Since around August or September, my Windows 11 computer has been freezing roughly every 15 minutes, especially while playing Overwatch or Roblox. During each freeze, the mouse still moves, but the rest of the system becomes unresponsive for about 10–20 seconds. Sometimes the game or application crashes afterward. The issue may have started after installing NVIDIA driver 597.06 or 617.14. I used Display Driver Uninstaller and reinstalled the graphics drivers, but the freezes continue. My system has an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5070, AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D, 32 GB of RAM, and 1.8 TB of storage. An error appears after each freeze, but I'm not sure how to interpret it.
2 Answers
The error shown after the freeze may point to security or antivirus software interfering with the system. Try temporarily disabling third-party antivirus protection, or check its logs around the exact time of a freeze. Windows Event Viewer and Reliability Monitor may also show whether the graphics driver, an application, or security software caused the interruption.
What power supply are you using, including its wattage and model? A freeze where the mouse keeps moving while the rest of the system locks up can happen if the graphics card briefly loses stable power under load. Checking the PSU, GPU power cable, and connector seating would be a good first step.
The driver reinstall rules out a straightforward corrupted NVIDIA installation, so I’d compare the event timestamps with your antivirus logs and the Windows Reliability Monitor history.