New
#1
Sudden crashing; no BSOD
Windows 7 64-bit Intel Core i7 with 2 1TB HDD and 8GB RAM.
Purchased with an HP in November 2009. (No current access to more detailed information.)
OS was reinstalled in August 2010 following a bad hotfix.
This story begins about 10 days ago. What's happening is I'm having sudden, inexplicable crashes of the entire computer, an immediate shutdown (though during this time there have been 1 or 2 isolated blue screens also).
Triggers: The original problem occurred when I tried to open a scheduling program for my church that I've been using for 6-9 months (TMS Explorer). There was a BSOD. But when Windows came back up, it was EXTREMELY sluggish. After much trial and error, I ended up doing a selective startup, disabling all programs and services, then re-enabling them one by one. The Zimbra Desktop email client appeared to be the cause. (This seems quite odd since I've been using it with no problem for 1-2 years. I uninstalled it, anyway.) During this time I also purchased and attempted to run SpinRite, but it froze 20+ hours into the process, likely due to my 1TB HDD being too large.
After this, things seemed to be working fine. The next problem occurred when I tried to play Civilization IV on Steam with my son. We were going through the tutorial when it simply and abruptly crashed. We reproduced this error two more times in the tutorial, then another time within the main game itself. All of this reinforced an early belief that it was an update to Steam on March 14 that was a trigger to the problem. I did not uninstall Steam, but I did disable it on startup.
Since then, however, in the last 24 hours, the system has crashed three times. The first two times I was playing music through iTunes and browsing with Chrome, things I have done dozens of times in the past. The third time was a short while ago; this time it was just Chrome that was open: a couple of tabs, watching a YouTube video.
Attempted fixes (some of these attempted after reading this forum):
- Updated Microsoft Security Essentials. (It hadn't updated itself in a month, for some reason.)
- SpinRite version 6 (red screen error partway through, as explained above)
- Downloaded and ran Malwarebytes. Antivirus was conflicting with it for awhile, but it eventually finished successfully and reported no problems.
- Downloaded SeaTools 2.22; haven't run it yet.
- Downloaded Memtest86 and ran it after the latest crash. It got about 40% of the way through the scan, then abruptly crashed the computer. On a reboot, I saw a BSOD; after it recovered, I opted for a normal start to Windows, then had the abrupt crash again. On a second reboot, I again saw a BSOD; after it recovered, I tried to boot into Safe Mode but got the Startup Repair instead. Startup Repair suggested a System Restore; I agreed. Less than a minute later, there was another abrupt crash. The desktop is currently off; I'm on my laptop at the moment.
I am off work today and open to suggestions. Thanks in advance.