Vista - Frequent temporary lockups

Good day, and thanks for clicking this thread. Sorry for the large walls of text, but this problem has been hexing me for a couple months so I want to be as detailed as possible. I'm don't even know if this is a Vista issue but I'm beginning to run out of areas to investigate.

The Symptom:

While playing WoW, my computer screen will freeze for approximately 3-5 seconds. Generally speaking, this happens after I've been playing for "a while" -- I've had it happen as soon as 30 minutes into my gaming, or as late as 3-4 hours; however, once it starts it then repeats itself with increasing frequency, reboots seems to help a little. There is no "trigger" that sets it off, I've had it happen in indoor environments, outdoor environments, 25 man raids, or by myself.

During this freeze my toon online will just stand there like an idiot. On my end, the video completely freezes but whatever sound was playing at the moment of freeze will play itself over and over at about 1/2 second intervals, kind of a machine gun effect of sound. I also get a sound from the computer case that might be the sound of a hard drive getting accessed.

What I've done so far to diagnose:

1. My first thought was video card. I was running 2 x EVGA 7950 GT cards in SLI. I soon found that WoW doesn't support SLI so I removed one. I updated all drivers, dumbed down the video settings. After that didn't work, I swapped the video cards (hell, I've got two why not?). None of these things worked.

2. My second thought was heat. I moved/added fans to the case without success. I moved the computer off the carpeted floor to the top of my desk. I took the side of the case off and ran a fan at full blast while playing -- even with the fan on the computer it still froze.

3. Because of the hard drive spin-up sound, I thought perhaps it was because of a failing hard drive. I have my OS on a seagate 1TB SATA hard drive and all my applications (to include WoW) on a 150G Raptor 10k SATA HD. I reinstalled WoW on the OS hard drive and got the same error as when it was on the application HD. Both hard drives are defragged once per week.

4. Bad memory? I ran the Vista mem test on a reboot which turned up no errors.

5. What I haven't trouble-shot.
Sound card: I do get a repeating sound problem when the computer freezes; however, I always have vent up in the background, and I can continue to talk to other players in vent while WoW is going through it's hissy fit. I can't believe vent would continue to work if the issue was sound card based.

DVD drive/3.5" disk drive: not used for WoW

Internet connection: Vent works during these lockups, my internet is fine.

Peripherals: don't think so

Anybody have any ideas? The only things that leaves me with are OS support of WoW which is supposedly a non issue, and just a general WoW dislike of NVIDIA cards. I'd rather not troubleshoot a video lockup problem with a new $400 video card...

Thanks for any help you can offer.

Hello, Im thinking it might be a memory-timing or heat issue as I get similar problems on another machine here.

Have you checked the performance logs in vista for evidence of a service/driver/program causing the system to become unresponsive?
Does you graphics card and Motherboard Controller both have fans?

The other comps I have setup running a 7500GT nvidia card with NForce 4 MotherBoard run WoW perfectly, I can remmeber XP doing the same thing years ago and back then it was usually a device cauing the computer to "Wait" while it performed a task.

This sounds like it could be the famous TDR error. On some programs you'll get a driverr failed and was restarted message. On some it will just lock. On some a black screen or flicker for a few seconds.

It happpens because graphics got out of sync with the computer. Many causes for it. Could be vista, poor drivers, weak power supply, heat, or other things.

Google tdr and you'll find lots of discussion / suggestions. There are no sure cures. I had no problems for a month with a new graphics card and now I get frequent TDRs. As you can see below, my graphics card (8800GT) was @43C, so it's not excess heat, anyway.

Check the logs as it might happen during gameplay, open the start menu and type eventvwr.msc and have a look though Administrative-Alerts and some folders called Performance-***

Thanks to everybody who posted on this topic. I checked the event viewer and there is almost too much to choose from. Needless to say there are a LOT of errors in the log, 2 within the last 24 hours. That said, I couldn't gather much from the log since it quickly degenerates to HEX error messages.

One time I just happened to alt-tab out of WoW when the lockup occurred and I saw the TDC bubble. I don't have any temperature monitoring software (speedfan refuses to install on my computer for some reason and the uguru software that came with my mobo isn't vista 64 compliant) but as I've said, the lockup has occurred with the case wide open and a box fan going full blast so I DOUBT it's heat (plus the card has a fan, and my case is ginormous with a seperate bay for the hard drives).

A lot of people in WoW are blaming the 2.3 patch, unfortunately for me I upgraded to Vista right at the same time as that patch and really don't remember exactly when the lockups began so I can't narrow the problem down to a single event . Hopefully the Vista service pack that never seems like it's coming out will address these TDC errors.

check your bios for any HPET vista timer or similar and disable it also are you running vista from a SATA drive?

I'll check, I've never heard of an HPET timer but if there is one I'll turn it off I am running vista from a SATA 3.0 1TB, what's the issue with vista and sata?

I have the same problem.

Differences: My OS (Vista) is on the Raptor disk and my apps are on a not raptor disk.
The freeze happens in other games as well as WoW. Such as Call of Duty 4 and Crysis.
I'll try some of the things suggested here.

I don't do gaming but I had this problem for a couple of months on my bright new ROCK SL8. I went thru the graphics drivers routes and a lot of other checks. This problem appeared on every bit of played media and program, the display lockout and recovery was there too. When I had exhausted every avenue my dinosaur brain had I did what I had been putting off all the way through. I stopped the bundled BULLGUARD Security program (I felt it was a bit busy) and loaded-up my NORTON INTERNET SECURITY ON-LINE program from my old stack. UREKA! Blinding speed and no lockups or audio ju-ju-ju-ju-ju-ju-judders.

ROCK SL8
2.833 GB QUAD CORE
2x9800 SLI
4MB DDR2 RAM
3x320 GB drives in RAID5 config.