Hibernating in Windows 7 (64 bit) will always crash after prolonged use, any way around it?

Question

So I have noticed an interesting and equally annoying pattern of Windows 7: no matter what you do, if day after day you always hibernate and never shutdown eventually (after approximately a week or so) a crash is guaranteed; at some absolutely random point everything will just freeze leaving no option but to restart.

Now, I understand pcs/laptops are supposed to do a proper shutdown/restart from time to time, and I may be just hitting on something Windows 7 simply doesn't handle well, but still: is there something I can do about it?

My set up has 16GB of RAM, by the way; I highly doubt it's a case of a memory leak because I've yet to see half of that completely full, let alone the 16GB. (Also, don't ask what programs or processes do I have opened because I'm fairly sure that's irrelevant; the cpu usage for instance doesn't go up before freezing, I know how the fan sounds like when a process is stuck in an endless loop increasingly demanding cpu time and that's definitively not the case, ie I can't hear a change in the fan before it freezes)

Solution

Few months ago I was experiencing the same problem with W7 64 bits Home Premium edition and I finally find the "culprit" (with the help of Sysinternals Process Explorer...): The System Restore Task Schedule which create a restore point each time a user is logging in...

%windir%\system32\rundll32.exe /d srrstr.dll,ExecuteScheduledSPPCreation

The solution I suggest is to disable this scheduled task:

Task Scheduler ->

[Left Pane] Microsoft / Windows / System Restore

[Central Pane] Triggers: «At Startup»: disable this task (but not the other one)

Hope this help. Let us know.

Comments

[Synetech]

Using hibernate is basically the same as leaving the system on, and since there are people who leave their systems on for days without problem, the issue is with your system, not Windows 7’s ability to handle hibernation or run continuously. You say it is not a memory leak because you have not used all 16GB of RAM, but that is not correct. In fact, it probably is a memory leak in a driver or some high-privilege program. Don’t look at the total physical RAM usage, look at process/system VM size. A process or driver could mess up its address space and crash without using up all the RAM.

[Mahn]

Makes sense, I guess I should not rule that out then. Thanks for pointing that out!

[surfasb]

Could be a hardware issue. Memtest?

[Mahn]

True, I should consider that aswell. If the workaround in the answer below doesn't solve the issue I'll put the RAM under test.

[OverrockSTAR]

Any solution to this issue? I am also having same problem.. :( configurations are same as mentioned above.

[Mahn]

@PareshkumarChaudhari it was a faulty hard drive problem in my case, I ran several tests with SeaTools for Windows and in less than an hour the results came back with faulty sectors. I replaced the hdd and haven't seen issues hibernating for long periods of time since then.

[OverrockSTAR]

Thanks Mahn, I will also have a look at the HDD then.. thx

[Mahn]

Interesting, I'm going to give this a try, I'll let you know if it helps. Did the freezing also happen at random times in your case, even several hours after restoring the system from hibernation?

[climenole]

Hi Mahn :) The crashes looks to be "random" at first glance but finally it was'nt. Hope the solution I'm using works also in your case. If not we'll find another solution.

[Mahn]

I'll mark this answer as accepted in the meantime, since I don't really have a way to check if it is working, but I'll come back to this question if I still experience issues. Thanks again!

[Mahn]

This didn't seem to fix it sadly :/ I guess the search for a fix continues. I hope you don't mind if I "unaccept" the answer, but I would need to signal somehow this question is still looking for more answers.

[climenole]

No problem. If the answer is not the correct if you unaccept it. :)

[OverrockSTAR]

Any solution guys?