Despite the opening image of this article, when we talk about the PC being “frozen” we are not referring to the cold, but rather that it suddenly does not respond and we are forced to restart it. In this article we are going to look at the most common causes of a PC freezing or crashing and what you can do to remedy it .
PC problems that do not manifest as a blue screen (BSOD) or sudden shutdowns / reboots usually result in the system freezing and not allowing us to do anything with it except hitting the reset button to force it the wrong way. to restart.
Causes why the PC freezes
We are going to examine below what are the most common causes of this situation and what you can do about it.
Insufficient system resources
One of the most common reasons a PC freezes or hangs is because the system does not have enough resources to meet the demand for the software. In this regard the two components that are to blame in most cases are the processor and RAM; the PC stores all running programs in RAM, and if these processes occupy all physical memory, the computer will use the paging file, a section of the storage device that acts as backup RAM for these situations.
Even if you have an SSD, using this file is much slower than using the actual RAM intended for this purpose, and as a result your PC will slow down to the point of crashing and “hanging.” With the processor it is a similar story, and when we execute very demanding operations we can take over the CPU usage for them, leaving the rest in the background and causing the system to freeze.
If this is your case, you have several options to solve it, such as expanding the capacity of the RAM memory of the computer or changing to a more powerful CPU as the most drastic and logical measure, but you can also manage the virtual memory of the system or simply try not to run so many applications at once.
Hardware incompatibility
If a hardware component on your PC is not fully compatible with your version of the operating system, it can cause stability problems. The normal thing when this happens is that we have the dreaded blue screens, but there are times when we install a new device and Windows tries by all means to discover how to make it compatible. We will notice that this is so if we open the task manager and see a process called WMI Provider Host (32-bit) consuming most of the processor and / or disk resources.
We are in the same situation as in the previous section, the PC is frozen because the CPU is at 100% (and sometimes due to the same hardware incompatibility). All we can do is wait for Windows to finish this task, or disconnect the hardware device causing the incompatibility.
Other problems that cause the PC to freeze
Of course, the diversity of potential problems that we can have that cause the PC to crash is quite wide. For example, we could have Malware of some kind that causes the use of hardware resources to skyrocket and leads to the situations that we have mentioned above, so if you see in the task manager that there are processes that you do not know and that are consuming many resources we recommend you scan your PC for Malware.
In light of this, we must also mention that having antivirus installed on the computer is usually a fairly important source of slowdowns. Although an antivirus can often leave the PC completely frozen, it is not very common, but in the case of users who install different antivirus on the computer, yes, since the engine of one interferes with the other and causes blockages. Never install two different antivirus (in fact, if you install a third-party antivirus, we recommend disabling Windows Defender).
Finally, we must highlight another possible source of PC crashes: the Windows registry . This registry is a database in which Windows stores all kinds of information about your PC and its settings. When you install or uninstall some software, edit a configuration or make any changes to the PC, Windows records everything there.
Most of the time the Windows registry works without any problem without you doing anything, and in fact we strongly recommend that you DO NOT use the famous “registry cleaners” like CCleaner, since in most cases they are totally useless and at worst of the cases can be even dangerous. If your Windows registry has too much stuff to the point that it causes Windows to freeze, the best thing you can do is reinstall Windows , no more.