random reboots without BSOD - sometimes several daily

essenbe said:

If the card overheats, it could cause a shut down, or more than likely a Blue Screen. But, 58 isn't close to overheating.

Yeah, I didn't think that was hot enough to cause issues. It felt hot to the touch but I know these cards get hot, and 58 didn't seem high enough to be an issue. It's ran much hotter than that when I've maxed in out in stress tests and it ran fine.

essenbe said:

tgfyhre, Do you have any friends with an extra PSU you could, beg ,borrow or steal? What I am seeing is typical PSY failure, but I would like you to be able to check it before spending money. We have checked almost everything else we can check other than the PSU and the Motherboard.

Unfortunately not. None of my friends are into tech really, and I don't have any spare power supplies. I wonder if I should just buy a new one. But I really hate to start dumping money into this PC and ripping it all apart to rewire it with a new power supply. And I really don't have the money to throw into a good power supply. If anything I could put that money towards a new PC.

Okay. My PC was in idle mode this afternoon for several hours. I opened up a notepad document to type some text into it and saved it. I left the PC running and made dinner. When I came back to the PC I clicked on the notepad document to open it. The very second I clicked on the notepad file the PC rebooted.

Now tell me it's a power supply issue.

This is how this PC has been acting. It reboots on all kinds of random tasks. Sometimes while surfing a page. Sometimes when clicking on a new page to open. Sometimes while streaming a video. Sometimes like today when I just click on a file on my desktop. Sometimes while in idle. It makes no sense. I can't believe it's the power supply. How would opening a text document trigger the power supply to fail? And it can't be a heat issue. It's very cool in my apartment today and PC temps are fine.

I hear no mention of drivers but I know driver issues can cause reboots like this. I don't know how to check for incompatible drivers or conflicts though.

I checked my minidump folder and as usual it's empty.

essenbe said:

If you buy a good quality PSU now, you could use it in a new build and may possibly not have to buy a new PS right now. We have run almost every test that can be run, I believe. That leaves the PSU, Motherboard or CPU. I can't say it is definitely the PSU, but your symptom are what one would expect from a failing PSU.

I don't plan to build a new PC. Too much trouble. The next PC I buy will likely be a Dell. Not ideal but my girlfriend's sister's new Dell is pretty awesome.

Attempted to enable Driver Verifier. The PC was in idle for over an hour while I watched tv. When I came back to enable Driver Verifier, it opened, and then the PC immediately rebooted.

There's no way I can believe this is a power supply issue. There's got to be something else going on here, somehow related to when I open files or pages, or click things. I know it doesn't make sense, but neither does the power supply at this point.

I'm attempting again now to enable Driver Verifier.

Okay I enabled Driver Verifier and upon reboot my computer gave me a BSOD just before my desktop came up. I tried a couple times and it would not let the desktop load. I then tried the "repair Windows" option from my Windows 7 DVD. That ran for several minutes and failed. I then tried to boot into safe mode with networking which for some reason it let me do (is the driver verifier enabled in safe mode)? I ran the SF_Diagnostic_Tool and I'm posting what I've got. Before I enabled Driver Verifier I uninstalled my Logitech drivers for my mouse, under the off chance that it could have been that. It wasn't. I also removed my HighPoint RAID Management esata card just as a precaution. I've had that installed for over a year now - I use it for my external esata HDD boxes.

The BSOD read:

A Device Driver attempting to corrupt the system has been caught. The faulty driver currently on the kernal stack must be replaced with a working version.

I have no idea where to go from here. I can't boot into Windows now with Driver Verifier enabled, only safe mode. Windows repair had this to say after running several tests:

Diagnosis and repair Details:
Root Cause Found:
------------------
A recent driver installation or upgrade may be preventing the system from starting.

Repair action:

system files integrity check and repair
result: failed error code = 0x490
time taken = 462091 ms

I didn't do a system restore because it was pointless - this issue has been going on for months.


One other crazy theory I have: I remember many months ago, I got quite a scare when I got a popup in my Firefox browser - the famous ransom popup that threatens to encrypt your system if you don't pay the ransom. I couldn't close the popup or browser, and immediately brought up task manager to crash Firefox. After restarting, and running ccleaner, everything seemed fine, so I didn't worry too much about it. For all I know it could have just been a jpg of the ransomware - I didn't analyze it that long. But it did lock up my browser. I have read that installs itself deep into the boot files. Is it at all possible that it somehow got into my system but was interrupted from actually encrypting anything, but is still causing issues? Just a wild idea I know. But that BSOD that says a driver is attempting to corrupt the system reminded me of that incident. I can't say the time period is exact but I've been having these issues for months and that incident happened months ago.

So what can I do now? What do I do to fix this driver issue? I have no idea what driver it's referring to and I haven't added any new hardware anytime recently.

essenbe said:

tgfyhre, you tell me what you think it is. You obviously have a hardware problem.
We've tested the Graphics card and it passed.
We've run Memtest86+ and your Ram passed
We've tested your hard drive and it passed
We've run Prime95 and it passed
We've verified your system files and they've passed
Now, the only 2 components left in your computer are the Motherboard and the PSU and there really is no test for either one of those. So, you just have to guess which one it is. The only other possibility that I know of, is a dead short somewhere in your computer.

Please check out my above post. I have posted new info and a crash dump from a BSOD from driver verifier. I'm not an expert by any means. I'm just saying that to me how could a power supply keep failing exactly when I click on files on my desktop or in youtube videos?

Anyways this new info by driver verifier seems to be pointing at a driver issue. I would appreciate it if somebody could look into this and suggest what to do next for the driver issue.