Games Keep Crashing and I don't know why

[jshagen169]

First time posting here so forgive me if what I say is confusing. Recently (withing the last month or so) the pc games that I play (GTA 4, Champions Online, Just Cause 2, Payday 2) will crash to windows 7. A couple times however it has resulted in BSOD. I have monitered CPU and GPU temperatures while playing these games and the cpu stays around 38-40C, and the GPU hovers between 55-60C. Nothing is being overclocked, it is all at factory settings. I have uninstalled and reinstalled the graphics driver to no avail, and I have checked all other drivers to make sure they are up to date. I guess I just don't know where to look next. Any advice would help. Below is the analysis from WhoCrashed, hopefully it will shed some light.



Crash dump directory: C:\Windows\Minidump

Crash dumps are enabled on your computer.

On Sat 1/18/2014 6:03:07 AM GMT your computer crashed
crash dump file: C:\Windows\Minidump\011814-25178-01.dmp
This was probably caused by the following module: ntoskrnl.exe (nt+0x75BC0)
Bugcheck code: 0xA (0x0, 0x2, 0x0, 0xFFFFF80003115F27)
Error: IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL
file path: C:\Windows\system32\ntoskrnl.exe
product: Microsoft® Windows® Operating System
company: Microsoft Corporation
description: NT Kernel & System
Bug check description: This indicates that Microsoft Windows or a kernel-mode driver accessed paged memory at DISPATCH_LEVEL or above.
This appears to be a typical software driver bug and is not likely to be caused by a hardware problem.
The crash took place in the Windows kernel. Possibly this problem is caused by another driver that cannot be identified at this time.



On Sat 1/18/2014 6:03:07 AM GMT your computer crashed
crash dump file: C:\Windows\memory.dmp
This was probably caused by the following module: ntkrnlmp.exe (nt!KeBugCheckEx+0x0)
Bugcheck code: 0xA (0x0, 0x2, 0x0, 0xFFFFF80003115F27)
Error: IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL
Bug check description: This indicates that Microsoft Windows or a kernel-mode driver accessed paged memory at DISPATCH_LEVEL or above.
This appears to be a typical software driver bug and is not likely to be caused by a hardware problem.
The crash took place in the Windows kernel. Possibly this problem is caused by another driver that cannot be identified at this time.

 

[archer]

Hi jshagen169, Welcome to Seven forums.

Which driver are you using for the GPU? Did you do a clean install of drivers? download the latest drivers for the card, download "Driver Sweeper". this small utility will help you to remove leftovers of the old drivers.

uninstall the drivers, run driver sweeper, reboot and then install the latest drivers.

Run memtest over night to check for any errors on the RAM.

 

[AstaLaVista]

A quick google search shows that your HDD may be on the way out, have you check ed it for errors? Have you also tried windows repair with your Win7 CD/DVD? I don't believe it will hurt.

+1 on what Archer suggested, it is very common for people to install drivers on top of the old ones and that is never a good idea... do a complete uninstall of both your audio and video, get newer drivers first and save them on a temp folder, go to safe mode and run CCleaner (both cleaner and registry), check your startup while you are there and don't let things like catalyst, adobe, things that you don't need to start, restart and let win7 install generic drivers for both, restart for good measure and then run with admin privileges the newer drivers... hopefully this will solve the issue.

It is my personal belief that when you update drivers, you must do both audio and drivers, can't really explain why but again, sometimes one gets corrupted and does something to the other drivers... then again, if you are going to go through the motions of doing one, why not the other?