I have an Acer E5-571-54R4 laptop
with a Core i5-4210U 1.7GHz CPU and 8GB RAM running Windows 10 with
updates current.
Sometimes
it freezes. The screen is "paused" at whatever was on it at the time.
If it's playing a sound, the last few ms of the sound repeat over the
speakers. No response from keyboard or mouse. The only way I can
recover it is to long press the power button and reboot it.
I'm having a hard time troubleshooting this because of how infrequently
it happens - once or twice a month maybe. Other than the OS itself and
pre-installed background programs, there is no common software running
when the problem happens, so I suspect a driver issue or hardware fault.
Besides Windows, I have some Adobe CreativeSuite stuff, Microsoft
Office, Firefox, Chrome, and some video software called OBS installed.
However, these are not necessarily running when a freeze occurs.
I have run memtest86 which indicated
no errors. A surface scan of hard drive came back clean. I manually
updated drivers via Acer's website, and when that didn't work, ran
Windows Update to see if Microsoft had any better drivers than what I
was using. BIOS was updated today, then a freeze happened 20 minutes later.
I have underclocked my CPU and GPU thinking that overheating was a problem, but then observed a crash happen when internal temperature was just 50ºC.
I
see nothing in Event Viewer from the time of the crash. There is no
BSOD nor memory dump file. Virus/malware scans are clean.
If anyone could give me some suggestions for how I could determine what is causing these crashes I would appreciate it.
