Help with a locking up PC

[Julian]

My Intel NUC has taken (again) to locking up every few nights. I've always left my PCs on 24/7 and I've never had this with any other system. When I get up in the morning and wiggle the mouse to wake it up about one night in 3 it won't wake up. When I then go and look at the PC (it's physically in another room with 5m HDMI and USB cables running to my monitor - the long cables being a setup I've used for well over a decade) I find that the fan is on full blast and the disk light flashing every half second to a second so some activity there. Unfortunately with it being unresponsive and my not even being able to get the screen out of sleep mode I can't see what it is doing.

A long press on the power button forces a reboot and then it's perfectly OK for the rest of the day (or sometimes 3 or 4 days and nights) but unfortunately all that the Reliability History tool shows is the "unexpected shutdown" with no other info.

Because the PC is in another room the next thing I need to do is hide my keyboard and mouse in a cupboard each night and put a "CHECK THE PC FIRST!!!" sign on my desk in their place so that I stop habit from making me wiggle the mouse as soon as I get up and go and look first to see if the fan is locked on full since right now I don't know if it is because it is locked up that the PC won't wake or if the act of trying to wake up the PC is what locks it up.

One sinister thing that occurs to me is do I have some sort of malware that is bitcoin mining or spam-boting in the middle of the night? My AV finds nothing but is there any way to see a past history of CPU use by process that survives a forced power-cycle reboot so that I could see, if the fan on full is due to high CPU usage and not some glitch in the RPM control software, what might have been using up the CPU cycles? I'm not sure it's not an RPM glitch because there doesn't seem to be masses of heat coming out which I would expect if it even a single CPU core had been locked at 100% for hours. Lack of heat might also be an indication that it is the act of trying to wake the PC that triggers the problem since then even if it is high CPU usage the CPU would only have been locked at 100% for less than a minute between my failing to wake the PC and going to look what was going on.

I must say that so far this Intel NUC has been my worst PC for 20 or even 30 years, my worst ever in fact. I love the tiny form factor because I do transport it across continents a few times a year and it means it doesn't take up much space wherever it is but as far as reliability goes I've never had these sorts of issues for as long as I can remember. I'd still prefer to fix it than write it off but I've actually had these problems 6 months ago, thought they'd gone away, and now they're back. I'm running out of patience.

I am on the latest BIOS and drivers and am running Windows 10 Pro build 1803 which is the latest that the Windows Update client says is applicable for my system.

- Julian

[mc2fool]

A simple thing that's worth doing when you get these sorts of problems is to run a check for disk errors.

[Julian]

A simple thing that's worth doing when you get these sorts of problems is to run a check for disk errors.

Thanks. Just did that. No errors found.

- Julian

[Slarti]

Does the Event Viewer show anything from nights when it locks up?

It may be worth clearing the event viewer and look at it as soon as you've restarted, the next time.

Also, when you do a forced shut down and then restart, do you do a clean shut down and then restart after that so as to clear the system out?

Slarti

[monabri]

I had a problem with the disc of my Win10 machine registering 100% whilst apparently no tasks are being carried out. I found this out by using CTRL-ALT-DEL and Task Manager (Performance Tab). The machine feels like "lead" and the mouse won't respond - generally the machine "drags like a ducks derriere". I Googled what might be causing the issue and did all the recommendations but to no avail.

I then noticed a couple of things - my McAfee AntiVirus had expired and I had reverted to use Windows 10 inbuilt "defender" - if I checked for updates and downloaded the latest virus definitions ('KB2267602') the disc utilisation reverted back to a few percent and the PC "freed up". This was fine but the virus definitions are updated every day and so I had to go through the same rigamarole every day. I also noticed that even if the Windows virus definition were up to date, the very act of checking seemed to free up the machine.

So....I decided to stump up for McAfee 2019 Internet Security and to avoid using Windows Defender ( I then switched off the windows update).

As I look at disc usage at the moment it is reporting 0%.

[PrefInvestor]

Hi Julian, Well given the problem that you describe I would suggest trying the following list of potential fixes (in the order listed):

1. Could be a power management problem. Something powering down when idle that then fails to power up again when you start using it again. Go into power options set up a new power profile and change ALL of the settings to prevent ANYTHING powering down. Always use that power profile.
2. Try doing a “sfc /scannow” from an admin command to fix any corruption problems.
3. If 2 doesn’t work try doing a “DISM /Online /Cleanup-Image /RestoreHealth” again from an admin command prompt to fix any corruption problems.
4. If 2 and 3 don’t work try using the Microsoft media creation tool to create an ISO and then use it to do a repair install (ie keeping your apps and files). Take care to select the option to keep your files and apps !.

I can’t be sure that any of these will solve your specific problem but if a targeted solution doesn’t work (point 1) then 2-4 are a sledgehammer solution to almost ANY Windows 10 problem in my experience.

ATB

Pref

[Julian]

Thanks all. While it seems to be doing this fairly frequently I think I am going to do my hide-the-keyboard-and-mouse experiment first before trying any fixes. I really am curious to find out if it is the wake-up-attempt that is triggering the fan-on-max behaviour or if it is going to fan-on-max sometime during the night. I know that experiment doesn't really get me anywhere in terms of info to fix the problem (apart from maybe being able to log a slightly more specific support issue with Intel) but I would like to satisfy my curiosity and I suppose it would also indicate that I was probably being paranoid about thinking it might be some sort of bitcoin mining malware or similar which would be reassuring to know.

- Julian

[PrefInvestor]

Hi Again Julian,

If you want to know if you’ve got a malware problem then you should install MalwareBytes from

https://www.malwarebytes.com/trial/

and run a scan. You get a free trial period so you don’t need to pay anything. This this will do a better of detecting any malware than your AV software. Might give you some peace of mind anyway ?.

ATB

Pref