Windows 11 freezes randomly and has display issues during RDP connection

Question

Hello

Recently I purchased a DELL Inspiron 3020 system with the following configuration:

Win 11 Professional 64 bit

13th Gen Intel i513400 10 cores, 16 logical processors

MS office 2021

Graphic card Intel UHD 730

1 TB SSD : Model NVMe P0221 Phison

The windows & other software were pre-installed by DELL in factory.

Following are the issues that I have been facing since the beginning.

1. When I launch a calculation on 4 - 6 - 10 cores, after some time, the RDP connection does not work at all. I am able to connect with my login and password, but the screen remains blank and then RDP disconnects
2. When no processes are running, I do not have problems with RDP connection.
3. Even when no processes are running, the system freezes sometimes and even basic functions like copy + paste do not work while working on console directly
4. Sometimes the screen goes blank suddenly and gives sethc.exe error

Can you please assist in resolving these issues. Are these due to Windows 11 or graphic card. Dell have done a hardware diagnostic and there are no issues with the hardware. So it is a problem of windows 11.

Answer 1

Hello,

Just to confirm, will the problem occur exclusively during an RDP session, rather than a console session?

Session Freeze can be caused mainly due to a high resource utilization on the server, for example, if you open Taskmgr you may notice high CPU, Memory, Disk utilization.

If you notice there is no high CPU, however, sessions are still freezing, then there is a high chance the cause is due to networking, there may be some packet loss that will lead to session disconnections.

You may also verify if the issue is caused by some third-party application by performing a Clean Boot.

Regards,

Karlie

Answer 2

Hello

Thank you for your reply.

The problem of freeze occurs randomly, on a console sessions. For example, I am editing a word / excel file.

Even simple operations like copy + paste do not work and I need to reboot. I do not think there is a high usage of CPU as this system has 10 cores and 6 logical cores. This problem occurs even during a simple operation.

Once during a console session, the screen went blank for a few minutes and then came back with the error

sethc.exe as shown above.

RDP session: Sometimes the RDP session works correctly when we do not disconnect at all. However if we disconnect and try to connect again, it does not work. I get the window to login, but the screen remains blanks and eventually disconnects. It is not a netwok issue as I am testing from the same network. I am able to connect to other systems on the same network via RDP since years without any issues, but this is the first time I am encountering a problem with the system. Perhaps it is an issue with the network installation on this system (network card or drivers).

A Microsoft support engineer called me and connected to the system to verify the issue and concluded that

the issue is with Windows 11 which was not installed properly. Therefore he advised to completely reinitialise the system and do a fresh windows installation.

Thanks for your reply

Answer 3

Thank you for the feedback. Typically, when encountering issues like random freezes on console sessions, it's advisable to troubleshoot the local system first before addressing RDP session problems.

In this case, even simple operations like copy and paste not functioning properly indicate a potential local system issue. Additionally, the occurrence of the "sethc.exe" error during a console session suggests possible underlying issues with the Windows installation.