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My PC crashes at irregular intervals, one-year old computer

If it really only started happening after you installed new GPU drivers then those are the most likely culprit. Just ditch them with DDU and see if it keeps happening with Windows default drivers.

If that's not it, then it's probably memory related.
 
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playXray

Member
I’d look for a software issue first as that’s easiest, so do whatever you can to restore the computer to the state at which it was working, likely with a GPU driver rollback. If that fails, do a hardware troubleshoot starting with the RAM and see if removing/disabling any components fixes it.
 

longdi

Banned
ngl i left my PC on for 1 year straight no issues

seems like your pc has been crash/shutting down and auto-restart, without you knowing, since at least this May.

i dont think is the nvidia driver update.

can you go event view(local) and look throught the 'Error' and 'Warning'. maybe you can see the 'display' and 'nvlddmkm' event.
 

Mentat02

Banned
Since this morning my PC crashes, just from me being on desktop, running the minimum of apps (Steam on the background, Microsoft Edge, a couple of programs maintaining my fan speed, etc.)

The screen freezes for 5-10 seconds, then either goes black (with the PC still operating), or I get a blue screen of death and the PC restarts itself.

It can take my PC 10-40 minutes to crash.

I think that this may be a memory issue - some of my PC's memory chips being faulty or something.

The only thing I can think of doing since last night was downloading the latest Nvidia drivers for my 2080 Super.

Any thoughts?
all these symptoms mean you have a bad power supply. If your PC is prebuilt they usually put in the shittiest PSU on the market in there even if the CPU and GPU can't handle it. I'm super confident you have a bricked power supply.
 

Zeroing

Banned
Definitely it’s because of the update from windows… they always release updates that mess up things.
 

Shakka43

Member
For me when this started happening (i7 9700k) the only way to get rid of it was upping the Cpu core voltage a tiny bit from what it was drawing on automatic. I then overclock it by a bit and had to do the same to keep it stable.
 

Kenpachii

Member
1) check temps with speccy ( to hot, dust out your fans )
2) Update all drivers + all motherboard drivers get them from motherboard manufacturer itself. ( could use DDU to remove gpu driver entirely and redownload the newest driver from nvidia itself)
3) Run a benchmarks through eachother, i always use heaven & valley benchmark + furmark at the same time to really get your setup cooking.

Still unstable

4) reinstall windows clean install nothing but basic drivers + motherboard drivers
5) run benchmarks again.

Still unstable? mostly hardware issue then, probably ram.

6) unplug everything u don't use that is connected towards your motherboard, like extra ssd's / hdd's etc.
7) run benchmarks

Still unstable

Play the memory game

8) if you have 4 bars, remove 2 bars out of the slots + stress test
unstable
9) place the remaining 2 in your motherboard in the other slots
unstable
10) do 1&2 but with the other 2 memory modules. If this solves your problem at any point, replace ram.

Still unstable?

11) if you have a igpu on your motherboard ( intel mostly ) u can remove the gpu entirely and connect your monitor towards that. Or if you have a another gpu laying around.
unstable
12) replace powersupply.
 
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Kenpachii

Member
Fun fact: After making this thread, my PC hasn't crashed once.

Probably ram then or power supply. When your windows or games start to allocate data to that cooked module its gg, or when the power spikes upwards and psu can't deal with it its gg also. That's why u always always buy a high quality PSU never gimp on it.

Unless its software ofcourse.
 
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Golgo 13

The Man With The Golden Dong
A) No.

B) The latest Nvidia driver for my 2080 Super.

C) BugCheck 307 Event ID 41
Okay. So first thing I’d do is try rolling back the driver update on your GPU. You can do this by going to the Nvidia site, searching for your particular GPU and redownloading whatever the last driver you had before things went south. Usually Nvidia updates are fairly stable, but this may be an easy solution. BSOD are common when there’s GPU driver issues, particularly when they occur at random intervals. This may or may not fix your problem, but it’s easy and worth a shot. This sounds driver related from the symptoms. If NOTHING ELSE HAS CHANGED except you updating your GPU driver, that certainly is suspicious.

Next question if that doesn’t work - do you have a “restore point” set up on your computer? You can tell this by going to the search bar on Windows 10 and typing in “recovery” —> open system restore —-> next. That should tell you if you have restore points and when they were created. DONT DO THIS YET but it’s an option for later.
 

Nickolaidas

Banned
Okay. So first thing I’d do is try rolling back the driver update on your GPU. You can do this by going to the Nvidia site, searching for your particular GPU and redownloading whatever the last driver you had before things went south. Usually Nvidia updates are fairly stable, but this may be an easy solution. BSOD are common when there’s GPU driver issues, particularly when they occur at random intervals. This may or may not fix your problem, but it’s easy and worth a shot. This sounds driver related from the symptoms. If NOTHING ELSE HAS CHANGED except you updating your GPU driver, that certainly is suspicious.

Next question if that doesn’t work - do you have a “restore point” set up on your computer? You can tell this by going to the search bar on Windows 10 and typing in “recovery” —> open system restore —-> next. That should tell you if you have restore points and when they were created. DONT DO THIS YET but it’s an option for later.
I've already downloaded the previous driver for the GPU. I will install it if my PC does another crash.
 

Golgo 13

The Man With The Golden Dong
I've already downloaded the previous driver for the GPU. I will install it if my PC does another crash.
Good luck man. I studied Computer Troubleshooting in college and BSOD’s are one of the most difficult things to diagnose because they can be from like 10 different causes - overheating, driver issues, registry issues, failing power supply, failing memory, bad hard drives, file system corruption, malware, the list goes on.
 
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lachesis

Member
I had similar issues - thought it was my aging PSU - but it turned out to be loose memory modules.

I noticed that on the system profile, it was recognizing the whole 24gb, but not in CMOS.

So I took everything out, and put in one by one, making sure it would recognize. In some slots, I found a memory unit won't recognize unless you put certain ones - so I did that - till it recognize all my 6 memory modules... and the issue is gone now.
 

Reizo Ryuu

Member
My pc started randomly crashing/hanging a few years ago, turned out my HDDs were dying and the system was stalling when accessing a bad sector.
 

DCDW

Member
I had a friend who had what sounds like the same issues. At the end of the day it turned out to be his power supply shitting the bed.
 

Nickolaidas

Banned
Just had another crash.

I re-installed the older nvidia drivers. Let's see what'll happen.

If it crashes again, I'll do the memtest.
 
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Golgo 13

The Man With The Golden Dong
Just had another crash.

I re-installed the older nvidia drivers. Let's see what'll happen.

If it crashes again, I'll do the memtest.
Yep, those crashes aren’t going away anytime soon (without finding the cause and fixing it) I had a computer that was BSOD but it was because horrific AMD thermals. If the driver rollback doesn’t work I’d recommend a system restore to a point when you remember your PC functioning normally (like I mentioned in an earlier post). This way, if you Restore to a week (or two) ago and you still have problems, then you can be assured it’s a hardware issue and start doing things like memtest, getting some temperature monitoring tools, checking the disk for errors (Chkdsk command), investigating power supply issues, and things like that.
 
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Nickolaidas

Banned
I ran the Windows Memory Diagnostics Tool (mdsched.exe) which is integrated in Windows 10. Didn't find any issues (took it about 1 hour to complete the check). Is the app reliable?
 

Nickolaidas

Banned
This may be related.

In the past few days, I've been seeing my CCleaner keep notifying me that there is a lot of unwanted space that needs cleaning - and it is raised in a pretty fast rate which made me raise an eyebrow, but didn't bother to see if something's wrong. I clean my files and within a day I get a notification that there is about of 1.5 GB of unused data.

Out of curiosity, I went to see where is that unused data coming from and I saw ...

sf5nHy8.jpg

Now granted, I just did the memory check so this could be just a result of the application, but I don't think I've ever had my PC accumulating 4.5 GBs of unused data and all that being memory related - within a few days!

So, next time my CCleaner will be 4 GBs full, I'm going to thoroughly check what is what.
 

longdi

Banned
when you crash, windows will create memory dumps and these are big filesizes.

i wont use ccleaner, please uninstall it. it had a bad data breach.
just use windows 10 inbulit file cleaner.

imo seems like a bad hardware if you keep getting random crash and reboot. do you overclock your pc?
 

DeepSpace5D

Member
I had this same issue when I built my first PC 2 years ago. In my case, the issue was with updating my AMD drivers. I hope you can get it figured out.
 

TheSHEEEP

Gold Member
Agreed. Best part of owning a Mac is you don't have to worry about playing the latest games. Because most games don't get ported to the mac platform. You'll have much more free time to do other activities.
You do get Wine/Crossover on Mac, which lets you run Windows software and play Windows games.
But it's like the dysfunctional, retarded cousin of Wine on Linux. On Linux, you can easily run 70-80% of Windows-only games (for me it's more like 95%, but I don't play multiplayer games anyway which is where support is worst due to anti-cheat software usually). Including many recent releases out-of-the-box (especially with Proton which is directly integrated in Steam), even Cyberpunk could be played on Linux like 1 or 2 months after release.
Most of that doesn't work on MacOS, so maybe you'd get 20-30% of it there?
Gaming-wise Linux is miles ahead of MacOS - not in native support, but in "who gives a fuck if it's native as long as I can play".


Delete the porn.
NEVER delete the porn. You'll regret it.
Keep it and hand it over to your grand-children on your death bed. Or, if you don't plan on having kids, donate a mysterious hard drive to an orphanage.
If there is an afterlife, you'll be giggling for eternity.


Anyway, on-topic:
Unfortunately I have to agree with most others here that the issue could be just about anything. I hope for you it is the GPU driver, but if it isn't then most advice here was sound.
You'll have to start excluding sources of the issue one after another.
My gut feeling would be that it is an hardware issue, given the apparent random nature of it - faulty electronic devices like to be random like that.

My best hint would be to start excluding sources not from likely to unlikely but from easy to hard:
Would suck to completely uninstall everything if it turns out you only had to exchange some memory.
 
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mansoor1980

Member
when you crash, windows will create memory dumps and these are big filesizes.

i wont use ccleaner, please uninstall it. it had a bad data breach.
just use windows 10 inbulit file cleaner.

imo seems like a bad hardware if you keep getting random crash and reboot. do you overclock your pc?
dude will you kindly elaborate on ccleaner data breach
 

Kenpachii

Member
This may be related.

In the past few days, I've been seeing my CCleaner keep notifying me that there is a lot of unwanted space that needs cleaning - and it is raised in a pretty fast rate which made me raise an eyebrow, but didn't bother to see if something's wrong. I clean my files and within a day I get a notification that there is about of 1.5 GB of unused data.

Out of curiosity, I went to see where is that unused data coming from and I saw ...

sf5nHy8.jpg

Now granted, I just did the memory check so this could be just a result of the application, but I don't think I've ever had my PC accumulating 4.5 GBs of unused data and all that being memory related - within a few days!

So, next time my CCleaner will be 4 GBs full, I'm going to thoroughly check what is what.

Do what i told you, reinstall windows, only install GPU drivers + motherboard drivers from the websites those products are from and play 1 game u always play that crashes the thing and then see if its stable. U exclude all software issue's this way directly.

Also CC cleaner / Norton and all other stuff are not needed anymore, its a waste of space and only interfears with your register that can fuck things up. Windows has windows defender standard which is a virusscanner that works perfectly and other then that u just use your PC for what u want.

Once u did that, u can troubleshoot and u are done in a day and know exactly what's up.
 
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Garibaldi

Member
Remove every unrequired piece of hardware (network card, non boot drives etc, if you have onboard gfx, remove the gpu too), then reduce your ram to one stick. Boot to the bios and let it sit for 10 mins or so monitoring the temps on the board and cpu. If that's ok, trying booting it. Download HWinfo64 (or equiv) to check all the sensors. Run prime 95 or something to confirm overall stability while in windows and running minimal hardware. If that's ok after an hour add some ram back in and repeat the boot/prime cycle. If you've removed the GPU at this point put it back in and run 3d mark or something that will tax the gpu. Keeping an eye on HWinfo64. What's you PSU like? Age and such?
 

Chris23

Member
If you said its happening because of a recent gpu driver update, i'd uninstall and start from scratch with this tool.

Make sure your motherboard chipset drivers are all up to date (check motherboard manufacturer website for your model)

Make sure your motherboards uefi is on the newest revision.
 

Reizo Ryuu

Member
This may be related.

In the past few days, I've been seeing my CCleaner keep notifying me that there is a lot of unwanted space that needs cleaning - and it is raised in a pretty fast rate which made me raise an eyebrow, but didn't bother to see if something's wrong. I clean my files and within a day I get a notification that there is about of 1.5 GB of unused data.

Out of curiosity, I went to see where is that unused data coming from and I saw ...

sf5nHy8.jpg

Now granted, I just did the memory check so this could be just a result of the application, but I don't think I've ever had my PC accumulating 4.5 GBs of unused data and all that being memory related - within a few days!

So, next time my CCleaner will be 4 GBs full, I'm going to thoroughly check what is what.
Those memory dumps could have the exact information on what causes the crash. Use windbg to open them and scroll all the way to the end, it should say something like "caused by:"
 

Uiki

Member
Turn off fast boot in bios and windows. Fast boot it's a buggy mess and can lead to improperly shut down windows (even if shut it down properly).

Event 41 is related to windows not shutting down correctly.

If you don't want to turn off fast boot for whatever reason, don't use the "shut down" button in windows but press "restart", wait for it to load again then shut it down normally and check if you still got errors.
 
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Amiga

Member
Thanks for the replies, guys.

I was a Sony boy for a lot of time so I'm quite new to the PC hardcore universe.

- have a system restore saved on separate storage.
- use a virtual machine for installing and running software you are not sure about.
- confirm compatibility before changing parts.
- good luck.
 
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