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#1
Random black screen, stuttering and BSOD error 0x0000000F4
Hi, I've been having some problems with my computer. It locks up and after a couple of minutes, it gives me a BSOD. This started happening about three weeks ago, while playing PlanetSide 2 for the first time after its release (never happened during the beta). The screen and the sound started stuttering/hanging and then the whole computer locked up. Mouse and keyboard stopped responding, then the screen went black and after a few minutes a BSOD showed up. I didn't have minidumps set up at the time this happened, but I think it said something about "INPAGE DATA KERNEL ERROR" if I remember it correctly.
After this, the computer would keep crashing at random times. The exact same thing. Stutter, lock up and BSOD. This went on for a couple of days, then something happened to my harddrive. It would not load up Windows. It got stuck at "Starting Windows", so I decided to format my harddrive and reinstall Windows to see if it fixed it. It fixed the problem with Windows not loading. But the computer would still crash randomly and still does, but now it is slightly different. It either starts stuttering/hanging like before, or the Windows process just simply dies and after a while the screen turns black and sometimes BSOD.
The bluescreen error is different too. This time it would say "A PROCESS OR THREAD CRUCIAL TO SYSTEM OPERATION HAS UNEXPECTEDLY EXITED OR BEEN TERMINATED", followed by the error code 0x0000000F4.
I have set up minidumps (unchecked "Automatically restart" and selected "Small memorydump (256kb)"). But it still won't create one. It gets stuck on step 2 "Initializing disk for crash dump".
These crashes happens even when just doing simple things, like watching videos on Youtube and not just under heavy load. In fact, it rarely happens while the computer is under heavy load. It's when it's idle or working very little most of these crashes happens.
I have tried different thins to fix this, but nothing works. I have checked the harddrive (both partitions), tested the RAM (ran memtest86+ for 8 passes), updated graphics drivers and other drivers. It didn't report any errors. I have checked my temperatures and they're fine. It's 20° - 30° Celcius at idle and the graphics card goes up to 60° under heavy load. And that's about as hot as it gets.
Someone suggested I should stress test my graphics card, so I did. I ran 3D Mark 11 and Unigine Heaven 3 and everything was fine. No crashing, no stuttering.
I checked the Event Viewer and everytime the computer crashes like this, three errors are being logged. They are:
EventLog 1101
EventLog 6008
Kernel-Power 41
I don't have any new hardware installed (installed new graphics card and PSU 5 months ago, but that's not "new hardware" is it?) and I'm not overclocking.
The computer is a Acer Aspire AM3920. I've had it for bit longer than a year (15 months). I replaced the PSU and graphics card with better ones, but everything else is stock.
Here's the specs:
Motherboard: (Can't get much info on it. CPU-Z says "Acer Aspire AM3920".)
Graphics card: Sapphire Radeon HD 6870 1GB
CPU: Intel Core i3 2100 @ 3.1Ghz
PSU: Corsair GX600 @ 600W (Should be enough to power everything.)
RAM: 6GB DDR3 (3x Samsung M378B5773CH0-CH9 2GB DDR3 1333MHz)
HDD: 1TB(Can't get much info on this on either. I can't find anything online and there's no label on it.)
OS: I'm running Windows 7 Home Premium SP1 64-bit.
At first these crashes would happen at least two times a day but now it happens alot less frequently. Last week it didn't crash once. It ran perfectly fine for a whole week, but now it's back. I've had two BSODs total since Saturday and it started stuttering and hanging a bit earlier today while I was playing a game, but it never crashed. I just exited the game and waited for a while, then everything was back to normal again.
If you can help me, please do.