or memory problem because it happens when your machine is inactive for a period of time, so hibernation could be the cause. I think I saw somewhere that there is a problem with this feature- come on techies!

MS wants to blame addons (i asked), but. I have the problem with IE8 and Firefox stopping. This is true in Vista 32, Win 7 32, and Win 7 64. After a while a message comes up asking if I want to close or restart. Most-times it will restart back to where you were, sometimes not. I am running a toshiba x205-sli6 with dual hards drives, dual video cards and many other devices. Programs seldom lock up.
If the message doesn't come up force the job to close with task manager, then reopen. It's a poor work-around, but what'cha gonna do.

I've experienced this with issue every Windows machine I've ever owned or worked on. (2000+ boxes and laptops installed so far)
It is fixed by going to your Power Management settings.
Just right click the desktop, select Properties. Go to the Screen Saver tab and click the "Power" button or whatever it is called in Win7. Then just select "Always On" in the Power Schemes drop down options at the top. Click Apply or OK and you'll be fine.

You will no longer have the problem. See, Windows always offers a Standby and Sleep mode, but neither one have ever worked properly. As I said 2000+ machines and I have always had to make sure nothing was set in the Power Schemes that would put the computer in Standby.

Reckon I can feel with you at least, as my Windows often struggles under the described circumstances.
Then I take a deep breath and think:
1. Restart that PC, if nok or, if the incident reappears, check my user profile and settings:
2. Did I change my autostart progs? Autosyncing iDisks or Dropbox, virtual or web disk of all kind?
3. Did I add new resident progs, luring in the background, eating sys power, such as Virus Scanners, living aids checking drivers etc in the background, Facebook, Twitter & Co,
4. What was the last program/application (may be several) I have added to my system?
5. Did the incident occur since? Or before?
6. I might deactivate,/delete and restart the suspicious app/s, and re-check for incident.

All this may take much time but, again provoking the incident step by step, while disabling one suspicious prog after the next,until the incident has vanished is the only way to go.
Keep an eye at the Task Manager and blog the incidents, thus learning more causes and interactive results.
Sometimes, a cup of coffee might do, as the system is recovering itself while obviously inactive but very busy underground and quarreling with progs asking the very resources.
Besides, if you really love using many things - or everything, the best way would be to setup a similar second PC, which you should install as a mirror, but everytime one step back of your original PC, for safety reasons, than you?ll find out the bug on the spot.
Don?t forget to stay cool and modest, don?t ask too much of your system and try only to setup progs you really need, over and over, and not lots of trials and trash progs bulging your PCs horizon.
Crossing my fingers for your good luck
Peter

geek or brain smart but the first thing i would do is clean my reg. and then turn off all extra startup programs and see if that fix the problem, to turn off start up programs is go to run/msconfig/and click on startup, un check all programs you don't need to have to run your system and reboot.
good luck.

I am experiencing the same problem with my wife's HP Pavilion DV6-1250US laptop with a Core 2 Duo P7350 (2.0 GHz) and 3 GB of RAM running Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit. It was purchased last October during the "Free Upgrade to Windows 7" period and originally had Vista Home Premium 64-bit installed. The Windows 7 was installed via Upgrade, not a clean install, from the distribution disk HP provided, and has been kept entirely up-to-date. It is using Norton Internet Security, also kept current. We are not using any screensaver.

To restate the problem, when the computer is left on but idling for an extended period of time, it will freeze up completely and can only be used again after a hard reboot following the crash deliberately caused by depressing the power button and holding it down. After it reboots it then operates normally in all apparent respects.

This machine is quite garden-variety and unmodified but is unusual in one respect -- its purpose. My wife is a musician and composer and the laptop has been optimally configured as a tool for applications such as Sibelius, PhotoScore and AudioScore, which are SERIOUS resource hogs. The computer is kept connected almost constantly via USB to a Roland Fantom G8 keyboard (VERY nice!) that is used both as an input device and as a sound playback device. The freezes occur whether or not the keyboard is powered on.

This freeze occurs irrespective of any running programs -- it happens with numerous windows open, or with none open and the only things running being the base TSR applications, which are kept to a reasonable minimum. It happens after periods of heavy activity or if no user activity has taken place at all. HOWEVER, they do not ALWAYS occur -- sometimes the computer continues to work properly even after hours of idling.

The easy workaround is to shut down the computer when not in use, something everyone ought to do to network-connected computers anyway, but YOU try telling my wife that!

And to those of you weenies who always insist on parrotting such nonsense as "Get a Mac," well, go play with your overpriced toy. Real adults need real computers.

We found that with Windows 7 Pro, our systems required a minimum of 4gb of memory for it to run properly. As you said, you only have 3gb of memory. Once we put in 4gb, all of those issues were resolved and are very happy with Windows 7 Pro.

I believe this may very likely be related to a peripheral device connected to your system.

I had a colleague that had a similar problem with a laptop. I his case he found the problem through a process of elimiation, and it ended up being his docking station. I would elimiated peripherals one by one. I would start with wireless desktop peripherals (keyboard, mouse), KVM switches (notoriously bad with sleep\wake), USB hubs (I personally had boot problems due to a USB hub in a monitor), next I would move to scanners and printers. My colleague never did get a solution for his docking station, but at least he can work without having his system freeze after sleep or hibernation.

Did you build the PC yourself?
More likely this issue is caused by some setting within in the Motherboard BIOS than a Windows7 issue. (Hopefully you know how to access the Bios- usually press F2 or delete when the PC starts up.)
Here, giving exact instructions is difficult because there are many different versions of the Bios, and even the same Bios will vary based upon the Motherboard and Processor. Also, companies have Bios upgrades, constantly changing things.
Probably the setting which is causing your problem is under power management setup - make sure the Suspend state is set on S1, not S3. My Windows 7 PC had a similar problem with the Suspend state on S3. Try this fix first.
If the suspend state isn't the problem, see what settings there are for your processor. If you've got an Intel, try enabling things such as C1E, C3 State, C5 State....
If you were messing with the Bios in the first place, try the option to load optimized settings...
The usual Word of warning with the Bios is to be careful about your changes, cause messing around can make the PC unbootable. The changes I mentioned above should not make the pc unbootable- usually incorrect over-clocking settings cause that problem, so don't panic. To fix an unbootable BIOS, you have to open the case and disconnect/reconnect the CMOS battery, which sets it back on factory defaults. Word of warning is too that it can be difficult to find exactly what every setting in the Bios does - have to research the web pretty well.

Hope this helps,

Glen

i am using a laptop but i have experienced a very similar problem.i hate the mouse pad so i use a usb mouse. sometimes when it froze and i only clicked on an icon a couple of times it would wake up after a few minutes . normally though, i don't have that much patience. it was faster to restart. i had the mouse pad turned off and device manager did not show any problems. out of desperation i i dis abled the hid compliant mouse and set my power options to a custom plan of: on battery, 3 min., 3 min., never. screen brightness to max. plugged in, never, never, never, screen brightness to max. i don't know why but i no longer have the problem.

hope this helps; ezymuny.

I discovered that if you hold Ctrl and Alt and then hit delete the do you want to change password,lock this computer etc screen comes up.Then all you do is hit cancel( may have hit it twice) and you're back in business without having to shut down and restart.(This is on my desktop unit).
I am not sure what causes this freezing.

On my lab it just ask for my password and no problems.

Bob van Essen

I have had this problem on 2 different PC's running windows 7. One with a Asus motherboard and the Other with a Gigabyte motherboard. They would either freeze or shutdown on their own and give the same message you had on start-up. I looked in the event-log and only saw Kernel 41 error. In both cases I was able to solve this problem by going into the bios and disabling Intel's SpeedStep. When enabled it allows the OS to control the CPU speed. When disabled the CPU runs at the default speed.

I had the same problem with Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit. After being in "Sleep" mode for a while, it would freeze when coming out of Sleep mode. There were two hardware-related problems.

The first problem is that my motherboard/integrated graphics chip had a maximum of 256MB of video/graphics memory available. Now, it seems that Internet Explorer 8, in combination with Windows 7, requires at 512MB of video memory to play back HD video. For some reason, this shortcoming caused my computer to freeze when coming out of Sleep (probably IE 8 and/or some video was played before it went into Sleep). Anyway, this glitch was resolved by installing a separate $30 video card with 512MB video memory. Ridiculous, but true !

The second problem was only uncovered by accident. Before doing a clean install of Windows 7 I used an old boot disc to reformat the hard drive. It was standard Win XP formatting. Windows 7 installed OK but guess what? Win7 doesn't like that formatting! Later I erased the drive using DBAN (Darik's Boot and Nuke on a CD or floppy). Then installed Win7 afresh and let Win7 format the drive. Bingo ! Everything worked correctly since then.

Finally, a friend of ours had problems with Win7 coming out of Sleep. We traced it to his pld hard drive. On a hunch, we substituted a newer drive and reinstalled Win7. No problems since then! So, is your hard drive kinda old?

It could be that your system is going into Hibernation mode after say like 20 minutes, or whatever time limit it could be set to. Earlier version of Windows and earlier notebook PC's use to have a whole lot of trouble with this. Not being able to break out of Hibernation mode.

One more thing that could help you. Avoid the Windows Viruses and all the other frustrations all together by upgrading to LINUX Mint 9. I love it!

As you mentioned this is a shot in the dark. Keyboard and mouse may have timers. BIOS and OS have settings on what happens after nn time. Look for something that selects keyboard and/or mouse 'resume from suspend.' Power settings in both BIOS and OS could be sending mobo into deeper sleep which then loses contact with input devices.

When you find it in this state move the mouse and watch signal light on monitor. If it changes to 'live' color/light then wait. PC does a few things to power itself up and you may be stacking too many hardware interrupts for machine to deal with while checking itself and spinning up drive (most time consuming part.) Hope this helps.

No answer but same problem (I think). I have a brand new (1 month old) ZT computer loaded with Windows7. I've had 2 freezes in the past two weeks. I assumed it might be a faulty computer. I had the computer on for several hours, was not using it and came back to a black screen. Could not get a response. Blue button was on for the computer but it would not turn off when pressed. After pressing a number of keys without response, I closed by turning off power strip. Restarted and everything was fine. When it happened again two weeks later, I got the black screen again but by pressing a number of keys the screen opened but the screen lighting was dim for several minutes--commands not followed. Finally, everything worked ok. This is a new machine, 4mgs memory, dual core. I have not loaded it up with many new programs. I wonder if Windows 7 is the problem?
Anyone else experiencing similar issues?
TX

I've heard of quite a few sleep/timeout/hibernate related problems on Vista and Windows 7 machines. That is, you don't see a problem unless the computer sits in an idle state for a while. (In my case, it was an HP printer that kept disappearing.) They all seem to tie into services and their failure to refresh properly. Usually this kind of thing happens with drivers that are buggy and/or badly implemented. If you google a bit, you can figure out what services can be set to manual or disabled safely under Windows 7 (and Vista). Hopefully one of those will make your problem go away.

You will apply bellow's instructions are working for Left click Only..

check the mouse cord port

Change the mouse and plug in a good(working)mouse and then see it what happens next..

Neither Download Avira Antivirus and with Comodo Firewall and both install your pc and scan for virus
After that if you will find any virus then do which u want.keep or delete it its your wish...obviously bro delete it, then atlast format your os and then try it.
If the antivirus cant delete virus then just format your os and then reinstall a os(windows) and then immediately install both antivirus and search the virus after that delete those virus and check it..i think it will be solved...

Go into the start menu box,type in Power Settings,when selected use the drop down menu and select NEVER for sleep,and again for hibernate use NEVER,this should fix your problem,
Alex

I am not sure I have the answer but I had the same question. My would freeze up after every inactive session. The techs at windows had me upgrade my bios. Which was very involved and time consuming because I had to go back to a Vista OS first. Then upgrade the bios and then re-install. Then, and now, the system would not stay "asleep". It would go to sleep and then wake up after a few minutes. It is much better now but I will never upgrade my OS again. I'll just wait until I purchase a new PC.
My system is much the same as yours. Dual core with 4 gb. W7 is the Home Premium version.

Hi Harry,

The problem you're experiencing could be a multitude of things, so let's clear some issues up first.

1. You said you had a new install of Windows 7 Pro, but you didn't say if it was a new computer or an older computer you loaded Windows 7 to. This makes a difference. If your computer is not completely compatible with Windows 7 it could be one possible cause of this problem.

2. If this is a computer that had XP or Vista on it and you reloaded with Windows 7 - did you run the Windows 7 compatibility wizard? I suspect you probably did, and everything seemed okay.

3. Did you check with the manufacturer of your motherboard to see if there were any firmware or BIOS updates that should be installed to work better with Windows 7? If not, you should do that in any case so you'll know you have the latest updates available.

If you've done all of these things and you're still having problems, you could very well have a hardware problem. I recently purchased an HP Desktop for a customer and everything was running fine until I let it sit long enough to put itself into the sleep mode. After that, just as you described, it required a re-boot to get back into Windows 7. I used every trick in the book to try to solve this problem, including about 3 hours on the phone with HP Techs. Finally, I ended up returning the computer.

Just as a side note here. My customer was in the "I need this immediately" mode, so I located an identical model to the one I had returned and swapped the hard drives. Guess what??? Everything worked perfectly. So the problem was not in the Windows 7 installation, or any of the 20 other apps I'd installed to prep the computer for the customer, it was a defect on the motherboard.

Just so you know, Windows 7 will, by default, turn off the screen in 10 minutes and enter the sleep mode in 30 minutes. Normally this should be no problem. All you should need to do is wiggle the mouse a bit and the system should come back up to the user icon screen and if you've set the system to do so it will require you to re-enter your password to get back to where you were before. These settings are adjustable in the Power Options of the Control Panel.

Just click Start and Type Power Options, then select Power Options in your Start Menu. On the Power Options screen select Change When My Computer Sleeps, and you can adjust your settings there. If you still continue to have problems, there is a report you can generate in Windows 7 called the "Power Efficiency Diagnostics Report".

To generate this report:
Click Start
-->Type CMD (do not hit enter yet)
-->on the Start Menu Right Click on CMD
-->Select Run as Administrator
--> (this opens the command interface window) Type cd\ -->then ENTER
-->Type powercfg -energy
-->then ENTER (do not forget the space after powercfg)

If you entered the command correctly the system will enter a diagnostic mode and generate a report in your Root Directory (usually C:\). Look in you Library for C:\ to find it. Double click the report called "energy-report" and it will open in your browser.

This is a very detailed report that tracks all of your power related issues with Windows 7. Mine comes up with a lot of USB Suspend errors that I ignore. Understand that generating this report isn't going to solve any of your problems, but it could give you a lot of useful information regarding what's going on with your Sleep Mode difficulties. This command (powercfg) also has many other uses for advanced users if you feel so inclined to explore them. You can see all of the possible parameters of this command by using the command:
powercfg /?

I realize this is a long winded explanation of nothing concrete. But I hope it provided you with some useful ideas to get to a solution.

Best Regards

I am trying to solve the same Win7 freezing problem.
This is what I am trying:
1. Have deleted data from c:drive and now have 63GB free space.
Drive was almost full.
2. Cleaned up C: and degfrag.
3. Increased RAM from 2mb to 6mb (running Win7 64bit)

Not tested yet hope to have an answer soon.

Hi
At first be sure that asking for running windows in normal way or safemode is becouse of restarting your windows to get out of freeze and you do not save last settings of windows.
then it can be possible that cus you are using tow hard drive your windows freeze and. once you clear your CMOS maybe you can troubleshoot this. and also check the jumpers of your hard drives if you are using IDE connections.

You might want to check your power supply. When a PC freezes like that it is usually a sign of a bad power supply. If you find that the power supply is OK then you might want to check to see if your system is running out of RAM too quickly. If it is, then it could be caused by having too many programs running in the background that is causing your memory to get used up too quickly. If that happens then it could cause your system to freeze up if it stays inactive for too long. If you do have programs running in the background then try closing them down if you don't need to use them. You might also try running a memory diagnostics test to see if one of your RAM is failing or not.

I have an ASUS I-7 laptop and am having the same problem. I have a bandaid solution that works for me. Click ctrl+alt+del and then click on the esc botton. This unfreezes the screen (for whatever reason) and avoids having to reboot.

Paul W.