Computer has begun freezing intermittently accompanied by BSOD occurrences?
Computer has begun freezing intermittently accompanied by BSOD occurrences?
My build is four years old, and except for a RAM issue early on it has functioned smoothly, but lately I've faced freezes and crashes, along with occasional BSODs.
The two dumps are identical, both fail with a DPC_WATCHDOG_VIOLATION, which means that a DPC (the back-end of device interrupt processing) ran for too long. However, these dumps are for a cumulative DPC runtime, rather than for an individual DPC, and we need the kernel dump to debug those fully. Please upload the file C:\Windows\Memory.dmp, that's the full kernel dump and it will be large.
That said, both dumps appear to fail whilst accessing your SSD. We see Windows NTFS functions called, including a couple of checkpoint and restart calls, so the issue may lie with the SSD. Download
Samsung Magician
and use that to perform a full drive test. Also use Magician to look for driver and/or firmware updates for your drive and to display the drive SMART data.
I don't see any third-party anti-malware drivers loaded, but if you do have a third-party anti-malware tool installed please disable or uninstall it and see whether the problem remains.
The magician's full diagnostic didn't find anything. It mentioned that an extended SMART self-test needs the newest drivers, but the device manager says those drivers are already installed. When I tried to download them manually from the website, nothing happened. I'm not sure what's going on.
OK, we'll assume your drive is fine then. Windows Defender is all you need, as I said, I didn't see any other anti-malware tools but I needed to ask. That's all fine then.
Thanks for the kernel dump. I'll try and explain how I'm using it so you can have some confidence in what I'm going to suggest. As I mentioned, the DPC_WATCHDOG_VIOLATION bugcheck was for a cumulative DPC run (the system was at Dispatch Level for over 2 seconds). From the kernel dump I can extract the event trace data in a form that the Windows Performance Analyzer (WPA) can use. In WPA I can list all of the DPCs that were running at the time of the BSOD, here's the key part of that output...
At the far left you can see the list of DPCs that were running in descending order of run time. Note that ntoskrnl.exe isn't a DPC it's the Windows kernel. At far right is the total run time (in ms) of each DPC. Microsoft recommend that no DPC run for longer than 100 microseconds (0.001ms), you can see that tcpip.sys ran for almost 750ms and HDAudBus.sys ran for almost 300ms. The former is related to a networking operation, the latter to audio processing. These two DPCs alone contributed to over 1 second of Dispatch Level running and so they are our first port of call when looking at what caused this BSOD.
Both drivers are Microsoft drivers and so are not themselves at fault, it's the third-party device drivers under them that we need to look at.
For your networking, the LAN driver is rt640x64.sys and the version you have is quite old, dating from Jan 4th 2021. The WiFi driver is Netwtw04.sys and is also fairly old, dating from Feb 20th 2022. I don't know which you use to connect but there is an updated LAN driver on your
MSI MPG-X570-GAMING-PLUS motherboard
website. I suggest you use the
Intel Driver & Support Assistant
to find an updated wireless driver.
There are two third-party audio drivers, one for the motherboard audio card and the Nvidia audio driver. The motherboard driver that you have (RTKVHD64.sys) is dated July 27th 2021, your motherboard drivers website has an updated audio driver dated 29th Aug 2025, I suggest you upgrade to this version.
The Nvidia audio driver (nvvad64v.sys) is part of the graphics driver package and there is a much more recent Nvidia version (581.42, dated Sept 30th 2025) on the
Nvidia Drivers website
. I would consider updating to this version. There are known conflicts between the Realtek and Nvidia audio drivers, depending on your setup you may not need the Nvidia audio driver at all. Experiment with not installing the Nvidia audio component and see.
In addition,
and possibly even more relevant
, your BIOS is well out of date. Your version is dated 22nd June 2021 but there have been several BIOS updates since then, many of them including updated AGESA microcode - this is the essential microcode that AMD processors need to function, it's VERY important to keep up to date with AGESA updates. It might be wisest to update your BIOS before you do anything else. I certainly recommend that you update it.
Thank you for your assistance thus far. I waited a few days after updating the BIOS and drivers to check if it improved things.
(After updating the BIOS, MSI stopped trying to install several downloads, some of which were drivers, others were unnecessary. I unknowingly downloaded some of the unwanted ones, including Norton 360, a third-party anti-malware. Ironically, Windows Defender found a Trojan in their files, but I won’t go into details.)
So I waited a few days after the BIOS and driver updates. I even upgraded to Windows 11 since it was available free, and version 10 is becoming outdated. (I’m not sure if this moves this thread into the wrong section of the forums now...?) Unfortunately, the freezes and sudden restarts began again yesterday. Today it’s so severe that I haven’t gone more than half an hour without experiencing one or the other. There have been no BSoD messages, so no new minidumps appeared.
I’m considering clearing as much space as possible from my main drive. If I had extra hardware, this would be the point where I’d swap things around to identify the problematic component. I’m at a loss for what else to do besides that.
I hope you hadn't switched to Windows 11. No issues with Windows have ever been resolved by upgrading—it just adds more complexity. We're no longer dealing with the same operating system...
What I recommend you attempt now is launching Windows in Safe Mode. In this mode, a minimalized version of Windows runs, loading only essential services and drivers. Usually, no third-party applications are installed. This means you won't be able to perform meaningful tasks or play games, and many devices might not function correctly due to missing drivers. For instance, your display will likely appear at low resolution since it relies solely on the basic Windows driver.
The value of Safe Mode lies in its simplicity: a stripped-down environment with just Microsoft services and drivers, making it highly reliable. If you encounter BSODs or crashes there, it's likely a hardware issue. However, if your system runs smoothly in Safe Mode, the problem probably stems from a third-party driver or service not loaded in that mode. In such cases, another method can help identify the faulty service or driver.