Okay, I'm getting no joy from Asus or Microsoft on this, so hoping for some clues on how to narrow down the cause.
I have very frequent OS freezes, always & only when running Remote Destkop Client (mstsc) in Windows 7 x64. I never have a bluescreen, and there is never a minidump. The display & input just freezes — no keyboard, no mouse, and sound will just continue the last wavelength if any. So far, I can't find a way to trap the hang given that there's no bluescreen; advanced startup & recovery settings for system failure are "Write an event" checked, "Automatically restart" checked, and "Kernel memory dump".
I've updated to the lasted BIOS, and tried a few different graphics drivers, both generic & ATI. I've also tried disabling Aero, and everything about the remote desktop experience (incrementally unchecked every box in the mstsc -> options -> experience tab), even disabled/unplugged external monitor to make sure it wasn't a dual-monitor issue.
My specs are:
Asus G73jh notebook
8GB RAM
ATI Mobility Radeon HD 5800 Series graphics
(recently tried driver versions 8.791.0.0, 8.801.0.0)
American Megatrends G73jh.211 BIOS (7/27/2010)
Windows 7 Home Premium x64
Windows Memory Diagnostic passed all of the following at least 3 times with no errors:
MATS+
INVC
LRAND
Stride6
WMATS+
WINVC
This notebook is better than most at removing heat (laudable vent design), so I'm not inclined to suspect thermal causes (especially since running 1080p video for hours has never caused a freeze, but mstsc does, reliably, within 5 minutes to an hour).
This did seem to start happening after a Windows Update, but I've since reverted every patch applied since a week before the first occurrence, with no joy. (And I'd only had the PC for a couple weeks before that, so it could have been chance + less actual time spent remoting at the beginning.)
I'm at my wits end, and I bought this laptop primarily as a remote terminal client (go figure, right?) Any ideas on how to identify the cause of this?
Thanks!
UPDATE: Found a viable workaround: Using mRemote in lieu of mstsc, I've had multiple RDP sessions running for over 24 hours with no freezes. This is odd, since under the hood mRmmote uses MS's DLLs & OCXs, but somehow there must be a difference.
UPDATE 2: Issue continues; freezes now also happen when accessing Google Plus using the Chrome browser (any version, stable through canary). Even displaying the Plus notification icon in GMail in Chrome will frequently cause it, while accessing Plus in any other browser will not (have verified this pretty exhaustively). There must be something substantially different in Chrome's use of hardware, perhaps via their custom Flash implementation). Also discovered that freezes can still occur with mRemote, it's just less frequent than when using MSTSC.
Best Answer
Using "msconfig", I disabled everything in the startup section. Doing that made the computer run better and remote desktop no longer froze the computer up. So I re-enabled things in the startup a couple at a time until I worked down to the Adobe startup items (Acrotray, CS5 manager and Adobe updater - there are a couple of others). System still runs great and no more lock ups. There must be something in the new Adobe stuff that doesn't mesh well with the ASUS software or drivers. The Adobe apps that I have are Design suite CS5 and Acrobast X Pro.