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Computer locks up every hour, followed by BSOD error 0x000000F4
Hey all.
Let me split my post up in a few sections.
First of all what is the actual problem:
About 2 weeks ago, after running smoothly for over a year, my computer started behaving a bit strangely.
The only change I made to my system in the last days prior to that was a windows update, but suddenly my PC started to freeze up completely.
The individual freezes start off with windows becoming unresponsive, and eventually everything freezes up. Sometimes when I'm watching say a Youtube video, the video keeps playing while the Windows and other programs have already frozen up.
These freezes most of the time result in me either having to hard reset my PC (turn off the power completely, or trigger the reboot switch), or a BSOD.
What errors have I been getting:
The BSOD I talked about generally presents the following error:
STOP 0x000000F4 (0x0000000000000003; 0xFFFFFA8017574060; 0xFFFFFA8017574340; 0xFFFFF80002388D50)
Lately a few other errors have also shown up like:
0x0000007A (Kernal Data Inpage Error)
error with ntfs.sys
Apparently no physical dump of these error can be created (error 0xC0000010), so I'm also not sure if any of those BSOD errors are registered in the windows logs.
The weirdest thing is that these crashes occur EXACTLY every hour. I included a screenshot where you can see this.
Also this crash can be circumvented by putting my computer in the sleep mode. (The most workable way to use my PC right now is to put an alarm every 55 minutes and sleep my PC when it goes off)
What have I already done:
Now I'm not totally unfamiliar with computers. I build this rig myself, and I've already did a few things so I'll list some here.
My first thoughts were that this either had to be a:
- Software issue. Main reason for this is that 9/10 time it is a software related issue that causes problems, also the fact it crashes exactly every hour had me hinting towards something in that regard.
- Memory issue. Also known to cause issues of this kind
- Harddrive issue. I've had hard drive issues in the past, where sectors were damaged causing this types of errors as well.
So what have i tried:
Since I figured software is the easiest (and most likely) to tackle. I ran a virus scan (ESET NOD which I own + Windows Defender), and anti spyware software (Malware Bytes Anti Malware).
I checked all my drivers and made sure they were up to date, and made sure that windows was up to date as well.
I did a system restore to before the windows update that I could only really imagine being newly introduced software in the last few weeks.
Since I own an SSD that contains windows, my games and only a handful of programs. I figured that a format and fresh install of Windows 7 Home Edition (x64) would not be a bad idea. Since it might be an error in windows itself.
None of this helped. (If anything the format made it worse, as W7 now also loads a lot slower, it hangs on the "Starting Operating System..." screen, right before the windows 7 logo.
Next I tried to run CHKDSK on all my drives and HD Tune Pro; a program that scans the hard drives for bad sectors. I've had a history with bad HDD so I figured it wouldn't hurt to at least check them. None of my hard drives turned out to contain bad sectors.
So I tried to scan the memory. I first used the Windows build in memory scan that you can access during booting, this turned out nothing.
I also ran MemTest, however this version was a Windows program so it could only scan the memory not in use, and with having quite a lot of memory it simply took longer than an hour, so my system would freeze before it got past 50% (although all the memory before that part checked out OK).
Some more info that might be useful:
- Crashes also occur in safe mode.
- I can not install W7 Service Pack 1 (Error code: 80073712). Might be related?
- I expanded my memory from 8Gb to 16Gb about 2 months ago. My system now runs on 4x4Gb. The expansion was purely because I used to run several programs at once some quite heavy on RAM. And the increased memory is cheap, so I don't need a large and slow pagefile on my limited space SSD either.
That's all I can think of at the moment. Let me know if I need to provide more information :)
I hope you guys can help me out :)