Solved my BSOD .... suprized by problem share

this is kind of a long winded story, but has a good lesson in it for those who are struggling with this issue.

I have to start with my old PC, a socket 775 Q-6600 machine. I started getting the dreaded BSOD and other bad behaviors, did some diagnostic work and with no sucsess I simply decided I had got my use from this machine and built a new I-7 which I am using now. The I-7 gave me the same struggles which I fought for some time, unfortunatly too much money was invested to just walk away from the build. A solution had to be found.

With my new I-7 behaving badly, I struggled with diagnostics, lost data in the transfer to the new rig, many months of pain and agony reloading OS's, trying other OS's etc. Nothing worked. Not only did the OS's behave bad, programs like anti-virus would not function as well.

During my struggles I had come across a couple threads that hinted to something I had missed. Then a light came on. My old PC started behaving poorly after I had purchased high end gaming mouse and keyboard, I will not name the brand (although I want to).

So, with yet another fresh Win7 load, I watched software installs closely. And lo and behold, the software and driver certificate was not authenticated by MS with an install warning. Now, I had missed this completely b/c of the name brand of the mouse and keyboard.

My I-7 is stable now and runs well. My old Q-6600 is the same, and is still a stout little PC that serves me well.

I would like to add that I have cut the chords and disposed of that high end gaming gear, spent good money on other brand high end mouse/keyboards with close to the same result. A lot of money lost. At the moment I am using the cheapest of cheap mouse/keyboard, at the cost of gaming to keep my PC working well.

I would like to add that the input devices I had were making my PC so erratic, I see many similar problems I was having in the threads started in this forum. I guess the point I am trying to make is the simplest rule: undo the last change made when problems occur.

Next time I run into an issue this severe I think the best thing would be strip down the OS to the bare minimum, and keep generic input devices on hand for trouble shooting. The drivers/software of that gaming gear was some of the first loaded on the OS, so the problem was continually repeated no matter what. Hope this helps.