Can old, poorly wired electrical outlets cause a PC to freeze?
Fellow PC builders, here's a fun one for you.
I took some "old" and no-longer-used PC parts and built my sister-in-law a gaming PC for her and her stepdaughter to use. It was a Christmas gift so the stepdaughter could play the Sims.
She has called me three times to tell me it's completely frozen - like hard locked, dead freeze, screen is displaying the last frame it was on but you can't interact with the PC in any way until you reset it with the power button.
She let it sit for an hour before she gave up. Two times this happened while stepdaughter was playing the Sims 4 and once it happened while my brother-in-law was watching YouTube videos.
Obviously, I went through the usual things you'd think in this situation and I had her bring the PC over so I could do some digging. Fully expecting to find a hardware issue, I tried the following:
-
I ran the Sims while also watching multiple YouTube videos in the background. Couldn't replicate the issue after about two hours.
-
I obviously checked the temperatures while gaming and YouTubing, checked the usual performance metrics and everything was great.
-
Ran OTTC stress tests - all of them. Under heavy loads, this thing was doing fine. Even at 100% utilization, the memory, graphics card, and cpu were fine. Did a power test too, fine. Did a "combined" stress test and all was fine.
-
Ran mem86, no issues with the memory, no bad sectors or errors.
-
Played Skyrim on ultra for several hours. This was a really fun way to troubleshoot.
-
Checked the event log from the day she had freezes. I can see where the event happened because leading up to the unexpected "power off" event, there were a ton of events related to various processes timing out. Seems like it was unable to connect with services and run certain background processes while it was frozen? I didn't see anything that really stood out to me as being a possible cause except...
-
in the event viewer, there were a few events related to Microsoft family safety. I set this up at the request of SIL so stepdaughter wouldn't get into anything she shouldn't. In the Event Viewer, it seems like maybe it wasn't verifying something correctly or didn't have permissions it needed? Upon Googling, I found some other folks with this error but I couldn't find anything about whether it caused freezing or not. Seems like one of the many events that just gives a warning but doesn't have any effect. One guy who had this issue had his computer freeze but disabling the family safety entirely did nothing. People in the comments thought it probably wasn't related. I also found another event that Google wasn't very helpful with. Might have been related to sound card but my sound card drivers are up to date and again, I have not been able to replicate the issue even when gaming and watching videos, so I don't know if it's related.
-
I ran the Windows System Files Checker and found no issues related to my Windows install.
I can't figure out why this would be happening only at her house. She says it froze after one hour of use every time. This brings me to the title of this post. My SIL moved into a really old house with sketchy wiring. My FIL told her the wiring is so bad that she needs to get it fixed immediately or risk a fire, so she's working on that. This house has a butler stairway, asbestos, and plaster/lathe walls if that tells you what we're dealing with here. This is the ONLY thing I can think of that would possibly be different between the two setups and maybe explain the freezing, but it just seems so unlikely to me that this is the cause.
Help?
Long-time tech here. So, you have an environmentally dependent and non-random failure mode.
"She says it froze after one hour of use every time."
Power quality is... unlikely to be your culprit, but I'm not going to fully discount it out of hand. Let's step back for a sec though so we're not over-focusing on one suspected cause. If there's one thing I've done too many times, it's spend time pursuing a specific suspected cause of a problem and get over-focused on it, only to later realize something else was the root cause. To be fair, I suppose this could describe many normal instances of diagnostics - literally any time the root cause isn't the first thing you think of and investigate could be looked at this way.
'One hour of use every time.'
That says thermal to me. Have you gone to their house (or had them take pictures / video of where and how they have it set up)? If they have it plugged in and wedged in a cubby or something with terrible airflow, it could just be cooking itself until it overheats and shuts down. The consistent failure timeframe would support this.
Aside from getting some variation of your eyes on that installed environment, can you install a logging option so you can later review CPU/GPU temps over time leading up to the failure mode? That should give you a fairly conclusive yes/no on environmental thermal.
The motherboard might be tightly screwed as well.
It's unlikely. Your computer's PSU should provide steady and stable DC current of the correct voltage to your components. If there isn't enough AC power, it should be more of an all-or-nothing situation (e.g the computer will turn off, not that you get these in-between stages of failure).
The best way to protect any desktop PC from power issues is to buy a UPS and hook it up through that. That will guarantee the quality level of the power. Years ago I used to have a PC that would destroy GPUs:
Turns out the power delivery in my apartment at the time was shit. Adding a UPS into the mix totally resolved the issue. Since then, the only PCs I run sans UPS are laptops and I have never had an issue like that since.
Does any of this apply to your situation? Hell if I know. But yeah, UPSes are not optional equipment IMHO.
And laptops have batteries which is half of how a UPS works.
Not saying it's necessarily the cause, but yes, unstable power can absolutely cause system lock ups, all sorts of other random seeming, hard-to-diagnose issues, and even lead to early component failure. That's one of the reasons why buying high-quality, properly certified PSUs from reputable brands is so important when building a PC. And also why when a PSU is faulty or starts failing it is often very hard to determine it's the cause of the issues, because of how randomly timed, and seemingly unrelated all the issues can appear to be.
As for your sister-in-law's issues, IMO the easiest solution would be to buy her an Uninterruptible Power Supply for the computer, which can keep the power more stable using the battery as a buffer. And if that doesn't solve the issues then at least you know it wasn't the house's wiring, and a UPS is still useful to have even if you have good wiring.
I think I'll skip telling her about the UPS and tell her to plug it in elsewhere in the house until she gets the wiring fixed.
The wiring is a fucking mess throughout the whole house but maybe one outlet will be reliable enough to at least see if that's the culprit for now while she works on having it all fixed.
Does she know which outlets are on which circuits in her house? Simply plugging the computer into another outlet on the same circuit is unlikely to fix anything, if the wiring/power fluctuations is the cause, but moving it to another circuit might.
p.s. I would still highly recommend getting her a UPS though. They're not that expensive (~$200), and provide a great deal of added protection. But I am also rather paranoid about that sort of thing, since I have a pretty stupid expensive PC and monitors that I want to keep thoroughly protected. That, and I also live in a rural area with lots of trees, so we experience outtages annoyingly frequently. ;)
She bought this (once gorgeous) home from a hoarder for a very low price in order to fix it up. The bad part is that everything is old and the previous owner messed with all the wiring. Apparently he even bypassed a couple breakers?
The good thing about it being a hoarder home is that there are plenty of holes in the walls and you can easily see where the wiring goes. My thought is that she should try a different circuit while she waits to have the rest of the wiring sorted.
Should see the house though. It'll be incredible when she's done. Really ornate woodwork everywhere and she got this massive house for like 100k.
My sister's last house was a foreclosure that had been mistreated for quite some time, so a similar situation. Great value, and no doubt a great feeling once you actually finish fixing it up, but a massive PITA to deal with when you first arrive. ;)
There are many horrific degrees of bad wiring. I wouldn't attempt dignosis from this altitude, but I wouldn't rule it out either.
Get a UPS and/or a line conditioner. Make sure its always always plugged in a surge strip. This is good advice for a pc anyway.
Tangent: I had a house with plaster walls. The one bedroom had a curved round wall surrounding the walk-in closet. It was beautiful, especially when we turned it into a chaulkboard wall. Thankfully the bad wiring there began and ended with no grounding. Bad, but I've seen far worse.
Let's say it's wired very poorly. Let's say it's the perfect storm. Can this actually cause a gaming pc to freeze like that? I would be expecting a power error in the form of a shut down, frying the PC, or a warning of some sort. But just a hard lock? Seems odd.
Power glitches can do some weird shit to electronics. Most electronics have a very narrow voltage range they'll work correctly in, and if they momentarily blip out of that range they can get into weird states that shouldn't happen and the hardware designers never planned for, but try to keep going from there. How that manifests in terms of user-visible effects is usually either a freeze (as the computer decides it needs to keep executing this one tiny bit of code over and over again that doesn't do anything useful on its own) or a system reset (as the OS crashes really hard).
Yea, I could see it happening. Computers like stable power. If there's random voltage drops happening, say down to 100V then back up to 120V after a few moments, that could manifest as a hard lock.
Try it with a raspberry pi, but only plugged into a 5v 500ma plug. It'll work, but potentially hard lock if you draw more than 500ma.
I think I recently encountered a power problem on my pc?
The motherboard is nearing 10 years old and over that time Ive lived in fairly humid areas a while.
My PC would start to freeze up whenever I try to something taxing with it and I was starting to lose it because I couldnt ever get the the root issue.
All my other components were fine and tested working in other systems so I was kinda lost.
Just recently I unplugged all of my PSU cables from my motherboard and saw there was a bit of corrosion on the top PSU connector that goes to the motherboard, fixed that and my PC is fine for now.
Maybe its a very rare issue? Maybe it could help you?
Power issues are very difficult to diagnose.
I don’t think so. Pc power supplies are functionally uninterruptible power supplies, they just only last for very short power outages. Either they power the computer or they don’t. If the wiring is faulty, the computer will turn off or reboot. It won’t cause issues like you are describing.
That being said, power issues are very difficult to diagnose. I had a power supply that either had issues or was too low power output for my pc. The only symptom was that in Elite Dangerous, it would randomly reboot. Under stress tests that should pull way more power than ED, it was just fine, and stable for days. But ED somehow caused it to reboot. Replacing the power supply fixed the issue.
TL;DR probably not, but power issues are so funky I have no idea for sure.
Right, this is kind of where my head is at. Brand new PSU though, way more than the PC needs (more than I have in my much newer build) and I couldn't replicate the issue at all.
Seems like everyone agrees the answer to my question is, "maybe?"
It might be worth considering when the freezes occurred. Who else was home at the time and what electronics/appliances were they using? I can’t say for certain but I could imagine something kicking on and temporarily pulling a lot of power being enough to cause a PC running something moderately demanding (like a game) to freeze.
I believe they were all home and had friends over. So probably a lot happening in the house with power usage.
Wow, I've had very similar issues a year or two ago.
"Poweroff" events in logs, and i couldn't ever replicate regardless of usage or timing.
The issues went away after I took out and reset my RAM sticks (maybe it was in a different slot this time, I don't remember) and haven't appeared again since then.
I don't have experience with this kind of behaviour. Well, I had onebad rramstick that kinda did things like this...
But I remember watching Scrapyard wars (of Linus Tech Tips Youtibe channel) and when they had freezes or crashes, they always talked about bad wiring and then conncted through UPS and it solved their issue. If you are able to borrow a UPS somewhere (friend, workplace, ...), I would definitely give it a try.
There is comment by stu2b50 here that says it is all-or-nothing situation, which seems reasonable. But I would still give it a try with UPS. I think there may be mains issue that won't make PSU shutdown yet will actually freeze the computer because of some brownout of something (undervoltage on the edge of functionality, basically) - simply put, PSU can't deliver stable power for a fraction of a second which will keep most of the PC running fine but will make one of the thing to freeze up (it may be some auxiliary chip on motherboard, for example).
I've been experiencing this issue lately and it persisted after replacing the PSU (it was a top tier, gold standard PSU before and after, and there was a UPS before and after. I also replaced the UPS even more recently.) I also tried the checks you tried, sfc, memory test, etc. I made sure I corrected everything logging errors in the event viewer. Nothing helped.
So, after looking it up, a few possible software issues popped up. Notably, apparently, this is something that (people assert) might be caused by issues with recent versions of Microsoft's Xbox Game Bar, what is for unfathomable reasons listed by Windows as "irremovable" system files.
I did my best to excise the thing from my Windows installation completely, which required removing the package using PowerShell, removing some services and changing some registry entries. For what it's worth, the system hasn't frozen again since (about a week ago). I have no hard evidence that this solved the problem for good.
Weird anecdote, probably not what's happening, but similar.
Way back in the days, my college got a brand new batch of around thirty 200MHz Pentium PCs. Most of them wouldn't boot, and if they did they wouldn't stay on long before freezing. After a bit of troubleshooting, my broadcast engineering teacher fixed it.
Using tools like an oscilloscope, spectrum analyzer, etc, he saw that the power cords were acting as antennae, picking up signal from the very nearby police hq, at just the right frequency (or maybe harmonic?) to send a strong enough signal up the wire to interfere with the clock pulses (as far as I understand/remember... it's been so long). He put a ferrous donut at the end of each power cord, right before the power supply, and none of them had the problem again.
What brand is your PSU, does it have the power to drive your components? Is it from a quality brand?
Reseat your CPU, make sure mounting pressure is not too tight or too loose. Make sure you have enough thermal paste and good coverage. Make sure there isn't a plastic sticker still on there.
Reseat your Ram or remove some to see if one is intermittently failing.
Try plugging your GPU into another spot on your PSU if it's modular. If it's using that little dangly bit to turn a 4pin into 8pins, try using two cables to the PSU. You might have a bum rail. (this happened to me and it was a pain to troubleshoot.)
As others said, get a UPS to eliminate the input power as a possible point of failure.
I'm not really worried about the PSU as much I think.
It's brand new, reputable brand, way more than this PC will need. And again, I put this pc through the ringer for many hours at my house with no issues.
But I will keep your comment in mind. I removed Microsoft's child controls on a clean windows install and sent her home with it. Told her to plug it in elsewhere until she gets her wiring fixed. Told her to let me know if it freezes again and to shut it down ASAP if it does.
I will start looking at reseating the CPU and messing with the PSU if it happens again. No real indication of what was causing the freezing but I was totally unable to replicate it or find any record of noteworthy events that preceded it.