My PC constantly freezes if I’m not playing a game or have a game running.
✅ If I’m playing a game, it’s fine.
✅ If I have a game running in the background while doing other stuff, it’s fine.
❌ If I leave my PC while playing a game and the lock screen pops up, it will freeze.
❌ If I do anything other than gaming, such as browsing the web or digital art, PC will freeze.
❌ If PC goes to sleep overnight, it will freeze.
The frozen PC will typically show no error code and display will show “no input” until I hard reset.
If I hard reset, it often won’t successfully turn back on unless I move the mouse while it’s resetting, otherwise it will freeze again on the windows loading screen.
Sometimes I will actually get a blue screen with the error code of DPC_Watchdog_Error or something like that.
Anyone know where I should look first to try and fix this? It’s been happening for weeks now and it’s driving me crazy. I can’t figure it out.
I used to have a very similar problem also with freezers that do not occur when a game is running even in the background. I also followed dead ends such as CPU state issues and so on.
The biggest breakthrough came after several years when I took the entire SSD out of the laptop and put it into a desktop PC with entirely different hardware and booted the same Windows there. The problem still occurred!
A complete Windows reinstall fixed it for good.
By the way, I also made a program that keeps one CPU core only busy at 100 % in a lowest priority thread. IIRC, it worked.
public class Busy { public static void main(String... args) { int i = 0; Thread.currentThread().setPriority(Thread.MIN_PRIORITY); while (true) { i = (i << 3) ^ i; } } }
(With a JDK installed: javac Busy.java && java Busy)
Also found this in my bookmarks, but it didn’t help back then, and OP never got it solved either: https://forums.tomshardware.com/threads/pc-freezes-when-not-playing-games.3731029/
My freeze did not have your odd reset problems. Its own oddity was that often it was a semi-zombie-freeze, in that I could sometimes even type text into an open editor and open menus, but nothing ever happened, saved or executed.