BleepingComputer.com: Windows 7 freezes -- how to find root cause?

Hello all

My Windows 7 freezes, ~once per day. Suddenly, with no slowdown issues prior to freeze or anything in particular. My installed programs list is short, and contains nothign suspicious. Updated Ad-Aware and AVG complain about nothing. The HW itself is fine, since a previous installation of Windows XP worked perfect.

Didn't find anything particular in the Windows Event log, but I am not sure I know where to search.

How do I start debugging this?

tia!

1) What is new or different since the last time everything worked properly (ie, new hw, new sw, virus, error, etc)?
2) Boot to safe mode and try to stay there for at least a day. Does the same thing happen in safe mode?

Thanks for the reply. Nothing is new, as far as I can tell. It just started happening.

Suspecting HW due to that, I installed SpeedFan and started logging temperatues, voltages and fan speeds. When it freezes again I'll look at the logs, and boot into safe mode.

Any more ideas?

Update: I ran SpeedFan, and it logged everything until I came and found the machine fronzen again. Looking at the log file, nothing is special: temperature, voltage, fan speeds -- all OK, and almost the exact same values when it froze as when I reboot.

More updates: HijackThis shows nothing interesting. Same for latest AVG and AdAware.

I am lost here. Any ideas?

Try running a checkdisk or a system file check.

chkdsk c: /b

sfc /scannow

Also check your hard drive for bad blocks with HDTune. If it does have bad blocks try repairing with HDAT2.

http://www.hdtune.com/ (should be a free version)

http://www.hdat2.com/ (should be a free version)

If you have trouble this boot cd has both tools you can use: http://www.hiren.info/pages/bootcd

This post has been edited by shauder: 22 November 2011 - 02:19 PM

You keep asking if there are any more ideas. Please do as I asked in the first response. Boot to safe mode and see if the problem occurs there.