The issue:
We bought a new DELL Inspiron 3543 Laptop for one of our users. Windows Freezes after a while by doing the necessary configurations (install AV, Office, and Join to the domain). So we do restart the computer, and after a time, the same thing happened…Windows freezes !!
It appears many times and at different stages of usage (installing software, running programs, or doing nothing).
So why does a new PC Freeze like that?
We returned it to the supplier, and he said there is nothing terrible and everything is fine. And sure enough, when we get the Laptop back, the problem arises again!
The solution:
So the next time it did that, I took the dump generated by the OS and located under C:\windows\mindump. Analyzing the dump with Windbg tool by typing the !analyze -v command to display information about the current exception.
The result shows that the exception occurs in the iaStorA.sys file.
So what is the iaStorA.sys file?
A quick search on the Internet shows that it is an Intel SATA Controller driver. This file is located in C:\windows\system32\Drivers, and the file’s version seems to be an old version.
So I went to the Dell Webpage and searched for a recent version of the Intel SATA controller, and I found one from June 2015.
So by downloading and installing this new driver’s version, the problem was solved.
