Freezing Problem

[driftwood]

I am having a problem with my gaming system.
I've been running Truck Sim faultlessly for a couple of years.
Yesterday I fired up ETS2 and started having intermittent freezes for about 6 seconds, then back to normal again.

System is:
I7-10700k on Z490-Plus.
32 GB DDR4 3200
RTX 2080 Super
Moza Truck wheel bundle with H shifter plus Saitek side panel.
OS is Windows 11

Prior to this I had re-installed OMSI 2 Bus Sim.
To make it recognize all of the available control functions, I installed the JoyToKey program.
This didn't help much with the Moza gear, but did enable the joystick on the side panel.

So, when this freezing occurred, I assumed it was something to do with the JoyToKey program.
I have uninstalled that, which didn't help.
I checked the graphics drivers, and they were current.
OS was up to date 
I've run a memory check and anti-malware.

This system is only used for gamming, so no other programs are running in the background.
However, I do run Open Hardware Monitor and GPU TweakIII.

When these freezes occur the temps are well within range.

Now getting to the head scratching stage.

[king1]

have you checked the drives? temporary pauses like that can be due to failing storage drives...

I use hd sentinel to check the drive status and smart errors if any, but I also like to watch the "Average Response Time" value on the performance tab for the drive in Task Manager.

Failing drives, which would have a general feel of sluggishness, perhaps accompanied by the odd "Not Responding", tend to exhibit unusually high "Average Response Time" values. For SSDs one might expect usual values to be 0-20 milliseconds, HDDs maybe 10-100. If its stuffed you might see values in the 1000-50000 range. (50000 odd would also be accompanied by a three hour boot time I would think...)

Those kind of failures don't happen everywhere on the storage drive, it may not hit those values all the time, so it is useful to watch task manager for a while and see what's happening, any bottlenecks or processes hogging resources...

and why did you reinstall the OMSI 2 Bus Sim? What was happening prior to that to make you want to?

[zqwerty]

Re-seat the RAM, observe anti static procedures whilst you do that.

[driftwood]

The OS and games drives are both 500GB M.2.
The storage drive is 500GB SSD
I'll run tests on them today and report back.

Reinstall probably wasn't the best word to use.
The bus sim had been previously installed as had several other games.
I had a cleanup several months ago and uninstalled the lot for a fresh start.

Thanks

[Wainuitech]

It may or may not help. In the search, type in Reli. Open the Reliability History. There should be errors listed at times of freezing ( red Circle). Click on them to get details. Sometimes, they are useless, like Windows Stopped responding (no kidding). Other times, they may give a better description of what froze.

[driftwood]

Ok, I installed HD Sentinel trial version.
With the available tests it gave a pass for all three drives.
I then ran SeaTools and that also gave a pass on all 3.
Then I ran Crystal Disk Mark and ran the speed tests.
The 2 M.2 drives were very similar but the other which turned out be a spinner was much slower, to be expected.
If all else fails, I will swap that out for the SSD that I thought was already in there.

My next move will be under the hood.
I'll reseat the memory and GPU.

I checked in Reli.
There was 1 red dot for yesterday and it didn't co-inside with the time of any of the freezes.
It related to security and updates.

[driftwood]

Just a follow up to this saga.
Inside the box was quite clean, considering I hadn't been in there for a while.
Re seated the memory and graphics card.
Everything else appeared to be just as I had left it.
Hooked everything back up and fired up ETS2.
Had a couple of freezes within ten minutes.
Got to thinking maybe it's a game issue.
I had posted this problem on the game forums but had no replies.
Not surprising really as most of the gamers now are on consol or laptops.
Not too many of us old dinosaurs about now.

So, I cleared the game log, got back in my truck and shifted 15 tons of carrots from Bulgaria to Romania.
Couple of hours running without any issues at all.