A long journey: 2 second freezes

S

Skweetis

For the last few months, I have had problems with my Win 10 PC freezing for a couple seconds. I have been slowly whittling down the issue, but am stuck on the last step.


Attempt 1. While I was working, my screen would freeze and then turn black. This would happen 2-3 times a day. Notably, I could still use the Windows Key to bring up the Start Menu and see it on the screen. So this wasn't an issue of a bad cable or hardware problem, that I could tell.


It seemed to happen a lot while I was using Outlook, so I spoke with an Outlook support person, and they had me do a ton of different things, and it didn't help.


I started wondering if maybe it was Spotify, which I also use a lot. After digging in their forums, someone said I should try to download Spotify from the Windows store instead of from the website, due to some GeForce issues. I did that, and it definitely seemed to happen less frequently.


Attempt 2. But it still happened, and when I looked at the Windows Reliability monitor, which I never knew existed, I saw that I was still having hardware issues (specifically: LiveKernelEvent, Code 117, often followed by strings that contained nvlddmkm.sys and other stuff). I believe this is nvidia related, but I am not 100% sure.


So I booted into safe mode, ran DDU to strip out all the nvidia things and then installed drivers from the last update, not the current one. That is, I installed 442.74.


I am now not having problems with the screen going dark, and so far, I have seen no hardware errors in reliability check.


But I am still getting these pauses of 2 seconds and it is driving me absolutely crazy. I note down the time and try to find something suspicious in the event viewer, but I can't seem to find anything.


Does anyone know how I can fix this and / or how to better track down where it is coming from? Is there a way to take the stats that appear in Task Manager and save them in a time series so that I can see if any weird spikes happen when the PC freezes? I am really grasping at straws.


Quick system info:


Operating System

Windows 10 Home 64-bit (10.0.19041 Build 19041)

CPU

Intel Core i9 9900K @ 3.60GHz 32 °C

Coffee Lake 14nm Technology

RAM

32.0GB Dual-Channel Unknown @ 1329MHz (19-19-19-43)

Motherboard

Alienware 0R3FWM (U3E1)

Graphics

XB271HK (3840x2160@60Hz)

XB271HK (3840x2160@60Hz)

Intel UHD Graphics 630 (Dell)

3071MB NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080 Ti (Dell) 34 °C (442.74 drivers)

ForceWare version: 442.74

SLI Disabled

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