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Screen Perma-Freezing

Gryszly··2 votes·1,206 views

Hello! This is gonna be a long one justxd I've been having this problem for awhile now, and there seems to be alot of other people who have been going through it for months. Ever since the start of season 8, my pc has been having random freezing issues. Im going to break it down by approximate date, what I did to try and fix it, and what happened afterwards. While also trying to make it entertaining So here we go, Patient 0, Perfectly healthy baby laptop girl of 2 years old. Dell Inspiron, 5000 series... idk crap about graphics cards and drivers an all that but its got a label that says AMD A9 7th gen It ran the game mostly well. I remember coming on and playing during Yorick's rework for the first time, when I went "the hell is a YourEK???". It went well until some many months later...BAM! Patient 1 Around August of 2017 Pc starts "freeze framing" It was annoying but only lasted a couple of seconds. I went back, learned I had Radeon version 16 installed, so I updated the driver and didnt experience another 0fps team-fight again. Until s8...whenever that was. Patient2 The symptoms have developed into this: Random freezing in both ARAM and Rift games. I don't play TT or rotation games much but as far as I can remember, this issue hasn't happened in any of them. A rundown: -Freezing was permanent. -ingame sound still played -no bugsplat -When VC was implemented,I could still talk to my party, they could still hear me. -I could NOT access task manager. -I had to restart pc>reopen league(I ipen it as an administrator)>Reconnect. What I did to try and fix it- update AMD driver from 17.2 to 18.1 using auto detect tool. I think what happened was, the pc couldnt find the location of my Radeon settings so when I updated, it would fail, So i watched a video that had me going into different files and setting "values" Idk. I'll find and link the vid upon request. After this, if ever the game froze, I was ABLE to access task manager now and reconnect. The new loading screen made reconnecting much faster. But its still annoying af, especially when it puts me behind a full 2 minutes. Patient 3 Today. I decided to try this: Dealing with My driver. Since AMD settings wouldnt come up in the windows search bar I went to the folders, under the dropdown menu "My Pc" I opened file location of everything there and set them all to default, thinking that maybe Radeon Settings.exe was in the wrong place. After that I used another video that had me go execute the administrative scannow command, I restarted, uninstalled my auto detect tool and using DDU(some kind of driver unistaller) I completely erased AMD files from my pc and manually redownloaded them. I tested it out on an aram game, solo. I froze two times in the same game but was able to reconnect. I decided to just go ahead and play draft with friends. I froze two times, once in the beginning, and then again a few minutes later. the thing about this second freeze is that the screen flashed white. nothing but the HUD and champion health bars showed. This freeze required me to not just end process with task manager, but relogin as well. I experienced no other freezing that game but um... The 2 deaths I gained from those freezes and the ~7 minutes lost really put a poor adc such as myself behind ;v; (good thing my jungler can carry). So the group decides to ARURF for a mission, and as expected the game ran perfectly as I played like a monkey as usual. Then we played ARAM, that went well. I played one more by myself and everything went well.

This is as detailed as I can get with my issue, and I understand that other people want to make sure that their problems are heard but please ONLY post possible fixes, suggestions, or causes. If you are having one of these issues, post your own bug report instead of replying how you're having the same problem, its way more effective, trust me. And! PLEASE don't post those "Riot won't fix it, They are lazy and they suck and they won't nerf Yasuo and yadda yadda." That doesen't help either...

Thanks for your time and for reading my novel! Sorry for typos, this is on my phone since my pc is having an annuerysm.

10 Comments

MagicFlyingLlama1 votes

Using in-place upgrade for radeon software has been unreliable at best for a while, for a few reasons.

Download the full installer for the correct drivers: https://www.amd.com/en/support

Run DDU to uninstall the driver completely: https://www.wagnardsoft.com/

Reboot.

Install the new drivers.

Reboot again.

Gryszly1 votes

Alright, thanks! I'll try it now and see how it does after some games.

Gryszly1 votes

hey again! So the freeze happened again, just now in an Aram, right at the final push. The sound still played. I was able to end task and reconnect.

MagicFlyingLlama1 votes

Most likely it has nothing to do with the graphics, then. At least not a glitch.

Have you tried monitoring the temperature of the processor during gameplay?

Gryszly1 votes

I don't have a way to accurately monitor that, the only way I know if its getting too toasty is if the internal fan starts whirling, which is always just upon start up and restarting after heavy updates, such as when I followed the rebooting method you described. I'm wondering if maybe I should just do it again.

MagicFlyingLlama1 votes

Get an accurate way to monitor it, then.

If you dont have any overclocking or monitoring software already, hwinfo64 is great.

https://www.hwinfo.com/

Gryszly1 votes

IM BACK FROM SPACE, I was away from home, Ill try it later on today, Tysm!

ScarletFever1051 votes

Same problem started for me months ago. I went through the whole trouble shooting process with Tech support (gotta give them credit for trying). But nothing was fixed. They seem to be insistent that is has to be a problem on my end. Yet I played other online games (and used other applications) on the same computer and none of them had any crashes. Tech was thinking maybe it was a conflict with my anti-virus Avast. I even tried turning it off to no avail.

I ended up upgrading my computer anyway a couple of months into the process.

Shock!!! Brand new Asus Scar II gaming laptop ... much better, crashes less, but still crashes and today I had it completely freeze up again just like the old one. Basically on the old computer I would get frame drops down to single digits even though when it was running smoothly that system could render about 80 FPS. On my new computer it can easily render well over 200 FPS so frame drops (which still happen) don't affect me much because it still stays fast.

In fact LOL would still crash from time-to-time on a brand new, fresh computer with nothing else installed! And just in case RIOT reads this ... yes that includes NO AVAST so it was not an anti-virus conflict.

So here is my advice:

  1. Open a support ticket with RIOT. They will make you feel like you are the only person on earth that this is happening to, but they will try to help.

  2. After you open the ticket (mostly as a means of telling RIOT that their engine coding is crap), ignore about 90% of anything they say because a TON of it is just you doing all of the leg work for them to trouble shoot their code. HOWEVER. If you are having any problems with any other programs on the computer in ADDITION to League, go step-by-step through RIOT's trouble shooting because it is actually pretty thorough and their tech guys seem to know their stuff so if you have ANY problems with your system that will pretty much help you find them.

  3. After that just completely UNINSTALL and REINSTALL League fresh. (In the future make this your first step.)

The fresh install seems to help a lot. My game still crashes to desk top at times, and today I had another complete lock up freeze like you described, so it is time for me to uninstall and reinstall again myself.

Basically something RIOT does in its updates or some other failure on their part to update and overwrite key files properly during some of the patches (despite the massive size of some of the downloads) seems to let crappy bloat happen and creates ghosts in the machine that crash the game. It is probably some form of file corruption but RIOT loves to make you jump through hoops and check every other problem and blame your end for a problem that according to them doesn't exist. If you search the boards there are threads like this going back years so clearly the problem DOES exist.

On my old computer I had installs of numerous BLIZZARD titles that I have patched and run for YEARS without needing to reinstall them. With League I am finding that it needs to be done about every 2 months. On my new computer which now had my game library fully install League remains the only title that I have to be this hand-on to keep running properly. Everything else I play is "install once and it looks after itself".

If I didn't love the gameplay so much I would quit for the poor quality of the "reliability" of the product. But this game is a bit like a drug ... no matter how bad it is we keep coming back to it.

Gryszly1 votes

Erm, Thanks but, this is the sort of thing I was asking people not to post... You see, you have to remember that of the millions of people who play this game, only a few thousand may have this kind of issue. So yeah I can understand tech support thinking its not a problem with the game but its external issues. If you sold a product that you refill with new cool features every couple of months and you have hundreds buying those products and a few say its defective or broken or whatever, with hundreds more people not experiencing defectiveness, who is it easier to listen to? I don't want to play the blame game, and I don't believe its Riot's issue. From whats been happening I can see it may be a weird disconnect between Windows and AMD, or maybe my poor Inspiron gal is too old for league ;-;. But I'm no tech/game dev/graphics card expert, so I can't (and won't) pinpoint the problem on any company, its not like they meant for this to happen to some people. Also Im sure tech support is just cranky because they have to deal with blame blame blame all day xd.

And another thing, I've seen these boards that describe the same problem from years ago as well, and everytime someone posts that "Its Riot's fault and they won't fix it because 'bla blah blah'" The thread seems to die. Which makes sense, no worker wants to provide help on a thread when they're already being attacked,and no one wants to provide assistance to someone whose now dead-set on the idea that Riot is the issue and won't look at everything else first. Like my grandmother told me, there's multiple ways to peel a tomato....yea, a tomato. Sorry for typos an all that, and hopefully that didnt come as rude, Im on my phone.

ScarletFever1051 votes

{quoted}

Erm, Thanks but, this is the sort of thing I was asking people not to post... You see, you have to remember that of the millions of people who play this game, only a few thousand may have this kind of issue. So yeah I can understand tech support thinking its not a problem with the game but its external issues. If you sold a product that you refill with new cool features every couple of months and you have hundreds buying those products and a few say its defective or broken or whatever, with hundreds more people not experiencing defectiveness, who is it easier to listen to? I don't want to play the blame game, and I don't believe its Riot's issue. From whats been happening I can see it may be a weird disconnect between Windows and AMD, or maybe my poor Inspiron gal is too old for league ;-;. But I'm no tech/game dev/graphics card expert, so I can't (and won't) pinpoint the problem on any company, its not like they meant for this to happen to some people. Also Im sure tech support is just cranky because they have to deal with blame blame blame all day xd.

And another thing, I've seen these boards that describe the same problem from years ago as well, and everytime someone posts that "Its Riot's fault and they won't fix it because 'bla blah blah'" The thread seems to die. Which makes sense, no worker wants to provide help on a thread when they're already being attacked,and no one wants to provide assistance to someone whose now dead-set on the idea that Riot is the issue and won't look at everything else first. Like my grandmother told me, there's multiple ways to peel a tomato....yea, a tomato. Sorry for typos an all that, and hopefully that didnt come as rude, Im on my phone.

Lol Grizzly,

For the record .. I am not running AMD like you, I am running NVidia. I am also on an Intel Chip, in a standard Off-the-shelf name brand gaming laptop, so I am mainstream as it gets.

This isn't about playing the blame game so much as telling you that your problem is one that many people experience with a variety of hardware configurations and explaining what you can do about it. Because you are looking for solutions, and I am telling you that RIOT doesn't have any because it is core to their product and at some point in the future they could fix it by giving their software a thorough bug fix, but for now that clearly is not their plan.

The bugs and problems seem mostly to by in RIOT's patching and upgrading system because if you un--install and then re-install you will discover that the problem goes away for a few weeks to a few months. Then it will slowly get worse and worse until it starts collapsing your system again.

Even one of the Tech Support guys I was dealing with said that he re-installs every couple of months just to clean it all up and avoid problems!

So, the insanity here is that RIOT knows full well that this is a problem in their game. Look how many threads for the last 5 years talk about the same problem. For really casual players it likely isn't a big deal because they don't notice the performance drops and periodic upgrades or following online advice will keep the game working "well enough". For example I was playing a lot less for a couple of years and during that time just slowly turning down the graphics settings, shutting down background applications, putting LOL in Low Specs mode, and running the Hex-tech tool from time-to-time seemed to minimize the problems. It wasn't until I started playing more frequently again and patching every cycle that things got disastrous.

But to simply tell you to un-install and re-install doesn't help the underlying problem. It will fix your problems, but not get RIOT to be more honest with its user base. In fact RIOT could solve a LOT of these problems by just telling people to START by un-installing and re-installing. But they don't do that because if they did, it would be an admission on their part that their patching system is the cause of the problem! So they drag people through the "Tech Support" process instead and at the very end of it, if they can't get things working "well enough" to satisfy you THEN you will be advised to un-install and re-install and miraculously this will work.

The proof is in trying it. There is no risk in un-installing and re-installing, it is just as if you are setting up a new computer and logging back into your account. If there was really any problem on your end then re-installing the game would fix NOTHING! On the other hand if re-installing improves anything or completely fixes it then you have the proof that the problem was in RIOT's game code. Again why this is the last piece of advice they ever seem to give.

For me the dead give-away as to the source of the problem is the fact that nothing else I play has similar issues. This is literally a problem I experience ONLY on LOL.

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