Windows 10 short hiccups/freezes

[HR5171A]

Hello everyone,

I have an issue since upgrading to Windows 10, the display and sound will hiccup for a split second. It is barely noticeable sometimes and might be even less than a second. This did never happen when I ran Windows 8/8.1. It happens when I listen to music, watching a video and gaming. I think it also happens when I browse the internet, but it is hard to notice. It is very noticeable when I'm watching a video or playing a gaming. It usually takes at least 1 hour before an other "hiccup" occurs. It varies a lot, though. There are no sudden CPU or HDD spikes. Everything is at normal. I tried the performance troubleshooter and nothing was found. All my drivers are also up-to-date. I have also installed all chipset drivers and LAN drivers for my motherboard from the ASUS website. The errors existed both before and after the installation of the drivers. My installation of Windows 10 is also a clean install, so I did format my SSD. Anyone else here have the same experience or have an idea what I can do? Other than to rollback to Windows 8, but it seems related to some driver to me.

For anyone having the same problems I'll type out my specs:

Windows 10 Pro N
ASUS Maximus VI HERO
Intel i5-4670K
8GB RAM
Nvidia GTX 970
Crucial M500 (SSD)

Edit: The issue seems to be caused by the Intel I217-V drivers. If you want to fix it, install any driver made before the 19.0 drivers. For example, the 18.5 drivers works good for a lot of people. If this doesn't help, go ahead and buy a USB ethernet adapter. I bought the D-Link - DUB-1312 adapter which works perfect for me (don't forget to disable the I217-V drivers in the Windows device manager). If this doesn't help either, it is probably caused by something else. Go ahead and download LatencyMon and check for high DPC spikes and see if you can find the cause. You're not ALONE - a lot of people seems to experience DPC issues with Windows 10 (a lot of ****ty drivers out there by Intel or whoever it may be from). If you still can't find any solution - try to go back to Windows 8.1 and see if this completely fixes the issues and wait for driver updates.

[petiaccja]

Hi,
Same problem here, also I have similar specs to you. I upgraded to Win10 and updated the BIOS a few weeks later, and the problem started.

Have you looked in task manager for any signs? Is your graphics card giving you TDR maybe?

Timeout Recovery is much more obvious. It freezes for a few seconds, and if the driver is restarded, it's followed by a black screen. We are talking about only a 200-300ms barely noticable freeze.
I took a glance at the task manager, but no CPU or HDD spike.

To add a little more:
As I said, the freeze take 200-300ms. Meanwhile, everything is totally shut down, including sound (buzzing), video (frozen screen), and input. It looks like as if nothing got CPU time. Because of this, I don't think task manager could detect the spike, even if there was one. It is most likely a problem with the operating system, a driver, or the motherboard. I can imagine a driver disabling interrupts for more than it should, thus killing task scheduling, or some task eating up all CPU cores, but the latter's unlikely.

[meimeiriver]

petiaccja wrote:
Hi,
Same problem here, also I have similar specs to you. I upgraded to Win10 and updated the BIOS a few weeks later, and the problem started.


Timeout Recovery is much more obvious. It freezes for a few seconds, and if the driver is restarded, it's followed by a black screen. We are talking about only a 200-300ms barely noticable freeze.
I took a glance at the task manager, but no CPU or HDD spike.

To add a little more:
As I said, the freeze take 200-300ms. Meanwhile, everything is totally shut down, including sound (buzzing), video (frozen screen), and input. It looks like as if nothing got CPU time. Because of this, I don't think task manager could detect the spike, even if there was one. It is most likely a problem with the operating system, a driver, or the motherboard. I can imagine a driver disabling interrupts for more than it should, thus killing task scheduling, or some task eating up all CPU cores, but the latter's unlikely.

On very rare occasion I've had the display driver stop responding. Indeed, it will reset itself; but on such occurances you'd always get a trace in the event log.

Mini freezes (without black screen) can sometimes also be caused by sata-driver hiccups (where the sata device keeps being reset). This especially happens on your typical third-party sata controllers (such as made by Marvell). Those errors will also show up in the event manager.

[bugme-not]

Same problem here with
Win10 Home 64bit 1511 and 1607
Asus H97 pro Gamer

Does happen while surfing the web and i´m listening webradio (i use foobar) in background.

What do i mean with freezing?
a freeze is this:
freeze for 0,5 ~1 Sec
Audio beganns to stutter like *EHEHEH* AND the Mouse pointer freeze too for the same time.

When this happened, the PC is normal in use again! it´s not neccassary to start the PC by "hardreset"

The new Intel LAN driver 21.0V results in an error message after booting
and v18.x aren´t able to be installed, at leats here

any suggestions

[D_6]

Hello.
I think I'm like the same problem! After upgrading to Window 10 My PC freezes because the network driver and wifi. If I disable the network driver and the wifi driver the PC works perfectly without freezing! Any solutions or suggestions?
Some positioning by ASUS and Intel? 😞
Thanks! 😮

[petiaccja]

Hi again,
I wrote a small program that warns when it loses the CPU. I ran it with real-time priority, so only ISRs (interrupt service routines) or disabling hw interrupts can take away the CPU from it. As I suspected, the CPU is taken away from all processes/threads, including this detector program. It measured a CPU "blackout" of 411 milliseconds.
So the answer is no, task manager cannot detect anything. I suggest updating all drivers, but if that's a problem with Windows, then only an update will solve it.

[HR5171A]

Formatted my computer and reinstalled Windows 8.1. Haven't seen any short freezes so far, and I have been using the computer constantly for almost 24 hours. This looks very related to Windows 10, some driver issue or something incompatible. I'm not sure what, although I think I have tried almost everything. All I can say is like above, just wait for an update or go back to an older version of Windows. I have spent far too much time on this already, so I decided to keep using Windows 8.1 for now. I will update the thread if I bother to install Windows 10 later on.

[petiaccja]

Hi,
I investigated the problem. The problem is caused by some cr*ppy drivers whose ISRs and DPCs take too long, hanging the whole system for the time they are executing. The drivers at fault can be identified with this tool called LatencyMon. Here's a link to it: http://www.resplendence.com/latencymon. You should check the "Highest reported DPC routine execution time". Around 1000us is normal, above that it's problematic. The program also tells the guilty module which, for me, was "ndis.sys" (network drivers and the like) and "tcpip.sys" (network protocol implementation). I tried to solve the problem by manually installing the latest driver for the LAN card from Realtek. In addition, I reset network stuff, as described here: http://forum.cakewalk.com/tcpipsys-causing-DPC-latency-problems-m2681743.aspx. As for the freezes, it's still not perfect, but it's certainly better.

There's enough help and explanation for LatencyMon on the site to get by. Be sure to run it until the first freeze, or at least half an hour.

Hope this helps.

[HR5171A]

petiaccja wrote:
Hi,
I investigated the problem. The problem is caused by some cr*ppy drivers whose ISRs and DPCs take too long, hanging the whole system for the time they are executing. The drivers at fault can be identified with this tool called LatencyMon. Here's a link to it: http://www.resplendence.com/latencymon. You should check the "Highest reported DPC routine execution time". Around 1000us is normal, above that it's problematic. The program also tells the guilty module which, for me, was "ndis.sys" (network drivers and the like) and "tcpip.sys" (network protocol implementation). I tried to solve the problem by manually installing the latest driver for the LAN card from Realtek. In addition, I reset network stuff, as described here: http://forum.cakewalk.com/tcpipsys-causing-DPC-latency-problems-m2681743.aspx. As for the freezes, it's still not perfect, but it's certainly better.

There's enough help and explanation for LatencyMon on the site to get by. Be sure to run it until the first freeze, or at least half an hour.

Hope this helps.

Thanks for the further investigation. I think you are correct, and it is related to the DPC latency. I'm not on Windows 10 right now, but I might go back to investigate even more. Further than the semi-freezes I also had some very short static sound noises from time to time, which happened even more frequent. This also doesn't happen with Windows 8.1. Now upon further thinking, I never had any noticeable issues when I used the sound from my TV. I thought I just was lucky, but since I use HDMI from my graphic card to the TV it uses Nvidias drivers for the sound. These seemed to work good. Normally, I used my G930 headset. And the issue might be more frequent when one uses the sound through USB?

[Jollydet]

guys its the intel network driver, anything past 19.1 will cause this issue, i use 18.5 with no issues, install intel driver 18.5 and your dpc latency spikes will go away!
https://communities.intel.com/thread/54594?start=15&tstart=0

[Zerreth]

Man I'm so glad you guys found out what the problem is because it has been driving me nuts. These issues + the extreme crappy Nvidia drivers on a 980Ti with severe memory leaks is not a happy situation.