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#1
Periodic BSOD during backups or watching videos
I've been having periodic (approximately once a week) BSOD's either while backups are occurring or while playing video games or watching videos.
The most recent occurred during the early morning (around 1am) during a system backup. I use an external USB 3.0 drive and Acronis True Image 2014 for backups. It is the 2nd time that the BSOD has occurred during a backup or restore operation. Other times that the BSOD has occurred is the either watching videos (Youtube, downloaded videos in VLC) and while playing games (Vindictus, Tera Rising). This has been happening for several months now. There are no event viewer errors or warnings prior to the BSOD that would directly indicate the cause, however, I have noticed that 10 minutes or so before every BSOD, several services will enter the stop state. Usually different services, except in one case - the Application Experience service always enters the stop state 10-15 minutes before every BSOD. Other services that enter the stop state are Windows Installer Service and the WinHTTP Web Proxy Auto-Discovery Service.
Other issues that are likely related is freezing of the computer and frequent high memory use when running my backup software with external drives attached. The freezing seems to happen randomly and started prior to the BSOD several months ago. They occur every few weeks. It starts with a program not opening when I click on it in the task bar. Then, I am unable to open task manager or Event Viewer to see what's happening. I can close open applications for several minutes, but eventually, anything I click on stops responding, although I have control over my mouse. I eventually have to do a hard reset. In every case, there is no event viewer errors or events that would point to the issue. I've run Chck Disk on all disks and discovered that one of my external drives was bad has since been unplugged, however, the issue keeps occurring.
The random high memory issue was the first issue that started to occur, before the freezing and BSOD. It started occurring last March and happens when my backup drives (USB 3.0) are plugged in and when I run my backup program. After the backup program loaded, the memory usage bar in the performance tab of Task Manager starts to slowly climb from 4-5 GB to 11-12 GB in less than 30 seconds. The issue occurs only when the drive has backup files - when the drive is empty, there is no memory issue. At the time this first starting happening, I was using Macrium Reflect for backups and Macrium was unable to help resolve it so I eventually started using Acronis True Image assuming that Reflect was the issue (disk scans and other diagnostics didn't indicate anything wrong with the disks). The issue continued to occur with True Image. The unusual thing about this issue is that the program process, either Macrium Reflect or True Image, shows unusual memory usage. In fact, no process or service was showing the excess memory being used, however, the performance tab of Task Manager clearly shows that nearly all of my 16 GB of memory were being used (even with Process Explorer I couldn't figure out where the excess memory was going). All the external drives have indexing turned off and as far as I can tell, are not being scanned by any anti-virus programs.
I posted this thread just last Sunday and for some reason, it was deleted with no explanation. Hopefully, this was just an error and won't occur again.