Solved PC froze up and I could not do anything

Winuser said:

I use an eraser on the gold contacts on the memory and I bought a toothbrush to clean the slots on the motherboard.

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I also use an eraser when needed. But I use an artists brush with the bristles clipped short for stiffness.

Though Geekom is one of the few mini PC makers to have a US presence for contact, it is made in China as are all the other off-branded mini PCs - Beelink, Minisforum, etc. While these devices offer great prices for the specs of the components you get, a large majority of them suffer from one common problem......HEAT.
Cause-too many components in too little space with not enough air flow. Some models have no fans. Others have tiny little fans that do just that....little in heat dissipation.

I have a 9 month old Beelink mini (which has 2 tiny fans) sitting on the desk beside this Dell. Normal idle temp is 65-75 degrees which is too high. Sometimes when doing absolutely nothing, its fans ramp up full speed. Coretemp reads the temps at 95 degrees. As soon as Coretemp reaches 100 it shuts the mini off. To use it I have removed the bottom cover and set the device on top of an external fan until I find the time (and inclination) to replace its thermal paste.

I will say, as long as I control the heat it works great. It just so happens there is no US contact for this Beelink. I have to deal with China and only through its support forum. The site doesn't even have driver support. I think any attempt on my part to return it to China for warranty would be futile and I'd probably end up minus one mini.

A friend has the exact same model bought at the same time and his runs 20 degrees cooler than mine at idle. Others have used their mini for several years without this problem, but a LOT of users across the web do have the problem and say that replacing the thermal paste is the fix. It seems many find it to be hard as a rock.

If you are able to get your mini booted back into Windows, a quick way to see if high temp is your problem is to install a tiny app called CoreTemp.
It is visible in your system tray all the time. This is from my Dell but it looks the same for my mini. This indicates with 2% load my temp is 32 degrees.

glasskuter said:

I have a 9 month old Beelink mini (which has 2 tiny fans) sitting on the desk beside this Dell. Normal idle temp is 65-75 degrees which is too high. Sometimes when doing absolutely nothing, its fans ramp up full speed. Coretemp reads the temps at 95 degrees. As soon as Coretemp reaches 100 it shuts the mini off. To use it I have removed the bottom cover and set the device on top of an external fan until I find the time (and inclination) to replace its thermal paste.

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I have a Beelink Mini that runs 24/7 and it has never over heated. I use it to stream my media content to our TVs. It's the Beelink SEI11 with a core i5-11320H CPU. I've been running it since July of 2023.

glasskuter said:

The site doesn't even have driver support.

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There is driver support but they made it almost impossible to find.

Edit: I just tried to see if my Mini had any updated drivers and Eset and Malwarebytes blocked the driver download page.

I couldn't get back online till a little while ago. I did run the windows memory diagnostic test and it did not find any errors. I then checked the storage drive health and all is healthy. I also ran Crystal Disk and all came back fine there as well.
I ran SFC /scannow and no errors are found - ran it a 2nd time just in case.

I am currently using a wired mouse since I am thinking that maybe the mouse was going bad and "maybe" that was causing all the issues, although I am not sure the mouse buttons suddenly not working would cause the issue, but I have no idea. The mouse was moving around the scree but when I was clicking to select something nothing happened, but if I used the keyboard and hit enter that was working. Although I am not sure how the mouse buttons would cause the pc to suddenly get so sluggish. But I can definitely see how it would appear as though things froze up since my clicking with the mouse did nothing at all.

I have had the pc up and running for a couple hours now and so far so good. I am just hoping that it was just a matter of the buttons on the mouse going bad. I will be looking into getting a new mouse that is compatible with my keyboard so that I only need the one dongle to work both the keyboard and mouse.

I will let you know if all is still running well later on today. I think that I will clean those contacts this evening just in case.

My PC will sometimes freeze occasionally, "maybe" a couple times a month, seems to happen when I begin to play a video on a website. Not sure why it does this on some websites, it's never frozen on YouTube, it's been doing this for years. I just do the power button restart, and move on, once or twice "max" a month, it's not worth using the limited brain cells I have at 74 to try and figure out.

lnjr said:

I have had the pc up and running for a couple hours now and so far so good. I am just hoping that it was just a matter of the buttons on the mouse going bad. I will be looking into getting a new mouse that is compatible with my keyboard so that I only need the one dongle to work both the keyboard and mouse.

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Does your keyboard and mouse use a Unifying receiver? If it does it's just a matter of pairing the new mouse with the OEM software. I have the Logitech K270 keyboard and mouse combo and it was very easy to replace the old mouse when it died on me. The new Unifying receiver is still in the new mouse if I ever need it.

I do have the unit with the unifying software and as a matter of fact, I also have the K270 keyboard and the mouse is / was the M510. I am going to try and get the same mouse since it fits my hand and I am already comfortable with it. Thanks!

I have been using the computer with the wired mouse and not a single issue all day! I do have a small little fan that I might pull out and put near the unit to help blow more air towards it. I do have the core temp software on the pc and is set to the Celsius for reading the temps but I am going to switch it to display in Fahrenheit instead since I understand fahrenheit and I keep having to look up the conversion. It is currently running at 34 Celsius and that is after being on for probably 6+ hours now.

It is running just fine, so I am thinking that this whole issue started because the mouse buttons were going bad.... Teach me to be sure to check the mouse and such when I have this sort of problem. I check the batteries and change them before they get really low so as to not have an issue, but for some reason I never gave any thought to the buttons not working without any indication.

lnjr said:

but I am going to switch it to display in Fahrenheit

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I suggest you leave it at Celsius.
Expect temps between 28 and 75C, for just about any processor.

EVERYone uses Celsius for computer temps.


Those that don't, spend their nights in the woodshed till they capitulate.



These are fairly normal (desktop) idle temps...




Note: PCIe and NVMe SSDs run much hotter. Somewhere in the 50-60C range.

I will leave it at Celsius - Thanks! Mine has been running at 30 - 31° C both yesterday and today. In fact, due to some downloads that were getting done last night the computer was on for about 18 hours yesterday and the last time I checked the temp was at 31° So. at least there are no issues with this unit getting too hot.

I am thinking that this whole issue that I was having with the pc was all because of a computer mouse going bad..... first time in about 27 years that I have ever had this sort of issue. Yes, I have had the batteries go and I can tell without even checking the batteries out because it will start to intermittently start acting up and I take those batteries out and put new ones in and I am good to go and back when I used a wired mouse the issue would be with that ball on the bottom and that was always an easy fix too, but this is the first time I have had the left button on a mouse die on me and it never even occurred to me that my problem was the mouse since I could move the mouse around and see its movements on the monitor, just clicking on something was not working and a shutdown was not working with the power button, but as it turns out I need to hold that button to force a shut down for longer than I did with my old desktop. Lesson learned!

I am marking this solved and thank you to everyone for all your help and assistance.

Check Reliability History for entries,especially at the freeze time.
In the Search box,start typing ---reliability ---to access it.
If there are red flagged entries,select the "Critical event' line,then RIGHT click on"view tech details"which should provide a "Report sent" page and the first few lines should give details of the cause of the event.