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#1
BSOD woes
Hey all,
I'm getting BSOD's at seemingly random intervals. They typically occur when my PC is sitting idle for a long period of time, but they have also occurred when I'm playing games or when I'm doing dev work.
Background:
All of this started about a month ago when I came home from work and my PC would not turn on. The PC was water-cooled and had been running without any issues for 2 years. I was eventually able to get it to turn on by giving the mobo more juice by plugging in the additional 4 pins for the 24 pin connector, since only the 20 pin was connected before. Then it would post at attempt to boot, but would freeze after several seconds of running the Windows repair utility or going through the boot sequence. I guessed the RAM was the problem, so I removed 3 of the 4 sticks and tried booting again. Now it could boot, but would not stay booted for more than a minute. After looking closer at the RAM, it looked like something had gotten on its pins, each stick had a black coating on its gold pins. Maybe a water leak.
So I took this opportunity to buy some upgrades that I had wanted for the PC - I bought a new mobo since my current one did not support SLI, a new i3 CPU that would fit into the new mobo's socket, and 4x2GB sticks of ram. I also went ahead and disassembled the water cooling system and stuck it in a box. It was cool, but very unnecessary and a hassle to reinstall.. and the pump was due to die soon anyway. So with my new mobo and cpu installed, the PC would boot fine, and with SLI working properly I could run nvidia surround (all 3 monitors act as one giant desktop) /cheer.
But now my PC was rebooting on a 20-30 minute interval, without a BSOD. The screens would just go black, and then it would reboot. So I went to reinstall Windows 7 on my SSD, but during the installation a file failed to copy and I got an "Installation Failed" message. So my guess was maybe it failed to write to the SSD and the drive was having issues, so for the 2nd installation attempt I chose one of my regular hard drives as the OS destination, and the same error occurred again but at an earlier point during the installation. So for the 3rd attempt, I tried installing on the SSD again, and it worked. Though oddly, I opted not to enter a license key during installation and it still has not prompted me to activate Windows, which makes me think something might have gone wrong during the installation.
Now:
So with my reformatted PC, I'm still getting the BSOD's but not as often. Now they occur once every few hours, again at seemingly random intervals and usually when the machine is idle (sleep mode is disabled). But I've also encountered weird errors all over the place with applications. When installing large programs, there seems to be a 50% chance that the installation will error out and fail, no matter which hard drive I try installing to. For example, Starcraft 2 took 3 installation attempts to succeed, and the Windows SDK took 4 installation attempts to succeed. Actually, I got a BSOD during one of the Windows SDK installation attempts. Also applications will often crash while I'm running them. For example, Starcraft 2 will crash when it's loading, loading a map, or at a random point during a match. The crash will always be a random error with the header "Installation is corrupt".
Another example is Windows explorer will sometimes stop responding. This happened 5 or 6 times within one hour yesterday. Also, frequently when loading any website, Google Chrome will display its death screen ("Aw, google chrome has crashed!") with the little unhappy face until I refresh the page.
I have run prime95 to stress the CPU as well as a couple tools to stress each video card, and they have passed all tests. Could the problem be a bad power supply or a bad drive? I don't want to believe that it's the RAM since the RAM is brand new. Or maybe it's just a bad driver?
I would appreciate any help! Attached is my system health report and BSOD dump output.
More Info:
-OS: Full Retail Windows Home Premium Upgrade 64-bit (installed over XP, drives formatted before install)
-Hardware age: PSU (1 year), Video cards (1 year), drives (2 years), all else is new
-OS installation age: 2 days
Thanks,
Frost