Intermittent Hang and sometimes total computer crash

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1

dxdiag result:

Above is the dxdiag result.

I have tried every solution from scan repair, turning off UI, increasing virtual memory size from 3GB to 8GB (I have 16 GB ram), scanning for virus, cleaning up computer junk etc, to clean reinstall of GPU driver from safe mode. The only thing I’ve yet to try is complete delete and reset of wow WTF/Interface folder because I’m a relatively serious pve-er and losing my UI setting across all my active characters could mean close to a week of work tweaking and testing everything back to how it was again.

Now, I’m aware that my laptop is closing in on 8-9 years old now but the system is running pretty well still and I’m pretty careful and disciplined at clearing/avoiding junk, even opening up to clean the fans once every few months, replacing thermal paste etc. Heat is definitely not the issue because I have had heat problems on several occasions even before I own this machine so I’m quite familiar with the symptoms of an overheating machine. I still run wow on constant 60 fps (I cap it) even in the open world on medium settings.

This issue has started ONLY after dragonflight pre-patch content where my wow would hang for about 30s to 1 min randomly in a variety of content I do, before resuming normal function again, probably once every few hours, but sometimes when it starts happening, it happens in several quick successions of maybe 5-10 minutes interval each before not happening for a few hours again.

*I have noticed in the open world, right when it finishes the hang and about to resume normal functions, my dragonriding mount would have no textures (all white) for a second, I thought I should mention this as a potential clue to the problem.

Things that I fear might be the problem:

  1. My system is too outdated? My GPU has no more updates available for it as it is pretty old by this point (GTX 870M) so I wonder if that might be the cause but I was playing wow absolutely fine before DF pre patch so I hope not. – I mention this because I’ve had the warning “Your driver is out of date!..” on the character menu screen for awhile now but there’s nothing I can do because my GPU already has the latest driver and it’s no longer getting any new updates for quite awhile now.

But please don’t dismiss me because my system is old or something. My primary objective here is to diagnose the EXACT cause of this. If it turns out that it really is because of the fact that my GPU is just too old then I’ll accept no problem.

  1. My WTF/Interface folder may be the source of this problem. In which case, its good and bad since it’s something fixable but requires a lot of work.

  2. Anything else I cannot fix without buying a new system.

Anyone has any helpful suggestions/tips/solutions/ideas would be greatly appreciated. Thank you very much. Please help. Really don’t wanna spend unnecessary money because if this keeps happening I might have to stop playing this game (probably for the better)

Sadge, help.

2

Hi Arlevyn

Let’s test the WTF/Interface. It will be a test - you can return your extensive settings afterwards if it doesn’t help.

**Important First Step - If you have the Curse/Twitch - ElvUI/Tukui or similar addon manager/installer - temporarily uninstall. (Those will interfere with the test)

Close game completely. Navigate to the main Wow folder > retail folder. Rename the Cache, Interface and WTF folders to .old — Cache.old - Interface.old - WTF.old

The game will install new folders on launch. Test with a new UI and no addons. If that didn’t help simply remove the .old from your original folders and delete the new ones the Launcher installed. (This returns your previous settings as they were)

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Sounds good. This will take awhile to test but it should take no longer than a day. Will update when I can. Thanks.

P.S. I’ve been avoiding this partly because its launch week and also all the forums/potential fix I’ve searched for have tried the full UI reset to no avail. But I’ll test it still of course. Cheers.

4

We may be able to update your graphics with Intel generic and Nvidia. I assume you have been using manufacturers drivers all along. It can be a bit of a trick installing the Intel.

Scratch that idea - looks like you have to most recent available.

5

Ah yeah, was wondering what you meant haha.
But if this is any useful info, I followed JayTwoCents’ guide to clean reinstall of GPU driver using DDU from safe mode. So I assume driver problems may be less likely the issue for now at least.

6

My hopes are on the WTF test. Even though it will be painful to sort that out again. We can also check that Windows itself is all good. One thing at a time - let me know.

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I’ve only had 2.5 hours to test so far but seems promising. Will need to play with this for the next few days to know for sure. Will update.

Update: Ok sad news, it still happened. Twice in fact, both in dungeons - not in the open world yet. But definitely a problem. What can I check next?

Update 2: Happened in opened world this time while flying.

P.S. I was wondering if there’s a way to stress test every single component of my hardware to check if any of them are faulty (and if so, which)? Or not performing as it should due to old age perhaps? Just a worry.

8

Looks like you are confident it is not heat related - would be my next thought. Let’s go ahead and run some Windows checks.

Type cmd in the Windows search box. Right click on Command Prompt that appears - select “Run as Administrator”

At the Command Prompt cursor type or paste: (after pasting click enter key to start things)

DISM /Online /Cleanup-Image /CheckHealth (takes a minute - then at C prompt run)

DISM /Online /Cleanup-Image /ScanHealth (this and the next command can take awhile)

DISM /Online /Cleanup-Image /RestoreHealth

*While running DISM using the /RestoreHealth or /ScanHealth, you could notice the process may seem stuck at 20% or 40%, normal behavior. After a few minutes the scan will finish. When the bar reaches 100% it may seem to stall give it some time.

Next run the System File Check command. It will take 10 minutes or so.

sfc /scannow (space between sfc and /scannow)

If sfc /scannow finds errors the tool will attempt to repair them. It will print that out. If it prints successful repairs - great. If it prints “could not repair all” - run it again.

Note - If you are typing the commands there is a space before each slash symbol - /

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Done. All clear but sfc scan did find corrupt files and successfully repaired. Will get back to testing and report any noteworthy updates. Is there anything else I can check some more meanwhile?

Thanks!

P.S. I ran sfc scannow a few times before to no avail so I didn’t think much of it but I hope this might be the end of it (copium) xd.

Also, I’d like to clarify that even though I’m confident about this not being a heat issue… I’d still give room for doubt, because thermal paste application could have gone less ideally this time round for some reason perhaps, but if all else fails, I will probably open this up and re apply the thermal paste even though I’ve reapplied it just a month ago in preparation for dragonflight release. So, noted. Thanks.

One more thing, in retrospect, everytime I open up my laptop to clean its fans and reapply thermal paste on the CPU, the thermal PADS on the other parts were never touched or replaced and they have definitely some dusty materials stuck on them by now but I’ve never had issue NOT replacing them. Though, this will also be what I will have to try to do if all else fails.

Update: Took awhile but it happened still, this time both in the open world while flying/landing.

10

Let’s double check the heat.

Download HWMonitor here:

Free download is down along the left side of page - called “Setup - English”

Open it on desktop - go play for a few minutes fight some mobs then tab out. Take a screenshot of the tool. Scroll down on tool to get the rest of the outputs then take another screenshot.

Upload those to Imgur or a similar site. I use http://postimages.org/

(Remove the beginning of the URL link to post on the forum - the http portion should work - or paste the link in chatbox then highlight it - click the preformatted text button along top of chat box - looks like this </>)

Also run the game while the notebook is in a Selective Startup mode. You may have tried this already. I don’t see mention of it.

11

Looking over the DxDiag, there are a few things that stick out.

Your C drive is very low on free space. I’d highly recommend offloading what you can to your D drive.

Your audio driver is from 2014. This really should be updated.

Looking at the the errors, it’s all over the place. RAVCpl64.exe shows a crash, which is part of the audio driver package, hence the need for an update.

Aside from that, there’s a crash from WoW, two from the Battle.net launcher, two from Chrome, Windows Sticky Notes, dwm.exe (Windows Desktop Window Manager).

Either there’s some pretty serious corruption with your OS, or there’s a hardware issue with your RAM. There are RAM test utilities available. There’s one built into Windows, or there’s Memtest86+, if you’re comfortable creating a boot drive out of that and booting to it.

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@Tratt
https://postimg.cc/gallery/32k5XWm

I’ve screenshotted a high point in temperature and damn those numbers on my CPU temp don’t look comfortable. But I also had Chrome opened with 12 tabs on my primary monitor while recording this and while I afk with background fps of around 15, my temp would be settling somewhere around 70 degree celcius, not sure if that’s considered bad or normal. Either way, I may have to rethink what is causing this, other than reapplying my thermal paste, is there a way to check if the problem might actually be somewhere else? like a clogged heat pipe perhaps, or suboptimal fans…etc?

From my experience, when my computer has heat problems, usually after more than 7-8 months of not cleaning the fans, the apparent symptoms would be abnormally low fps on just general activities in the game, not instant random hanging or crash and resuming to smooth gameplay again.

Also yes I’ve disabled most startups before, having gone through that multiple times, only about 6 things are enabled on startup now, namely System Explorer, CCleaner (I frequently clean temp files), 2 Audio stuff from Realtek, Delayed Launcher (from Intel, but no idea what this is), and Windows Security Notification. Everything else is disabled including up to Cortana. Let me know if I should disable even more out of those 6 left.

@Sarvelis

I’ve tried freeing space from my C drive manually quite a few times over the years, at most I can get up to is about 20 GB of free space out of 100GB, the rest are mostly system stuff and microsoft office or my GPU things, I’ve gone to lengths to try and identify unnecessary old installs of GPU or system files but I’ve never been able to find a more in depths guide on how to identify which of the system files are actually safe to remove. Mostly the guides always end up referring to using Disk Cleanup which I do use quite often. Do let me know if there’s a better more in depths method to cleaning up my C drive.

As for Audio Driver, I will look more into it, but just from my device manager there seems to be nothing to update.

I think between OS and RAM, it is perhaps more likely my RAM at this point (though, I’m always putting all possible problems at the back of my head). I would be interested in checking for serious hardware issues on my RAM because that is something I’ve never been able to find out about as I don’t even know where to begin. I may not be comfortable doing it, but I’m willing to learn for sure. As long as I have a way to ensure that I can do this safely without unknowingly doing something irreversible to my computer. Could you point me to a reliable resource to conduct this test? I don’t even know what a boot drive is. If not, I’ll try and look it up myself. Thanks!

Update: Hanged and checked my temp, around 80ish, lower than the screenshot I took, so i don’t know what to make of that.

Update 2: Left my computer on with only chrome and its 12 tabs on, went out for a few hours and came back, lowest temp is now at 50 degree Celcius exactly and running temp is at 58-60 C. Thought this could be useful info.

Update 3: Hanged when I just opened up the game, temp at 70

Update 4: @Sarvelis, did the Windows Memory Diagnostics - found no problems.

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This is not the way to check for updated drivers. Always go to the hardware manufacturer’s website.

Audio driver update https://www.gigabyte.com/Laptop/P25X-v2/support#support-faq

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Thanks @Zungar. Looks like latest one was released at 2015, but updated nonetheless. Cheers.

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20GB free on a 120GB drive is about the absolute minimum I’d recommend having free. If you have access to the MS Office installation media, you should be able to uninstall it and then reinstall it to your D drive.

Another way to free up some space on C would be to go through your list of installed programs and uninstall anything you no longer need, or never use. Manufacturers usually install a ton of extra junk that you can easily be rid of. The memory diagnostic that’s built into Windows is pretty good, but not fool proof. None are, really. I prefer Memtest86+.

If you want to run Memtest86+, you have to create a boot drive from it. You’d have to go to their website - htt ps://www.memtest.org/ . If you want to burn it to a CD/DVD, you can. On the right side, download the “Linux ISO” and burn it to disc. If you’d rather use a USB flash drive, download the Windows USB Installer. Double-click that and follow the prompts after it downloads.

Leave the CD/DVD or flash drive connected to your computer and shut down. After you press the power button, immediately start mashing the F12 key (looks like F12 is the boot menu key for a Gigabyte system at least). You should get a menu of boot devices. You’ll want to select your CD/DVD or flash drive, whichever you created. I’m not sure what the labeling on it will say, but it should not be anything related to C:\ or anything with “Windows” in it. Once you get the right one, it should boot up to a blue screen with some text on it. Just let it run for a while, hours, likely. It will loop over and over until you stop it. Once the “Pass” progress bar in the upper right corner hits 100% for the first time, then it has done one complete test. It will immediately start over again though. If there are any errors, they will show up in red on the lower half of the screen. If the bottom half of the screen stays empty, then there are no problems with your RAM.

As far as the audio driver goes, I know it’s not from the computer manufacturer, but it’s from the people who made the sound card. It’s not super current (2017), and I do wish they’d get an updated driver out due to how widespread those audio cards are used, but it’s the best there is right now. You should be able to get the driver straight from Realtek at this URL. You’ll want the 64 bit Windows executable one - third from the top. Their site can be infuriatingly slow to download at times.

htt ps://www.realtek.com/en/component/zoo/category/pc-audio-codecs-high-definition-audio-codecs-software

Looking at the temps you posted, the CPU temp does get awfully high. It’s not hitting TJMax (100C), but it’s maxing out pretty close (90C). If there’s anything you can do to direct a bit more airflow into your computer (fan, laptop cooling pad, etc.), it certainly wouldn’t hurt.

16

Gonna be first time doing anything BIOS related (praying nothing goes wrong). Does my USB have to only contain Memtest86? Or is it okay as long as it’s in there along with other things?

Will have to do this sometime in the next few days.

I have managed to get up to 27-28 GB free out of 120GB so far, had to completely remove hibernation and switched virtual memory paging size back to the default, plus removing some small minor programs I never really touched. But they were only in the 2 digit MBs sizes so I thought they wouldn’t amount to much last time. Guess its better than nothing anyway.

Regardless, a complete computer lockup still happened after all that - for context, I had chrome open with quite a lot of tabs and I was flying around in full acrobatics in high speed above a densely populated area of mobs (the starting area of Dragon Isle where the dragons are). I was considering maybe I could just buy a completely new set of 16GB RAM since it is actually one of the few things easily replaceable on a laptop and they are relatively cheap…would that be a good idea?

But I should prob still do the Memtest before going ahead with this I guess.
Anything else I could do/check meanwhile?

Cheers!

P.S. Between CPU, GPU and RAM, which are typically the most/least durable ones?
Also, an observation I’ve made, there’s always a fraction of a second of hang when I first opened up the talent tree window after I log into a character. Maybe this could be indicative of certain faulty part? Or is this just an effect of this new talent tree system having more things to load than it used to?

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I haven’t set up a USB flash drive with Memtest86+ since they updated for the first time in many years. I imagine it will likely wipe the drive though, so I’d copy anything important off of that flash drive first as a precaution.

Unless the RAM is actually bad, I don’t know if buying a new kit of RAM will change anything. There’s certainly a chance, but I’m not seeing anything that leaps out to give me great hope. If you can get a RAM test to indicate an error occurred with the RAM, then absolutely that’d be something to try.

As far as the more durable components, as long as they’re not overheating, both a CPU and GPU are fairly indestructible. I’d maybe give the GPU a slight edge because a bent pin in the CPU socket in the motherboard could cause some issues, but that isn’t a fault of the CPU. RAM is definitely the more fragile component of the three.

Admittedly, with the temps that you posted, your CPU is getting awfully close to overheating. They do detect that and throttle themselves to try to prevent damage though. Perhaps that’s what’s causing these hangs is the CPU overheating and throttling so far for so long, that it’s causing things to seem like they’re hanging for long periods of time. If you wanted to test that theory, if you have a fan you could put fairly close to the laptop - preferably so it gets some airflow beneath the laptop as well - and and crank it up, try playing that way and see if things still act up.

The talent tree causing things to drag a little bit doesn’t really point to anything in particular as a problem.

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So I think I may have found the source? I reproduced the same hanging/crashing outside of the game with heaven benchmark. So does this mean it’s highly likely that it is my GPU? If so, is this something I can open up and try to fix or are there any software related things? (I have clean reinstalled the driver), or am I just doomed until I can get a new system?

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