Windows 7: Random BSODs in and out of games

Hi I hope someone can help. I keep getting random blue screens.

Sometimes just as a game starts, sometimes half an hour in, sometimes just as system boots, sometimes as I'm browsing the net.

At first I thought it was the cheap PSU I had but they continued after buying the Corsair.

OS: Microsoft Windows 7 Ultimate 32 bit
Motherboard: Gigabyte GA-770TA-UD3
CPU: AMD Phenom(tm) II X2 550
Ram: OCZ3P1333C9ELV4GK 2 x 2GB
GFX: Sapphire HD 6970 2GB
PSU: Corsair TX750
System HD: 500G WD5000AAKX SATA3 HDD

Windows 7 reinstalled a couple of times



purchased all but PSU and HD second hand so I can't say how old they are.

I have attached the zip file required by posting instructions sticky.

Please help me keep my sanity and help my wife get her happy husband back rather than the sweary grumpy one she has currently.

Hello Macaroon, welcome to SF!

You've many dumps, too many to check....

One recebt one that stands out points to a driver I don;t see often: yswds,sys.

Thats for a yamaha audio device. Please delete or update if you can find a Windows 7 compatible one..

Please check the manufacturers latest drivers for your various hardware components.

Also run a full AV and malware test with Malwarebytes.

Test if your system stays ok in Safe mode w/ networking, try +/- a day...

If that works.. try:

Run a system file check to verify and repair your system files.
To do this type cmd in search, then right click to run as administrator, then
SFC /SCANNOW

Read here for more information SFC /SCANNOW Command - System File Checker

Hi MvdB

Thanks for your reply.

The yamaha driver is indeed an old card. It is a pro audio card (DS2416) very expensive in it's time and very powerful when mixing multitracks (still very powerful at it's job). There are no win 7 drivers for it as Yamaha stopped supporting it around about the time XP came out. I understand that it may have been part of the problem I was having but I did try running my computer with the card removed for a while and still had the same problem. In fact the reason for the purchase of the specific motherboard was due to the fact it still supported the old 5v PCI standard that the card runs on. I digress.

Since posting the above I did decide to pull my finger out of my arse and find out how to read these dumps myself and found that the most crashes, during games, was blamed on my GFX card driver. After a lot of researching and changing drivers etc I gave up and put my old mobo, chip and ram back in and all is running fine again, albeit a little slower.

I am assuming now that the problem is somewhere in those 3 pieces of hardware but I don't have similar hardware spare to do some swapping out. I was going to give my brother in law my old system but now I may just give him these parts and let him have the headache of solving it.

Finally, I've decided to do the sensible thing and separate my gaming system from my studio system and upgrade the gaming side to an sandybridge when finances allow, keeping the old mobo etc as a legacy system.

Once again thanks for your help.

I'll mark this as solved so I don't waste anyone's time but technically it's not solved it's "given up"

My pleasure and thank you for posting back your results! Appreciate it..