Applications stop responding after a while

Question

I have no idea why it happens. Some of the applications on my laptop stops working after minutes of usage, varying from 1 min to 10+ mins. These applications include Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Animate, and games Don't Starve, This War of Mine, and perhaps more. By saying stop responding I mean the screen freezes, and memory usage drops to near 0, with games I can see the sounds are still playing, but no more screen interactions can be done. Windows do not prompt the message that it is not responding until I try to close the window. In such a state the application can only be killed by task manager.

laptop brand: Lenovo xiaoxin 14

System info: Windows 10 x64 LTSC 1809(17763.2867)

CPU:AMD Ryzen 7 5800H with Radeon Graphics (allocated 2GB for the GPU)

RAM:16GB

SSD:SKHynix

Answer 1

Hi ZhengshengZhu

Okay, please let me know the result of that testing.

Answer 2

After uninstalling&reinstalling video card driver, I've tested out that the game Don't Starve can run for 40 min+, at which time I thought the problem was fixed.

Looking at task manager retrospectively after the game fails to response, CPU usage had a peak, but I cannot determine it's actually before or after. GPU performance seems good enough: ~20% of "3D" usage, not too intensive so to speak. I'll try other kinds of applications soon.

Answer 3

Hi ZhengshengZhu

If a corrupt driver causes software to crash or fail, then the RAM usage for that software may be cleared, not always, but yes, that can occur.

Answer 4

Could you explain the reason for such a phenomenon? I don't quite understand, if these applications get stuck in graphical computation, how come their memory usage get lost? Is it Windows who attempted to clear their worksets? Or do internal errors tend to cause a breakdown in applications' memory management?

I do suspect my video card driver causes trouble, so I went for newest update. But I've never fully uninstall&reinstalled it. I'll try.

Answer 5

Hi ZhengshengZhu

I am Dave, I will help you with this.

All software you list is graphically intensive, so, most likely, it is the device driver on your graphics card that is at fault.

Completely remove the current video card device driver using the widely available free DDU utility, then restart your PC and go to the support page for your PC on the manufacturer's website to download and install their recommended version of the video card device driver.