Vista - Vista x64 lock up while idle.

I'm running into a weird problem with my Vista Home Premium x64 machine. It was running fine for about 6 months and now I am suffering from lock-ups while it is idle. I've verified that drivers are all up to date including chipset and BIOS. If I leave the pc idle with no applications running it locks up within 15 minutes.

When the "event" occurs, everything appears normal until I attempt to perform a rudimentary Windows function like opening IE or My Documents. The mouse pointer switches to the circle/ hourglass and hangs. Ctl-Alt-Del is unresponsive and I can't do anything but a hard reboot.

The event log contains nothing out of the ordinary and I've watched the system monitor and can't see anything that is hogging memory or cpu resources.

To further muddy the waters, I've seen times when I've been playing a graphics intensive game (most recently the new Wolfenstein) and the game runs just fine. But if I alt-tab out to Windows and try to open up IE, it hangs.

I've run some tests for memory and hard drives and all have come back clean. I like to think I am a fairly pc savvy guy but this one has me completely stumped!! Any suggestions are much appreciated!!!!

What if you start Task Manager, Click on Processes, sort from highest to lowest, and watch to see if, when idle, defrag or some other process eats up the CPUs?

Exemplary writeup and troubleshooting - have some rep

A few questions:

1) Can you get the same lockup to occur in safe mode?

2) (Back in normal mode,) Is the machine still pingable from another box while the UI is locked up?

3) Assuming ping does actually still work, can you connect to its SMB shares while it's seemingly hung?

4) If IE and My Docs seem to readily lead to this symptom, are you able to start a CMD prompt and use it to traverse the same directory structure without triggering lockups?

5) What anti-virus are you using? Have you tried temporarily disabling it as much as possible or even uninstalling it outright, just to check whether it's part of the problem? (AV drivers are frequent lockup culprits.)

The deterministic way to troubleshoot lockups is to purposefully trigger a stop error (BSoD), and then to examine the relevant OS structures to see what's going on. Sadly, that's not a practical approach over a web forum so a bit of trial-and-error must be substituted.

Do you have an option to restart explorer.exe? Use Process Explorer to find its PID and then kill it and restart it with cmd prompt. Can you run sfc/ scannow at an elevated command prompt?

Thanks for all of the assistance guys! Work's been a little on the busy side so this evening was the first chance I had to perform some additional testing. Here are the results.

I have observed Task Manager before and during a lock-up. I was specifically watching to see if defrag kicked off. Nothing was eating up excess CPU or MEM. There were no abnormal processes running either.

So far I have not been able to reproduce the lock-up in Safe Mode.

I didn't expect to but yes I can! Both by IP and host name.

I'm not sure I performed this test correctly, but on another PC in the same Workgroup I am able to see the problem machine in My Network Places>>View Workgroup Computers. However when I double click on the icon I cannot access it.

When I am locked-up I cannot access the Start Menu to open a CMD prompt. I'll try placing a short-cut on the Desktop and see if that can be accessed. If that works, I will try to /taskkill

I currently have no AV software installed.


Thanks again for all of the help!

Just completed running sfc /scannow and reported back

Window Resource Protection did not find any integrity violations.

Can you schedule chksdsk and the memory diagnostic tool?

I ran both chkdsk and the Windows Memory Diagnostic. Both came back clean with no reported problems.

Do you have the screensaver enabled? Or does this only happen when it is sitting idle for less than that time?

~Lordbob

That was my first thought so I made sure I disabled the screensaver and all power saving options.