Computer Hard Locks Each Night

[terransystem]

I have an i7 2600 with Win7 HP 16gb ram, nvidia 570 sli a asus p8p67 deluxe and a cool master 1000w 80p gold. I was having problems getting BSODs when encoding video projects using Adobe Premiere Elements so I ran memtest86 and Prime95 and found out I had a bad stick of ram. So now I am down to 8GB of ram while 2 sticks get RMAed.

The problem is that once I took out the extra ram now my PC has been hard locking every evening. I leave my PC on 24/7 and each evening around 3am it hard locks. I can do anything and everything on it all day long without a problem. Its just that when I leave it on over night I come back in the morning and its locked up.

I have checked the event viewer and did not see anything in there. I dont know how to check to see which tasks or services run around that time. I updated my bios and my drivers and that did not seem to help. So i really dont know what seems to be the problem. Any help is appreciated. Thanks!!

 

[Motorheader]

Is your system setup for automatic updates and reboot after them?

 

[Ketchup]

Does it freeze when you do a manual reboot?

 

[terransystem]

My system is setup for automatic updates and normally does reboot and come back online afterward. I dont think there were any updates this week, and the problem has only been happening the last few days, but as of the last patch tuesday updates were installed and the system rebooted normally.

if i do a manual reboot, like if i ask it to restart right now it does so and comes back online just fine. i have all the settings in the bios to default and there are no conflicts in the device manager. it acts totally normal its just if it up overnight it hardlocks. again its only been happening the last 4-5 days now.

but no issues when going through post or startup or anything. no bsod or any other indicators. i do have the page file set to 16gb rather then auto manage as i have a 90gb ssd and with 16gb of ram it ballooned to 32gb of space. now i only have 8gb of ram as some is being RMAed. but could it be the pagefile??

 

[Motorheader]

Is there anything in the event viewer of note - red or yellow indicators - around the time you suspect the system does a hard lock?

 

[terransystem]

as of this mornings hardlock- it says the system shut down unexpected at 4:22 am unexpected and the system rebooted without cleanly shutting down first. the indicator of the shutdown is when the hardlock happened, but the time stamp of the event itself is when i rebooted. the next events listed are several hours before and none are critical or errors.

are there any tests i should run?

 

[Motorheader]

Is your system set to goto sleep or hibernate when left for a certain amount of time? In the bios is the power states set for s1/s3?

 

[Ketchup]

In Windows 7, I was having issues until I turned off hybrid sleep. Might want to give it a try.

 

[terransystem]

it is setup to never go into sleep mode or hybernate however the hybrid sleep was on so i went ahead and disabled that.

it did just hard lock on me about 20m ago while playing World of Warcraft. Nothing in the event viewer again. this is the first time it has hardlocked while using the pc. steam, dropbox, ms security essecitials were the only things running in the background.

i did make a change to my pagefile though last night. i changed the size on my ssd primary to 300mb and i added a second pagefile on a second 7200rpm hard drive as a system managed file. not sure if that makes a difference or not.

 

[Motorheader]

Even with that much physical memory I wonder if the page file size is part of the issue. I realize Win7 has improved on previous versions of memory management, but I wonder if that could be part of what is happening.

Also, have you upgraded or downgraded your video driver? You may be getting a reset from that.

 

[terransystem]

i did update to the latest nvidia driver. should i roll back to an older one? i went ahead and changed the page file back to system managed on the c: drive and there is now only one page file.

 

[terransystem]

ok i am going through the logs again and i noticed this morning that there was an error with microsoft antimalware realtime protection feature. it encoutnered an error and failed. feature behavior monitoring. that was the last event before the lockup. and going through the logs there have been multiple of those events the last several days. this is the first time it was the last even before the lockup however. but like i said that error has been happeneing all week in the logs. i just did not think anything of it for some reason. but yeah it is diffenately there. the only thing else in the logs is a warning saying my network adapter is not connected which is not important i dont think.