How to research issue with "frozen" windows system

Question

This is not a newbie question:

My desktop computer that is running Windows Vista tends to freeze on occasions. Freezes last around 5-20 seconds after then, the systems goes back to normal like nothing happened. This happens fairly often (I can safely expect this to happen within 30 minutes). During the freeze, I can move the mouse cursor, however switching to the different application does not work. Key presses and mouse clicks are buffered, and are applied once the system unfreezes. I believe this is incompatibility with a driver, but would be interesting to know.

So my question is: How would one debug such scenario? Considering I can not isolate a process to take a memory dump of, or even if I could try to dump Explorer, I can't control the process that would create the memory dump.

** Clarification **

I guess since the question is misunderstood, I'll clarify; I am not concerned with fixing the system, I am interested in how to debug system code. How would you debug system resources? Is there any way to do something like adplus -crash on a system process to create a dump on an exception (if one does happen but is swallowed). Or is there a way start a debugger during bootup to make sure that it allows for monitoring of drivers as well. I am sure that this is done by driver developers on regular basis, so looking for some information.

Timur

Answer 1

Take out everything that's not necessary (sound card, network card, connected printers, cameras, etc.).

Run for a while and if the problem doesn't occur, it was one of those devices, or a conflict between them.

If it still happens, go further; remove the mouse and keyboard and use remote desktop to control the computer, or try replacing your graphics card with another.

While it won't help Windows users, I'd like to mention the Linux Magic SysRq feature which can help at times like these.

Answer 2

This lack of responsiveness doesn't sound like a true freeze since you apparently don't have to reboot afterward. It might just happen because one or another applications has taken up 100% of cpu for a time, preventing all activity on the system. If you run Windows Task Manager or Process Explorer, you might be able to see that one or another apps has to 100% cup for a time. Process Explorer is nice because it shows more services as well as applications.

Answer 3

First place to start is with the system event log. See if it's disk non-responsiveness issue or if there is something else going on.

Answer 4

A number of the Sysinternals utilities such as Process Explorer and Process Monitor might help to isolate what is causing the problem.

However, if you really want to debug the problem, look no further than Debugging Tools for Windows, and WinDbg in particular.