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Question

Windows 8 freezes totally when left idle ?

Nov 29, 2013 5:41AM PST

Hi guys I have an issue here that I'm 'hoping' some of you might be able to point me in the right direction in getting it sorted.



Basically about 1 month ago a good friend of mine purchased a brand new acer desktop computer, I haven't got the exact model to hand as he lives 200 kilometers from me and he's not tech savvy at all, however, from what I remember of it, it's windows 8 x64, 4gb ram and i3 processor, so not bad at all.



When he got it I set it up for him as in just put in the regional setting etc.. and ran through the initial set up and all went well. I installed all his programs and all was good.



So about a month on he rang me and said his computer is just freezing randomly always when it's left idle for 10 minutes or so and this happens all day every day.



He said he didn't install any software or hardware.



I'm stumped to what it is at this stage that could be causing it.



This is what I asked him to do over the phone.



..... Ran hitman pro which said all was clean.

.....Ran chkdsk /f which was fine

.....Went into power options and set both screen and sleep to never

....Ran sfc /scannow which said it found some corrupt file but could not fix all (ran this from command prompt from inside windows as admin)

...Tried a system restore to the 14th of this month but said it couldn't do it as it may be corrupt but it let do a restore to a later date but still the same issue.





I've guided him through all this over the phone but I will see him during the week so just wondering if you have any suggestions on what could be a quick fix for this ?



This is only a new pc, so if I can't sort the problem rather than doing a fresh install and checking all the hardware internally I'm wondering if he should bring it back to the shop as it's only a month old, or would I be better of doing the fresh install ?

He uses it daily so time could be an issue if it was left back to the shop and they wanted to have a look at it for a few days but I dont want to mess up his warranty either.



Any suggestions ?



Cheers



Focus

Discussion is locked

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Answer
system restore to the 14th of this month but said it couldn
Nov 29, 2013 8:06AM PST

" system restore to the 14th of this month but said it couldn't do it "

Any antivirus suite today for reasons we can only begin to guess blocks SR. Unless I know which AV suite, I can't do much else other than note this and suggest you consider what a mess that creates.

So far I have yet to see the issue you speak of but we only have a few dozen W8 machines at the office so my bet is it's something like a screensaver or other.
Bob

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The antivirus suite is just standard windows defender..
Nov 29, 2013 8:19AM PST

Hi Bob and thanks for the reply Happy

The antivirus suite in question is just the standard one bundled with Windows 8, windows defender I think it's called but I could be wrong with the name but definitely just that installed and no other anti spyware or anti malware software installed.

This has me stumped at the minute to say the least.

I have seen 2 crashes in recent times one on my Windows 8 machine that had been working fine for nearly a year and then just a sudden freeze. I went into power options and set monitor and sleep to never and it did the trick for me but that hasn't worked here. Also a vista machine I just had a look at was frooze up but in that case it let me use task manager and I could see it was 'chrome' that was using 100% cpu and was freezing the computer. The strange thing there was that chrome wasn't even installed on the machine in question, I had to literally just delete the chrome folder in program files as it wasn't in add/remove programs.

But the screen saver thing is one to keep in mind for me but again it would only be the standard one that is running by default.

Thanks for your input, very much appreciated.

Focus

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Cue Grif.
Nov 29, 2013 8:43AM PST
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I will indeed
Nov 29, 2013 9:01AM PST

Thanks Bob, I just had a look at that page you linked and I'll do all mentioned. I won't be in Dubin/friends office until Wednesday so I'm just trying to get prepared for when I'm there and what else I can do.

I'll get the full specs of the machine from him when I speak to him on Monday and I'll want to have all the necessary drivers required for the machine just incase a last resort becomes of doing a fresh install on Windows 8.
The fresh install could be a job in itself as he got no windows disc's or drivers when he bought the machine so I'm 'hoping' that I have his particular Windows 8 install disc here, and if I do I hope it auto activates windows once fully installed as I've been reading the key is embedded in the bios. It does have a recovery partition but if I install from that all the usual bloatware will be reinstalled also.

I'm hoping I don't have to reinstall and it can be sorted. This is becoming one of the biggest challenges I've encountered in some time.

Thanks for the help and either way when it's fixed up I'll post what I did to 'hopefully' find a solution and get this machine working properly again.

Thanks

Focus

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Updates Cured
Dec 14, 2013 10:20PM PST

Simply doing Windows Updates on my Windows 8.1 cure my exactly the same problem

I hope it will do the same for you...