Weird Lock-Up on Windows 10 - Help?

[Aotrs Commander]

Okay, so came down to the computer this morning, and the screensaver (yres, I know, I don't really need to use them anymore, force of habit) was frozen (Dad would have booted it up and done nothing more than use Outlook to check his emails, and Waterfox to look at his wargames websites). Nothing moved, nothing worked. Even the power button didn't seem to want to a hard reboot, I ended up turning it off by the mains powers switch at the back. Rebooting seemed very slow. I have been doing some investigation into possible causes.

(Windows 10, up to date, did anther check to confirm.)

Disc usage was at 100% on C: (on the Performance section of Task Manaher) for a bit, but appeared to say no more than 50% on processes as far as I could tell (it's dropped back to 0% and 24% memory usage now).

Checked virtual memory - thought that might be the problem (since the default maximum was way higher than the recommended) until I wrote this post and double-checked, then realises 16GB was right, since I have 16GB RAM.

Nothing looks out of place in resource usage, nor does there appear to be anything that shouldn't be booted in the start menu. Windows Defender didn't find any viruses.



As you may have seen a few days ago in the rant thread I made, my SD card reader dropped dead; among the things I did to try and fix it was run sfc scandisk, and that did appear to find something to fix via DISM, which it said it did (clean on second pass). Crystal disc doesn't seem to be finding any errors on my drives.



(I'm running on a hybrid SSD/HDD - should I disable Superfetch?)



One issue to note - I can't update my Nvidia driver beyond 399.7 because if I do, TurboCAD 21 (which is my work program) stops working properly (basically, it breaks the renderer; good job, Nvidia!) (Doesn't seem like that would be the root cause, though.)



No clue at this point (I am, obviously, doing a critical file back-up as we speak!)



Any ideas?

[DeTess]

Was this a one-off event?

[Aotrs Commander]

Was this a one-off event?

As far as it has only happened once thus far, yes.

I don't ever recall anything like that happening to me before, though, which is why it worries me a little more than the odd periodic isloated incident,

[factotum]

I have never, ever seen a computer that was so hard locked that holding the power button in for 10 seconds wouldn't switch it off, because that bypasses the installed OS entirely...if that's what you mean when you say the power button wouldn't do a hard reboot then you have to be looking at a major hardware issue.

[Aotrs Commander]

I have never, ever seen a computer that was so hard locked that holding the power button in for 10 seconds wouldn't switch it off, because that bypasses the installed OS entirely...if that's what you mean when you say the power button wouldn't do a hard reboot then you have to be looking at a major hardware issue.

That was what worried me a bit. If it was just the lock-up, I'd have gone "eh, it happens" and aside for noting it in passing, not thought much more about it.

I mean, it was first thing in the morning, so maybe I wasn't holding it in for quite fully ten seconds (though it certainly seemed to be taking longer than it normally did).

And everything seems to be running fine since, where'd yo'd have though something like that would have... Not made it do that.

(Everything critical is backed-up, both to the secondary HDD and the 64gig flashdrive (I have too much stuff to back to DVD anymore).)

[snowblizz]

That was what worried me a bit. If it was just the lock-up, I'd have gone "eh, it happens" and aside for noting it in passing, not thought much more about it.

I mean, it was first thing in the morning, so maybe I wasn't holding it in for quite fully ten seconds (though it certainly seemed to be taking longer than it normally did).

And everything seems to be running fine since, where'd yo'd have though something like that would have... Not made it do that.

(Everything critical is backed-up, both to the secondary HDD and the 64gig flashdrive (I have too much stuff to back to DVD anymore).)

Win 10 is annoying that way. Though in some respects arguably that's a good feature. Namely, if it crashes it can autorepair afterwards. Which means it can actually crash horribly and afterward be totally fine once it fixes things.

Since I (re)installed Windows 10 fresh I've had 2 sad face BSODS Win10 promptly fixed itself and Different error codes each time. Same error? Different ones? Duno. Just earlier today watched a youtube vid from an ex-MS software tester that explained effectively bug testing is done live nowadays, so things like this is going to be more frequent than we are used to.