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BSOD while playing games, ntoskrnl.exe
Windows 7 Professional 64bit, source: MSDN Academic Alliance.
Hardware bought during last week of March 2011, system installed at that time. Everything ran flawlessly until around 2 weeks ago.
Computer acts normally until I launch a game (tested with several titles: Dead Space 2, Guild Wars, Forsaken World, Sword 2). Then, within around 5 minutes, usually one of three things happens:
1)everything freezes, like if I pressed a pause, reboot required
2)freeze like above, but screen turns into a storm of colorful pixels, reboot required
3)BSOD, system saving some data and then auto-reboot
Other that that, everything is fine. No random reboots, graphic artifacts, sudden performance drops.
It might be without meaning, but I noticed that either freeze/BSOD happens withing first few minutes after launching a game, or doesn't happen at all (in that case, everything is OK even for several hours, until next reboot).
What I've done so far: updated video driver (mostly cuz of point 2), ran 2 night-long mem tests (one for regular RAM, second for video card memory), monitored hardware temperatures, did some general system clean-up, like registry clearing, disk defragmentation etc. Everything seems to be in order.
As you may notice while reading contents of zip file, perfmon seemed to be unable to recognize my antivirus - it's Avast Free Antivirus.
Any help or suggestions will be appreciated, as I'm currently out of ideas other than full system reinstall, or starting replacing parts of hardware.