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Random BSODs, freezes, crashes, failed boots and more fun problems
Hi all, I'm at the end of my patience with my machine here. I'm hoping these forums are the salvation. So thank-you in advance!
Windows 7 , x64, OEM, original install from factory, 2 year old hardware and OS install.
My Dell XPS 8000 used to work perfectly. Then 6 months after purchase the first weirdness started happening, spread over a long time. Then it got worse, and since last Spring it has been a gradual descent into PC Hell. I am at the point where 3 reboots a day is pretty much normal. It's also starting to have more trouble booting.
Symptoms, in order of first appearance: (may not all be related to root cause)
- Weird problem with internet connection. Works fine after a fresh boot, but then after a while I might start seeing scrambled images on web pages. Then, browser will ask to download page instead of just showing it, then it will freeze altogether. What browser you ask? It doesn't matter: when problems start, they are all affected (Chrome, Firefox, IE9). A reboot puts things back to normal.
- sound card started occasionally making shrieking distorted sound instead of normal sound.
- I put my computer to "sleep" every night. Sometimes I wake up and it is awake, or it has rebooted itself.
- A lot of times it freezes or reboots itself soon after I wake it up, or perhaps it freezes at the login prompt while I am not paying attention to it. For a few days it crashed at 8:30 sharp each morning, even though I wasn't near it and it was just the login prompt showing.
- Freezes: common, most often when I am not sitting in front of it, oddly enough.
- BSODs: not frequent, but they happen.
I can't find a single thing that causes any of these problems consistently.
What I have done:
- Ram test: OK
- change anti-virus (now using MS security essentials), and ran multiple deep scans: OK
- Thinking the internet problems may be due to the NIC, I installed a new one and turned off the motherboard-based one -- no perceptible change.
- Ran SFC.exe, noticed the logs are filled with a bunch of stuff, and I have no idea how to make sense of it. So I attached it here.
- I turned on Driver verifier for non-MS drivers and let it crash (it did so immediately on reboot -- twice).
I'm hoping someone can help me figure out how to get my machine running smoothly again. Thanks.