Since installing the latest Windows 11 update, my Acer Aspire A715-42G has begun freezing completely at random times. The mouse cursor and keyboard stop responding, Ctrl+Alt+Delete and Task Manager cannot be opened, and there is no blue screen or error message. The only recovery is holding down the physical power button.
The laptop has a Ryzen 7 5700U, GeForce RTX 3050 4 GB, 16 GB of DDR4 memory, and an NVMe SSD. It is running Windows 11 version 25H2, build 26200.9445. These crashes are causing me to lose open work, so I would like to identify the underlying cause rather than immediately reinstalling Windows. What logs or diagnostic tests should I check?
2 Answers
A freeze affecting the cursor and keyboard is usually a system-level hang, often involving a graphics driver or a power-state problem. Because this laptop uses both AMD integrated graphics and an NVIDIA GPU, start by downloading the current drivers for both. Then use Display Driver Uninstaller in Safe Mode to remove the existing display drivers and install the fresh versions. This can eliminate corrupted drivers left behind by the update.
It is also worth disabling Hardware-accelerated GPU scheduling under Settings > System > Display > Graphics > Default graphics settings, then restarting. If the issue continues, temporarily disable Fast Startup through Control Panel > Power Options, since it can sometimes preserve problematic driver or power-state data between boots.
Check Event Viewer under Windows Logs > System for warnings or errors immediately before each forced restart. Ignore Kernel-Power event 41, because that only records the unexpected shutdown. Entries mentioning NVIDIA or AMD display drivers may be more useful.
Minidump files are mainly useful for blue-screen crashes, and a completely frozen system may not generate one. You can still check C:WindowsMinidump, but if the folder is empty, that does not rule out a hardware or driver problem. Event Viewer, Reliability Monitor, and graphics-driver testing are more relevant for this kind of hard lock.
I can use the computer normally between incidents, but these freezes never produce a BSOD. The entire system locks up, including the mouse and keyboard, so I have to hold the power button to restart it.