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#1
Seemingly random BSOD
Hello all thank you for reading.
My pc is a custom make done for me by a company called, Altex. Two of the drives in it are from the previous machine. I got the pc in August of 2013 and pretty much had issues from the start. At least once during a seven day period while the pc was sitting idle it would freeze.
No BSOD, no error messages just a frozen screen and keyboard. This was a nonstop issue till late December, then while checking out the flight bay for Star Citizen, I noticed the machines fans making quite a good amount of noise. After getting out of the demo my pc began a new and wonderous behavior. Freezing every few hours.
At that time I tried just about everything I could think of, system restore did nothing. I un-installed recently installed programs, I installed new video drivers. I finally got the idea to do selective startup using msconfig, making sure to allow start up of programs I knew I would need, IE: Trillian, Steam and a few others, then see what the machine would do. Crashing problems went away.. so I went back into msconfig and made one slight change, I added all of the drivers and programs for my video card to startup, this included the Catalyst Control Center and like magic... the pc started freezing again. So I uninstalled all that tripe and manually installed the video drivers. No more frequent freezes, I return msconfig to normal startup and I'm back on the once a week schedule of freezes for my pc.
Fast forward to two weeks ago, my pc was once again singing me a song, fortunately my case has a nice window on the side so I could tell pretty easily what song was being sung, my CPU fan was dying. PC is still under warranty so I take it in, they replace the fan I bring it home and it was once again freezing a few times a night.
I once again tried system restore, nothing. I uninstalled and reinstalled video drivers, nothing. So I take the machine in, they keep it for a week, decide nothing is wrong with the hardware so they decide it must be a virus, the virus check naturally isn't covered under the warranty but whatever, they scan all three drives. One drive keeps giving them issues, causing the pc running the scan to freeze, they decide the drive is failing, they flash copy all the info to a new drive and finish the virus scan and give me a call telling me that all is fixed.
But if it was all fixed you wouldn't be reading this would you?
The PC is giving me BSOD, once again seemingly randomly, I got one when I clicked on a tab in firefox, another when I was watching a show in a video player, another while playing a game.
For the most part each bsod was different than the one before it expect for the last, it is a duplicate of one I got last night, "system service exception 0x3b".
One problem is it took a few bsod before I enabled minidumps so I only have 4 logfiles but hopefully they will be helpful.
Any advice will be deeply appreciated.
Help me Obi-Wan Kenobi, you are my only hope, mainly because I don't feel like taking it back to the people who already told me it was fixed.
I realize I've given you guys a large amount of information and history about my pc, I'm just trying to be thorough.
Thank you folks for any help.
EDIT: Ah yes I forgot atleast once during the past few days the system froze and the screen warbled. Appearing distorted as if someone as tossed water onto a painting.