Sup, guys.

Last week I built myself a gaming PC. All went smooth, the machine successfully booted at the first try and installed Windows. A few hours later I experienced the first of many random freezes. There is no error message, no BSOD, nothing. Just a frozen screen. The cursor does not move, the Num/Caps/Scroll Lock lights on the keyboard cannot be toggled on or off, and the only way out is to press the reset button in the case. Oddly enough, these freezes never occur while gaming. Except for that, they're completely random. They may appear after 5 minutes of using the PC or after 5 hours. Any ideas? Thanks in advance.

You are saying that you can't even toggle caps, scroll, and num lock on the keyboard? That is very strange because I totally thought those lit up whether your PC worked or not. My guess is that something goes completely bonkers with your motherboard, since that's the only thing that really could stop everything like that. Maybe a faulty processor? I really have no idea honestly.

I'm having the same issue but my PC is mostly for office stuff.

Check that CPU, RAM modules and expansion cards be well inserted in their slots and sockets.
Check in the BIOS setup that RAM timings be not too aggressive.
A Live CD Linux distro like Knoppix is a good HW and SW check: after having done the aforementioned basic checks on HW connections, boot it from CD, if it runs well and it doesn't freeze, there are high probabilities you've got a corrupted Windows installation or very serious Windows drivers and DLLs conflicts and incompatibilities. In this case reinstall Windows, the latest versions available of all drivers, and initially just the indispensable ones, like those for the graphics card, adding the others one at a time to see what causes the freezes. After that reinstall SW one at a time, to do the same check on it.

If freezes happen only using IE, install another browser and use IE only for MS update, that unfortunately requires it, and update IE itself.

Antivirus can be troublesome, particularly Norton, if everything else is OK, you could try another one.

Google for more suggestions.

PS: Don't update the BIOS unless you are sure there are no HW problems, a freeze during the process could cripple your MoBo if it hasn't also a second built-in read-only recovery BIOS to start it anyway if the main BIOS update goes wrong. If HW is OK, and you want to give BIOS update a try, do it only if your BIOS producer offers an old style BIOS update utility not running on Windows.

Do memtest86+ I think... or if I remember the windows disk has a built in memory diagnostic...


Also there's programs like OCT
that let you stress test your processor, memory, and videocard. And if you use it, you should get a freeze a lot quicker to tell you what the problem is.

At the current state it could be anything from a hardware or drivers.

Also, if you could list what your PC is. It might be easier for us, or a different forum to diagnose the problem. As a mobo, or videocard may have a known issue.

Double post.

Thanks for the feedback, guys.

I checked the memory timings and they're correct: 9-9-9-24 @ 1.5V. I'm going to open the PC and check that everything is well seated and connected.

These are the specs:

• Intel Core i5 2500k running at stock settings.
• 8 GB of RAM
• MSI P67A-C43 B3 motherboard
• Radeon HD 6950 2GB
• Crucial M4 64GB SSD
• Samsung Spinpoint F3 1TB
• Rosewill 630 W 80+ Power Supply

Well, it's windows alright.

A faulty PSU is frequently the source of random freezes.Try to underclock and then see if the problem is still there. The old PSU I used in the Pentium 4 I revived for my parents was the source of endless (and usually random) hangs that it experienced - to check, I underclocked (and downvolted) it and it stopped freezing - so I tried out a new Seasonic PSU instead of the old one, now it's overclocked and serves as my HTPC. Butter smooth under any load.

I read some, and all your components seem to be of atleast good quality. Some of it much higher than that. So that makes finding the problem much more difficult.

here's a couple things I would try.
1) Run Memtest86+ http://www.memtest.org/
2) The power supply no matter if they are generally good. Sometimes fail. I've had Corsair, and OCZ PSU's start to die and ultimately die on me. Like Xen said the power supply causing problems, is probably the biggest pain in the ass ever.  The symptoms are random. One way to check. Is go to the bios. And look at your 12, 3.3 5 V rails. If any of them are fluctuating at around +/- 10% that is bad.
3) As I said before the easiest way to find a culprit is to stresstest each individual component via software. As your freezes should occur rather quick when you find the faulty component. There's software to stress the CPU, RAM, Videocard. 
4) Reinstall Windows 7. If you crashed at a bad time, or the registry screwed itself up, or anything operitating systems like to do to destroy themself. This will rememdy that. If none of those happened and your sure everything went correctly, don't worry about this. But, if you think software might be the cause of your problems. This is probably your best solution.