WinRAR crashing Windows 7 64 bit

This desktop was built about 3 weeks ago by CyberPowers, February 2012.
OS came pre-installed.

Specs:

Processor: AMD FX-8150
Motherboard: Gigabyte GA-970A-D3
BIOS: Award Modular BIOS v6.00PG

OS: Windows 7 Home Premium, 64 bit OEM

As stated above, I had this desktop recently built. It has crashed three times already. First time it was during an installation of Starcraft 2. At that time, I was running multiple applications. I restarted and was able to install sucessfully without running other applications. I did not report that incident because I thought it was just a minor bug.

Yesterday, 3/6/12, my PC crashed again while running WinRAR to extract a multi-part RAR file (7 parts, a video in WMV format). I tried again with a different file set, also a 7 part RAR file (containing a WMV file). I was able to copy those files and extract them with no problem on my laptop, also running Windows 7 64 bit OEM.

Welcome to Seven Forums.

Perhaps the crash has nothing to do with WinRar but due to some other in-built infirmity in the hardware or a software conflict. This because the system has also crashed when running other applications.

You can try using 7-z, a free archiving utility, and let us know if that also generates a crash.

Thanks for the reply wanchoo, I will try it this weekend. I am very busy during the week so I don't want to try to push my computer right now as I need to use it for work.

I had to make some minor adjustment to my first post. One of the WinRAR files was corrupt, and my PC crashed when I got to that file. On my laptop, it just showed "part4 is corrupt" (something along those lines). But my laptop doesn't crash, it shouldn't. It should only show this error message and the PC should just move on. However, this error makes my PC crash.

It actually crashed again just now saying:

A clock interrupt was not received on a secondary processor within the allocated time interval.

I do not have time right now to update the dump file zip, but may post again later this week.

I was updating Avast anti-virus definitions at the time. I tried it again using the application "version update" and the Avast GUI said that the package is broken. So maybe there was an error on their side as well which help instigate the error.

Looks like my system can't handle it when another application has problems.
Any more insight would be appreciated, thanks in advance.

Suggest taking a look at STOP 0x101: CLOCK_WATCHDOG_TIMEOUT troubleshtg for your crashes.

Thank you writhziden for the reply, I will try some stress tests.

Based on the replies so far and my research online, it seems like this PC's instability may be due to problems with the hardware or a combination of hardware/software driver issues.

When I have time to run stress tests, I will post my results on this thread.

Again thank you everyone for your input.

You're welcome. Best of luck!

Another thing that you can try is to check the hard disk for bad sectors and other defects with Check-Disk (chkdsk). If the scan is normal then reinstall Windows afresh and see if the system has stabilized.

If not then I think that the time may have come to contact Cyberpowers and apprise them about the history of the crashes and request them to give a once over to the hardware in the computer.