Windows 8 Locking Up When Not in Use

[goatsniffer]

I am experiencing an issue with my system that seems to have started yesterday.

 

When I leave the computer for a while, like overnight, the computer is unresponsive and will not work. The monitors won't turn back on, and I can't open a media player with my keyboard hotkey, the system seems completely locked up. The system does not lock up while in use, even when doing intensive tasks.

 

I have not changed anything on the system recently, just regular windows updates. The computer doesn't have sleep enabled, but the monitors do turn off.

 

I'm not sure what the issue is, as there are no windows event logs. Strangely, I had someone describe this issue to me on their windows 8 machine. Is there a recent windows update that causes this issue?

 

Any help will be appreciated.

 

Thanks!

[Davo]

I had this issue when I used the AMD SATA driver from Windows Update. It's also recently started happening after updating to 8.1

[goatsniffer]

I have an Intel SATA chipset, and I haven't made any changes to the drivers recently.

 

The last driver I updated was my ATI video driver to 13.9 a few weeks ago. Well before this issue started.

[Brandon H Supervisor]

check to see if anything stands out in event viewer

 

does it come out of sleep ok normally? it sounds to me like it may be crashing when it goes to sleep or hibernate (which most of the time is a video driver issue)

[goatsniffer]

Sleep is manually disabled on this system, only the monitors turn off after 20mins or so.

 

There are no errors in the event log, but here is my last recorded system event from 9:35PM. The system was not restarted until 11:12AM the following day.

 

Process C:\Windows\System32\WinSAT.exe (process ID:7028) reset policy scheme from {8c5e7fda-e8bf-4a96-9a85-a6e23a8c635c} to {381b4222-f694-41f0-9685-ff5bb260df2e}

[richp21]

I changed the power setting on the machine to only shut off the monitor.  Seemed to fix the issue.  Its on an AMD system so I guess the intel chipset had no effect on me.

[goatsniffer]

Yesterday the computer locked up while in a game running the 13.11 beta driver.

 

I dusted the computer and applied some fresh thermal interfacing on the CPU and GPU. Haven't had the issue since. Maybe it was heat?

[incendy]

I have this same issue on my Lenovo, but only when I leave Metro IE11 running. Very strange. I don't have the problem on my other two computers.