My work computer is having issues and my company doesn't have a real tech support team (small company, my bosses go-to is to take it to Best Buy/Geek Squad and see what they say about it), so I was hoping someone here that is smarter than me might be able to help figure out what my issue is
Lately, my i'll be in the middle of something and everything will be working perfectly fine, until it isn't. Everything will lock up and after a few seconds I'll get a prompt saying "Microsoft Windows: This application is not responding. The program may respond again if you wait. Do you want to end this process?" Waiting does nothing and terminating basically shuts everything down and gives me a blank screen. If I just hit the power button and put it to sleep, not even a full shutdown, it'll start working again for a little while. It's gotten to the point where it is happening multiple times a day now, though, including once while typing this post.
I've run Window's troubleshooting helpers, a malware scanner, defragmenter, updated drivers, performance scans, etc. and everything seems to be fine. I'm not getting any errors, corrupted files, or anything anywhere. Anyone have any ideas of what could be causing this? My initial thought is maybe a hardware issue or failure?
Comments
Number one thing when working on windows os is are you fully updated currently? They release alot of updates that if you dont restart to finish the install it will brick it.
Check to see if there are updates available.
Check to see when the last successful update was installed.
Cross-check the update history to see if any of the time/dates from the update history coincides with when you started having issues with Windows, reverting to an older version may help with troubleshooting further on
Yea, I'm fully updated. There was an update 4 days ago, but this started happening about a week and a half or two weeks ago maybe, and the most recent before that was installed at the beginning of October. Timing is off so I don't think it has anything to do with that.
I was able to boot in safe mode and ran another diagnostic that found a few corrupted files that weren't showing before. Back in normal mode now and haven't had issues yet, so maybe that fixed it?
Possibly if it was only file corruption, could also be the start of a spinning disk hard drive having issues. What brand pc? Some manufacturers have a diagnostic area that you boot into to run checks.
I may have fixed it.. Hasn't happened again since this morning. It's a Dell Inspiron 5570 that is roughly 4ish years old
Is it always the same program where this happens? Or is the same program always running when it does?
Seemed to always be happening when I had Chrome open, so I had the same thought. Switched to Firefox to see if that would help, but it didn't. It is also happening when I don't have a browser open and am working in excel or word too, so I don't think it's related to any single program. Would something like a failing GPU cause Windows to freeze? I know this GPU is shit and I need to unplug/plug in my headphones about 4 times before it will typically recognize anything is even there.
a failing GPU can cause the OS to freak out, but in my experience, you usually get black screens, resolution changes, flickering, etc.
For problems like the one you describe, my next thought is memory. Usually a bad chip will give you a blue screen/error message though. You might run a memory diagnostic and see what it tells you.
Clean up your PC using disk cleanup and make sure you clean up all the windows related files, then run a malware software detector (like ccleaner) and finally defragment your hard drive. If it still happens then try expanding your memory if possible.