Computer freezing can be caused by hardware or software issues, including faulty RAM, improperly adjusted BIOS clock settings, conflicting third-party software, and malicious software. Forced restarts may be necessary, and troubleshooting may involve updating drivers, defragmenting hard drives, or running registry optimizers.
Computers can crash for a variety of reasons, making troubleshooting a sometimes difficult and painstaking process. However, if you don’t fix the problem, the freezing is likely to happen again. This article focuses primarily on computers running Microsoft® Windows® operating systems, as the problem occurs more frequently on Windows computers. This doesn’t necessarily speak ill of Windows, but it points to the fact that most consumers use Windows, and most malicious software is written to attack Windows operating systems.
However, it’s not always the software that causes the computer to freeze. It is often a hardware problem. This is easiest to diagnose when the computer was working fine until new hardware was added. Sometimes this is simply a matter of installing the correct driver for your hardware, which may require you to navigate to the appropriate website to download a newer driver than the one that came with your product. Faulty or incorrect drivers can cause your computer to hang trying to access computer resources that are already being used by the operating system.
Faulty Random Access Memory (RAM) modules can also cause freezes, although RAM usually doesn’t “fail” once it’s installed unless it becomes damaged by overheating. A damaged or heavily fragmented hard drive can cause problems, including freezing your computer, so hard drives need to be defragmented regularly. Improperly adjusting the BIOS clock settings for overclocking can also cause problems, including freezing.
Third-party software, or software not written by Microsoft®, can cause your computer to freeze by conflicting with other programs or the operating system itself. Sometimes a patch file is available from the third party website to fix the problem. Other times a little internet research reveals that a certain popular program doesn’t get along with another popular program and one should be eliminated. Certainly there should only be one antivirus program installed at any given time, but other times the offenders are less obvious.
Unfortunately, some programs don’t uninstall properly, leaving behind parts of themselves to wreak havoc even when you think you’ve gotten rid of them. Antivirus and firewall programs have a reputation for being difficult to uninstall, sometimes requiring you to manually search for individual files and delete them after performing the standard uninstall procedure using Windows’ built-in utility.
Finally, secretly installed malicious software such as viruses, spyware, trojans, rootkits, and keyloggers can cause computers to freeze by interfering with normal operating system processes. If this is the case, you may have noticed your computer slowing down in the last few days or weeks. You may have had other problems as well, such as spontaneous reboots or the dreaded “blue screen of death (BSOD)”. In any case, when your computer crashes and nothing has changed in terms of hardware or software, you could very well be facing a problem caused by an infection. When you get past the block (options for this just ahead), run a full scan of your system at the earliest opportunity.
Sometimes when a computer freezes, neither the keyboard nor the mouse responds and there is no other way out than to perform a forced restart. This means cutting power to the computer by forcing a shutdown, waiting a moment, and then turning it back on. Unsaved data is very likely to be lost in this process, but there is no way to trigger a clean shutdown when the keyboard and mouse are unresponsive. When Windows restarts, it may ask to inspect one or more drives for consistency – allow it to do so. Normally you won’t find anything wrong, but Windows might do a minor fix or two to the file system before serving the desktop.
If you’re a little luckier when the computer freezes, the mouse will move but won’t be clickable. In this case the keyboard is normally responsive. Hold down the Ctrl and Alt keys, then press the Delete key to bring up the Task Manager. Use the Tab key to highlight the Applications tab and press Enter. Here you will see a list of running programs. Look for the message “this program is not responding”. Use the arrow keys to navigate to the problematic program so that it is highlighted. Then use the Tab key again to navigate to the bottom button labeled “End Task” and press Enter.
Closing the offending program should release the lock and allow you to continue your work. However, if the same program continues to cause your computer to freeze, check for an update or patch on the appropriate website. If there are no patches or updates available, you might try reinstalling the program, defragmenting your hard drive, or running a reputable registry optimizer to make sure there are no problems in your registry. You can also Google “(program-name-here) +freeze” without brackets and quotes, to see if others have the same problem and how they solved it.
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