New
#1
Lock-ups and BSODs, Gaming or Not
Hello
First, thanks for creating a place for people to better understand their OS installs. Also, thanks to anyone who's bothering to read other people's threads and help strangers with computer issues.
I've gotten a couple BSODs recently, but much more frequently, things just lock-up. By "lock up", I mean the mouse cursor won't move. When it "locks up" in games, audio will loop and stutter. I can't ctrl-alt-del, and I can't ctrl-shift-esc. Sometimes this happens with just firefox open, sometimes I'll just be in iTunes and my computer gives up. I know those programs are resource hogs, but my crappy Dell should be able to handle it. I cannot seem to reproduce the problem willingly, and it seems to happen less likely if the computer's been on for a long time.
I suppose I noticed these somewhat recently, I was getting a lot of "AMD display driver stopped working and has recovered" messages, which sometimes meant a freeze, sometimes just annoyingly flickered the display. I google that and someone suggested I extend the retry time several seconds by altering a registry entry. I did so, and the previous symptoms seemed to get replaced by BSODs and frusterating lock-ups.
I've since installed the lastest AMD beta drivers, unsure if my registry tampering ever reverted.
I also noticed my "PCI fan" may not have been operating, perhaps some component overheated?
I'm stubbornly hoping it's not permanent hardware failure, it's only just over 3 yrs old (Jan '11)
Any suggestions or insight would be most appreciated, thanks for reading! As my computer purchase indicates, I still have plenty to learn.
No idea what specs might be relevant without reading systeminfo.txt
Win7 Home Premium x64
Alienware (Dell) yeah, yeah, I know...
i7 2.8GHz
Crossfire HD5670