Is there an app or a command/procedure that would "fix" a partially frozen Win 7? By partially I mean the screen went black but didn't turn off (pretty sure after/because an app ate up too much resources) and the keyboard/mouse became unresponsive, but I can still ping the machine and access its shared drives just fine so at least core functionality seems to be still online. A hard reboot would fix it, but I'm curious if there's a more "hackery" way that'll let me avoid that and restart Win normally after first getting access back. On a related note is there a way to prevent this problem from occurring in the first place? There are a couple of apps I use that can cause this kind of freeze - things get dicey when ram usage gets very high. If the apps simply crashed for lack of ram it'd be one thing (and this is the more common result), but freezing the OS is obviously way more annoying. Dunno why the OS lets them eat up resources it needs for its basic functionality. Btw for security reasons I'm running a ramdisk (1gb out of 8gb).
I don't know if you tried Ctrl-Alt-Del combination and if you could start Task Manager. You could find out which process ate all your resources from there.
If you can start task manager you can try to launch explorer.exe. If not, you're probably pretty much out of luck. In 23 years of using Windows, I've never found a good way to recover from that situation other than a reboot.
Cheers for the tips, unfortunately already tried that to no avail. Sometimes this kind of freeze leaves the keyboard functioning and I can start task manager with ctrl-alt-del to kill the culprit, but this time no dice. I can't even turn the caps lock led on/off for example. When this keyboard locking happens I usually assumed the computer to be totally frozen, but this time seeing file sharing and pinging still working fine, I hoped there might still be a way to perhaps kill something remotely and get Windows to spring back. Alas a reboot is looming. Btw looking around for some info I found these interesting tips: https://www.devopsonwindows.com/7-ways-to-manage-windows-processes-remotely It's the closest thing to a solution I managed to find, although it didn't help me much in the end. Not sure if because the semi frozen system wouldn't respond or perhaps Comodo was still working and blocked these remote attempts. @Minimalist I already know the culprit was Firefox, I'm having several recurring issues with its continued usage as it eats up ram and resources. Btw I have the exact same portable installation of it on a w7 desktop and a w10 laptop and for whatever reason it's much more disciplined with its ram usage on w10.
I had this problem with my last keyboard. Then noticed a stuck function key. My computer would not even boot till I unstuck the key.
Such trivial problems can be the worst to hunt down because they're so unexpected. I remember an IDE cable going bad on me during an OS reinstall. It drove me crazy finding that because I never imagined a cable could go off just like that and before the reinstall there were no issues. In any case I'm not having a problem with the keyboard here, it just got unresponsive as Windows partially froze. Likely the USB subsystem didn't get its fair share of resources. I rebooted now and noticed another thing that also worked fine during this partial freeze - a file downloaded normally. So there was quite some functionality left despite the OS appearing frozen. Seems like there's a non irrelevant likelihood that someone with a more hacker type knowledge could still get something out of a state like this.
What sometimes helps if not a hardware problem & not asking too much of low powered hardware. Is completing a series of successful shutdowns & reboots. In some cases you'd be surprised at the stability restored.
I have this problem with stand by: I tried many tricks, read here in another thread and on the Web, but no one works.
I hoped that someone had some new tricks. I spent many hours searching in internet and I tried all proposed solutions without solving.