How to investigate a problem with a frozen windows system

Question

This is not a newbie question :

My Windows Vista desktop computer tends to freeze. The freezing lasts about 5-20 seconds after that, the systems return to normal, as nothing happened. This happens quite often (I can confidently expect this to happen within 30 minutes). During freezing, I can move the mouse cursor, however switching to another application does not work. Key clicks and mouse clicks are buffered and applied after defrosting the system. I believe this is incompatible with the driver, but it would be interesting to know.

So my question is: how to debug such a scenario? Given that I cannot isolate a process to take a memory dump, or even if I could try to reset Explorer, I cannot control the process that would create a memory dump.

** Clarification **

I assume that since the question is not understood, I will clarify; I am not interested in fixing the system; I am interested in how to debug system code. How do you debug system resources? Is there a way to do something like adplus-crash in a system process to create a dump for an exception (if that happens, but is swallowed). Or there is a way to start the debugger at boot time to make sure that it also allows drivers to be controlled. I am sure that this is done by the driver developers on a regular basis, so look for information.

Timur

Answer 1

This lack of response does not seem like a true freeze, as you apparently don't need to reboot after that. This can happen due to the fact that one or several applications take 100% of the processor time for a while, which prevents all actions in the system. If you start the Windows Task Manager or Process Explorer , you can see that some application should be 100% bowl for a while. Process Explorer is good because it shows more services as well as applications.

Answer 2

The first place to start is the system event log. See if there is a problem with disk immunity or if something happens.

Answer 3

Take out everything you do not need (sound card, network card, connected printers, cameras, etc.).

Run for a while, and if the problem did not occur, it was one of these devices or a conflict between them.

If this is still happening, move on; remove the mouse and keyboard and use the remote desktop to control the computer or try replacing your graphic card with another.

While this does not help Windows users, I would like to mention the Linux Magic SysRq feature, which can help in moments like these.

Answer 4

A number of Sysinternals utilities, such as Process Explorer and Process Monitor, can help isolate the cause of the problem.

However, if you really want to debug the problem, look no further than Debugging Tools for Windows , and WinDbg in particular.