EP45-UD3R: frequent freeze after reboot

[Zingh]

Greetings,

Short version: Whenever I reboot my computer, or turn it off, or put it to sleep, or hibernate it, it freezes frequently once I turn it back on. I've been struggling with this problem for about a year now.

Detailed example: One time, I rebooted my computer to apply windows updates. Up until that point, it had been stable for about a month. Updates applied successfully, but after reboot, my computer froze about 15 times in the course of the next few days... requiring a hard-reset every time. Sometimes it doesn't even make it to post. Other times, it freezes after post during windows logon. If it makes it past that, it might freeze randomly... when computer is idle, when I'm playing games, when I'm just surfing the internet... Freezes don't seem correlated with what I'm doing with the computer at the time. No pattern or cause other than the fact that I rebooted recently. Seems like half the time it freezes ~1 min after reboot. Other times, it lasts ~30 min before freezing. Last time this happened was about 3 weeks ago, and it hasn't frozen since. I have more windows updates to install, but i'm afraid of rebooting because I'll have to go through the same annoyance. When the computer is frozen, whatever was on-screen is frozen in place, including the cursor. Mouse and keyboard do not respond. Hard drive is sometimes active, other times not. After a reboot, the system logs are empty... Just a notice that the computer was "unexpectedly reset". It's as if the computer doesn't even realize it crashed.

Computer Info:
mobo: Gigabyte EP45-UD3R (rev 1.0)
cpu: Intel Core2 Duo E8400 @ 3ghz (not overclocked)
psu: PC Power Silencer 610 watts
video: EVGA Geforce GTX 260
ram: (4x2gb) OCZ PC2 8500
hdd: 2x 1tb drives in soft RAID 1
os: windows 7 pro 64bit, sp 1

Things I've tried: Tried several hard drive and memory diagnostics, all game up clean. Tried monitoring the temperature... and everything shows up as normal, even when crashes happen. Tried flashing the mobo bios, but it didn't work for some reason so i gave up. Also played around with a variety of ram voltage settings... nothing helps. I'm hesitant to try anything requiring a reboot, as this just means another week of freezing to deal with.

I'm not even sure this is a motherboard problem, but it doesn't seem like a software issue, as freezes are happening at random times, and I suspect the mobo because the freezes are correlated with sleep/hibernation/powerdown events. Has anybody ever experienced or heard of such symptoms? Any idea what could be causing it?

thanks!

[Dark Mantis]

Hi and welcome.

Normally this is all down to the fact that the system isn't 100% stable. You will need to check through your hardware and software and make sure everything is working perfectly.

[Tinker]

Pity you didn't log what update used. As DM implies & taking it further do a clean install. One thing
to try though may seem odd. Just use one stick of memory only in main slot if still same problem
swop to another stick. Although this doesn't sound like a memory problem on one PC ran it for
nearly 2 yrs. No problem until I purchased a 2nd matched pair. Then the random freezing started.
I settled for new memory, 2x2gb dual mode as it wouldn't run 4x1gb. I suspect I may have had
incorrect memory spec but 2x1gb worked perfectly. It was when DDR3 came out & very expensive.


Regards tinker.

[Dark Mantis]

Yes quite Tinker. I wouldn't be at all surprised if it was a memory problem as many turn out to be that. The OP could always run Memtest86+ on the memory one stick at a time for at least 10 loops/cycles each.

[Tinker]

It was one of those oddities DM nothing wrong with memory. Either another quirky Gigabyte MOBO
or incorrect memory spec. Played it safe by sticking to first 2 slots but doubled memory size. Freezing
then stopped though correct memory now used. Originally thought it was XP as it had run so long but
now on Win 7. But again faulty memory can cause freezing & mess up OS.


Regards tinker.