Random BSOD, freeze, reboot, boot loop, no minidump anymore.

Hi, my PC is 5 year and 11 months old, I have never changed anything inside it besides thermal paste and cleaning dust.

Since september, I have been having BSOD nearly every day. (And many times through the year as well but they all got fixed by replugging stuff, cleaning dust, and reapplying thermal paste.)
- During september, it was like : 10 min of chain BSOD when using it for the first time of the day somewhere within the first two hours, then it runs fine the whole day, I could play and watch videos freely.
- Mid-late september, it started to BSOD and also reboot without blue screens, and freezing until I reboot myself, at any time, even idle, it was barely usable.
- 26 of september, I update Realtek HD Audio driver, get MSE, reinstall Nvidia graphic drivers, no BSOD for the day, but a day after it starts again, and, since 28th of september, it does not create minidump files anymore! Yet it is configurated to create them, it even says it during the BSOD, now I take photos instead.
Yet I still got one more minidump created the 03rd of october, the last of them, while I had BSOD's few days before that haven't created minidumps.
I uninstalled MSE and the Realtek HD Audio Driver and it became more usable, but still having crashes 5 days out of 7.
- On November 11th, I reinstalled Windows 7 Home Premium 32b with the CD. Still the same, 1 day with no BSOD, and still no minidumps, the folder didn't even create, I had to do it myself, still nothing.

Very often, after a crash, the PC is running but won't reboot, the led of my screen is supposed to be blue, but it stays orange a lot, so I have to keep pushing "Reset" button until it really reboots.
Sometimes worse, it loops the reboot, I mean the motherboard fan instead of going continuous uninterrupted "Vrooooooooooooom..." does "Vroooom.. Vrooooom.. Vrooooom..." infinitely, I know it keeps rebooting because if I open the CD reader, it instantly closes, whereas it stays open if it goes just long "Vrooooooooooooom...". This case is the worst, it feels like my PC is dieing, I tried removing the smallest RAM stick when it happened to me 2 days ago, and it booted fine directly after, but soon got a BSOD just on scrolling a Youtube playlist thus loading its thumbnails.

I also get the "File header checksum is corrupt" black screen few times after trying to reboot.


Crashing happens mostly on videos and games, livestreams. But also while idle (not often, mostly after it already crashed). Can happen 10 minutes after first boot, or one hour, or five, but mostly the first two hours, if it lasts more while lots of videos were watched, then it is likely to not crash at all for the day.

I suspect, in order : 1. My RAM sticks (3GB) : because I get BSOD even idle, when doing nothing graphic intensive, sometimes when opening several Chrome tabs. I can crash EVEN IN SAFE MODE! Even while rebooting, before or after getting to the BIOS screen. Even while restoring to a previous date...
2. Graphic Card : like everything inside the PC, it's as old. And earlier in the past 14 months, some particles in games started flipping out like crazy, deforming my characters (in TERA, WoW, LoL, Sleeping Dogs) then BSOD, now it doesn't even warn. But it can still run games at lowest settings and videos in 1080p or 720p60fps fine, and I crash even without using graphic intensive apps, so it's less likely to be the cause of crashing while browsing Windows Explorer for example.
3. BIOS : this one I haven't ever updated, because I'm too newbie.
4. Power Supply Case & fan : the only thing I haven't properly cleaned ever, just sprayed canned air inside, because it's said to be dangerous.

I tried :
- Reinstalling Windows : helped just for the day of the reinstall.
- Display Driver ; Upgraded and downgraded many different Nvidia versions, but even the ones that worked well don't anymore, and having one is worse than having no driver. Because I get the "Nvidia kernel Display driver XXX.XX stopped responding and recovered..." error on most videos. And I can still run League Of Legends without Nvidia driver. I noticed that after uninstalling / reinstalling a display driver with DDU, it seems to work fine for the day, but crashes again the day after.
- Seatools Seagate tests : nothing found.
- Scans : Avira, MSE, Malwarebytes, Spybot : nothing big found and nothing fixed.
- sfc /scannow : nothing found.
- CHKDSK : nothing changed besides I got few more free Gigs of space.
- Increasing pagefile.sys to ~6GB : I don't know if this thing even works...
- Windows Memory Diagnostic : first time nothing, yesterday though, it said as soon as 7% of the total RAM was scanned, that there was a problem detected, but at the 15% of the second part of the scan, it stopped scanning, even though it says we should wait, I know it froze because the keyboard led and the power button weren't responding anymore. So I reseted and tried the diagnostic twice more but this time no problem was detected.
- Also weird fact, the 05th of November, I inspected the wires plugged to my graphics card, one of the 6 holes seemed broken, so I switched to an other plug that looked the same that wasn't plugged to anything in the PC, with the 6 intact holes, changed nothing to BSOD, but now when I boot, instead of showing the "American Megatrends" BIOS screen, it shows me a beautiful green "Asus" Motherboard screen, saying "Press tab to see BIOS screen", now I have it even if I plug the old wires.

I haven't tried (yet?) :
- Memtest
- BIOS update / "flashing", I really don't know much about these things that require USB or CDs, look confusing ...
- And of course, buying and replacing components, like graphics card, RAM, motherboard. So I first try to figure out what is faulty.

I just don't understand this PC anymore, so random, if it is angry at me, but sometimes runs intensively fine, why doesn't it just make me know by lowering FPS or closing an app ? Sometimes it does close the app or kill a tab or a Chrome extension, but when it does, you know it's gonna BSOD very soon anyway even if you quit everything and stop moving, matter of seconds.
It's very hard to test if the fixes work or not, because some days it will not crash at all, making me think it is cured, but the problems come back a day later, that's why I post so late.
I attached DM log, the minidump from before Windows reinstall are there because I copied them. If you need older ones from this year, I have them backed up. I also take photos of every bsod now, mostly showing "bad pool header/caller", memory management, IRQL not less or equal, ntfs.sys, win32k, sometimes no cause at all.

Thank you if you have a solution, even to at least get the minidump created again, many here have the same problem as I do on games and videos, that's why I tried to give as much information as I can.

Hi everyone (I was so deep in nerdmode I forgot to say that, the basics, sorry!), thank you for replying!

Staying in touch!
It seems that Memtest is a must, so I'm gonna try tonight, I don't know if my USB is valid though, it is a basic 7gb usb key used for storing files. I never heard a thing such as "Flash" USB (#newb). Also the installer formatted it, I backed up the "Lock" executable file (comes with the USB key, to give it a password) to somewhere safe meanwhile. If the test works, will I be able to use the USB key again for storing files normally ? If the key is not valid I guess I'll buy a correct one or look for a blank CD at home.

For the Display Driver, I used DDU many times, and I did check the "remove folders" case since I was told to do it in a video. Didn't seem to be the problem. Of course, it costs nothing trying once more.

For the BIOS, I will do it after the Memtest, not much time because of university, I don't really know how the BIOS update works. (#newb)

BTW; sorry if some stuff in the zip file is in french, sadly Home Premium doesn't let me change language.

Laith said:

That's a very nice name you have for your PC!

Hehe, I realize it's not an original one, I didn't think a lot as I was hurrying and picked a secondary nickname from many years ago when I was an Otaku too, or a weeaboo. Now I'm into Kpop, I guess I'm a koreaboo.
But I'm glad I reinstalled Windows, old one had my ugly family name!


EDIT : Memtest is currently running (I'm on my smartphone), so my USB seems valid. 10 minutes and 53% through first Pass.

Hi and happy new year all, I finally acquired a new 2gb ram stick to check how it goes because there seems to be another big problem now since few days after a series of idle BSODs. It is a combo of several problems, that often come at the same time, as I found other people having the same problem :
- No aero theme anymore, can't enable it. (no big deal)
- No sound, no headphones or microphone device is detected when I plug them, I installed and reinstalled realtek audio drivers, windows doesn't want to install its device though.
- No Firewall, can't start it through services
- No Internet (but this one is fixed thanks to the tweaking.com repair tool, but other repairs didn't solve the other problems, the software advises running them in safe mode and I can't reach safemode at all.) At boot, Netgear always opens up a window saying "failed to run service" or something, I close it and it says Netgear stopped working, but actually does work, so no worry, just a detail.
- Slow boot (fixed as well thanks to tweaking.com repair tool)
- Many other devices don't install when I troubleshoot "NEKO-PC" devices in control panel, because the icon has a yellow "!" sign on it : Realtek Audio Drivers, High Definition Audio Controller, File as volume driver, Microsoft system management BIOS driver , Microsoft virtual reader enumerator device.
- And worst of all, I get a BSOD 100% of the time when trying to boot in safe mode ! Which is weird since normal mode is fine except for the issues listed above, it can boot ipod and all that background services stuff. The sound problem is the most annoying to me at the moment, but since it's the BSOD forum... safe mode is more worrying in the long term because if I ever get a problem that prevents me to boot in normal mode, then I'm screwed, since safe mode isn't available, which doesn't make much sense at the moment.

So yeah, "No aero/Internet/sound/slow boot" is a combo I've seen other people having. So I tried to boot in safe mode to run a DDU, just for science, and this is where safe boot wasn't safe anymore. I was stuck into booting in safe mode because of DDU, but I fixed that by editing boot with F10, it was "/NOEXECUTE=OPTIN /SAFEBOOT something /SOS", deleted everything and ran tweaking.com tool, now it always starts in /NOEXECUTE=OPTIN, I don't know if it's supposed to be so, I never watched my edit boot settings.
I can't restore to a date prior to the problems, and system restore is messy as well anyway! It always fails because of some file said to be corrupt or whatever.
Example : "System restore failed to extract file (C:\windows\inf\arcsas.inf) from the restore point. The restore point was damaged or deleted during the restore."
Tried another date, it was C:\windows\inf\MSDTC Bridge 4.0.0.0\0007\_TransactionBridgePerfCounters.ini
I haven't tried them all (like 8 of them) though, but they were mostly me installing and reinstalling realtek audio drivers, and none was prior to the problems.

What I tried again and what it found/solved :
- CHKDSK, nothing // MSE full long 7 hours scan, nothing // Malwarebytes, nothing // sfc /scannow , nothing // HD Sentinel , nothing // Memory diagnostic, most of the time found nothing, few times it did with old ram sticks, new one hasn't solved problems. // Seatools seagate, nothing // tweaking.com Windows repair, helped for 2 problems, slow boot and internet, not the rest, maybe because I can't safe boot)

But I also have good news! Now, after a BSOD, sometimes Windows gives me the minidump file again ! Indeed, it only does it when the window says "Windows has recovered from an unexpected shutdown" when booting after a BSOD, and this window doesn't always appear after a BSOD.
! Note : BSODs of the safe mode don't give any minidump nor hint to a faulty file, they just give that same error code :
" *** STOP! 0x0000007B (0x80786B58, 0xC0000034, 0x00000000, 0x00000000)"

I updated the DM log, it now has more and current minidump files!
So with all that, I hope that someone has experienced this problem and found a way to fix it, like something to tweak in the registry .. , before I consider reinstalling Windows a second time, as well as all its programs & games, because it's a painful process, and I'm not even sure it's gonna fix problems. Thank you!