Where to begin diagnosing what's wrong with my PC?

SLiGuy

[H]ard|Gawd
Joined
Jan 20, 2006
Messages
1,146
Hey all,

I have a bit of a noobie question. PC specs are in my signature below and the system was built around December 2015. Nothing has ever been overclocked (probably a waste of capable parts, I know). Lately (within the past 6 months or so) I've been having issues where my PC would randomly freeze and either restart itself, or it'd just be stuck displaying the current image (frozen) and I'd have to manually restart. This happens both during gaming and also just light web use i.e. watching videos on Facebook.

I have not been able to replicate or find a trigger for the issue and it seems to happen randomly. When it would freeze it used to just be stuck on whatever was on my screen at the time, but in the past few days I've had the screen turn a solid color also (had white the other day, and just all black/greyish earlier). The only real "pattern" that I've noticed is that once it freezes or reboots itself once, I can usually go the rest of the evening without it happening again.

During gaming, the machine still runs flawlessly except for the random reboots here and there, but there's no artifacting, stuttering or discoloration at all when it's running normally.

I've never had this issue before so I'm at a bit of a loss on where to start troubleshooting, or in figuring out whether its hardware vs. software related. One thing to note is that my house had a pretty bad power surge in December 2016; most of my appliances (refrigerator, microwave, speakers, etc.) were completely fried after that. The PC was plugged into a power strip and has worked fine after, up until about 6 months ago. Perhaps its possible that some circuitry was damaged during the surge and has just been slowly deteriorating over time? Or perhaps the two events are not even related at all. I do watch my fair share of...adult content so I am not ruling out corrupted software either, although nothing ever comes up on my scans.

If anyone has advice on where to start troubleshooting, I'd greatly appreciate it! Or...I'll just this as an excuse to build a new rig.
 
I'd be really tempted to do a fresh install of Windows.
 
Download "bluescreenview" and see what the crash dumps say....

I've had 2 BSOD in the past 2 months and only once viewing the dumps did I realize it was from using shady streaming sites that mine crypto in the background. (check your CPU usage when viewing those sites to see if thats the issue)
 
I'd probably run memtest86 first just because it's easy to do. Second thought I'd boot up in safe mode and see if it crashes there.
 
Always hardware test before software test

memtest86 v7.x
prime95

cause its pretty easy to do and you just have to wait a bit for the results
 
Are you running hardware monitoring software? In particular CorsairLink and any other at the same time. I had run CorsairLink and Aida64 together for years, up until about 6 months ago when Corsair made a change to CorsairLink causing very similar issues to what you describe. If so, see this link.

http://forum.corsair.com/v3/showthread.php?t=172231
 
Download "bluescreenview" and see what the crash dumps say....


This, why do people insist on guessing? The dump usually will tell you everything you need.

I'll give u the clean your computer talk and all that. Yes, regclean still works too as well. Strip the crap off. What does the log say after reboots? There is a cause in there as well as the crash dump. Need more info on the errors. For instance, a video driver stop could point to a vga failure.. A WILD first guess, power supply. If your power supply at your house sux so bad, why are not on a bad ass UPS?
 
This, why do people insist on guessing? The dump usually will tell you everything you need.

I'll give u the clean your computer talk and all that. Yes, regclean still works too as well. Strip the crap off. What does the log say after reboots? There is a cause in there as well as the crash dump. Need more info on the errors. For instance, a video driver stop could point to a vga failure.. A WILD first guess, power supply. If your power supply at your house sux so bad, why are not on a bad ass UPS?

Good advice, however in my case bluescreenview and who crashed me gave no information that was helpful. Just that a video scheduler internal error had occurred.
 
is memory dump enabled? It's your graphics driver btw. Uninstall and clean the box, reinstall it.
 
is memory dump enabled? It's your graphics driver btw. Uninstall and clean the box, reinstall it.

We are getting off topic. Had nothing to do with my graphics card or drivers. Already stated what the issue was.
 
Don't forget about the 'event viewer' eyeball what recent big-red-criticals you have.
 
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