My computer is crashing too often.

[Thanatos]

Having used various PCs, and being acclimated to using Windows ever since Windows NT, I'm used to PCs crashing, sometimes often, sometimes almost never.

However, I get some pretty weird crashes on my computer, and it's especially troublesome when I'm playing the MP campaign of Napoleon Total War, because then it's not just me playing, it's other people relying on me.

Here are some specs, if this will possibly help.

OS: Windows 7, 64 bit
RAM: 2GB DDR3 2GHz
Motherboard: nForce 790i
Front Side Bus: 1333 MHz
CPU: 2.7 GHz Core 2 Quad
Video: 1920*1200 ATI Radeon HD4870 512MB (currently on the 10.2 driver)

Now, the symptoms that happen is that oftentimes, my mouse will turn into a black box that has seemingly random white "scratches" across it. The closest analogy I can think of, is if you made a little black box on top of a white background, and then you took your fingernail and scratched off a few lines, revealing the white background underneath. That kind of what this black box that replaces my mouse cursor looks like.

As is always the case, after my mouse does this, the rest of the machine will then crash. Sometimes, the machine just plain crashes, and makes a repeating grating noise, as if I was trying to exorcise the damn thing.

I know this is not an easy problem, since crashes and freezes can be due to a multiplicity of things, but I'm wondering if anyone can please help me out here.

[Freddie]

Ok when you say crashes does it crash back to desktop or does the whole PC just stop responding to commands (e.g Ctrl+Alt+Del doesn't respond) or does it eventually reboot? Does it only happen when playing NTW or does it also happen when your PC is idle?

[Thanatos]

Ok when you say crashes does it crash back to desktop or does the whole PC just stop responding to commands (e.g Ctrl+Alt+Del doesn't respond) or does it eventually reboot? Does it only happen when playing NTW or does it also happen when your PC is idle?

It just completely freezes, and doesn't respond to anything at all. Sometimes, if I just let the machine sit there, it will go to a blue screen, and then reboot.

It seems to happen at random, I just used NTW as a reference point to make my case of how it is really bad for me.

[Spiff]

Have you recently made any hardware or driver changes?

The best thing you could do is write down the error code on the bluescreen next time you get one then google it. It should give you some hint as to what the problem is - though sometimes they can be quite vague.

To do this youll need to go to the advanced system settings menu, from there click settings under "startup and recovery" and then untick "automatically restart" under system failure. That should cause the blue screen to hang around long enough for you to write down the error code. Once youve got it you can just restart the computer manually as normal.


Either way at the moment im guessing a hardware fault - either a problem with your graphics card or your ram. Id check the temperatures of the computer under stress, make sure all the fans are running, things like that.

[Thanatos]

Have you recently made any hardware or driver changes?

Alright, I've disabled the automatic restart, and will definitely write down the error code the next time I see the BSoD.

As for driver changes, the only one I know of is to my graphics card, but the problem of freezing persisted before, so I do not believe that the ATI driver is at fault here.

Thanks for all the help guys, I'll keep you all updated!

[wupwup]

try it with only 1 stick of ram at a time. that did if for me. also what power is your psu abd what is your gfx card?

[Roman_Man#3]

Try setting the RAM down to like, 1333mhz or 1600mhz. I know that some processors/chipsets have problems with RAM at high speeds, so just to eliminate that possibility, underclock it in the BIOS.

[Cyrus the Virus]

Have you always had this problem on the PC? Or for a long time?

[Thanatos]

Ok, time for an update.

Checked ram, don't think that's what's causing it. My computer is about two years old, and is still pretty brand new in terms of all the equipment it's packing. To be honest, I think it might be a bad connection between cards, possibly? If worst comes to worst, I'll have to take all the cards out, and put them back in securely, just to be sure.

My computer has frozen once in a while but now it seems like it's doing it more often.

[hollowfaith]

Hi Thanatos sorry to here of your puter troubles. In my experience its generally a few things...
1. Ram - A bad ram stick will give you constant crashes and reboots. Since you stated you checked the ram we can cross this off.
2. Heat - If the case gets hot you'll generally get weird graphical distortions of some type and a freeze complete with reboot. Make sure your case is clean on the inside and use some compressed air to clean out the heatsinks and vents.
3. Drivers - Are you up to date on all drivers besides your vid card, have you tried reinstalling DirextX to see if it helps?
4. Incorrectly seated Cards - Check to make sure all of your internals are firmly seated into their slots and that all cables are correctly connected.
5. Powersupply - If your powersupply is going bad that to can cause alot of system weirdness or instability. As a matter of fact a few years ago I suffered something similar as my system became more and more unstable the PWS finally gave. Once I got a new one the puter has run stable ever since!

Thats all I can think of off the top of my head this late at night. I hope some of this can help you and if not I wish you luck!

[Thanatos]

Oh jeez, it's freezing like crazy now. I had two MP battles ruined in NTW because of it, both near the end.

Sigh, I'm going to check all of this on your list tomorrow and possibly on Wednesday hollowfaith, it's getting to be positively unbearable.

[Thanatos]

What power is my what now?

[wupwup]

power supply unit. the box that you plug the kettle lead into. not sure how you can tell if you dont open the case up though. if it is a prebuilt pc it is almost deffiatly low quality and barely adequate so if you added a bigger graphics card it might not be able to power it

[Thanatos]

Oh no, my graphics card, the ATI HD Radeon 4870 only requires 500 watts of power. I purposely gave it a power supply unit of 750 watts, so that the machine wouldn't be redlining.

[Roman_Man#3]

What kind of PSU do you have? And was this pre-built? Have you removed and re-sat all the cards, as well as checked all the power connections?

[Thanatos]

What kind of PSU do you have? And was this pre-built? Have you removed and re-sat all the cards, as well as checked all the power connections?

Alas, I am in the middle of finals, so I have to wait until the weekend to take my computer apart!

My computer was custom built by myself, I did it all. As for my PSU, let me take it apart later, and I'll let you know.

In other news, I have updated my motherboard's drivers, and no freezes so far... I don't know if this did the trick, but I'm hoping!

[hollowfaith]

Awesome Thanatos! I hope that was all ya needed!

[Thanatos]

Ok, so it turns out that didn't do anything for me, it still crashed during an NTW multiplayer session. I seem to be getting a disproportionately high amount of crashes and freezes whenever I run either STALKER or ETW/NTW, for some reason.

Here is the picture I took of the BSOD below. I hope someone can read this better than I can?

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

[hollowfaith]

Looks like an issue with your vid drivers, they appear to be timing out. Do you have VPU Recovery enabled in CCC? Also did you update over a previous driver, if you did, did you completely remove the old drivers first?

Well heres a site with people having the same issue as you, I didn't really read through it for you though because its getting late.

http://www.hardwareheaven.com/window...-error-52.html

[Thanatos]

Thanks a lot hollowfaith, your help is definitely appreciated, as is everyone else who has posted here.

I went also to the Microsoft tech forums, and it would seem that after a while, all the posters realized that the ATI drivers themselves were fine, it was when Windows updates were installed in conjunction with the ATI ones that things crashed and were ugly.

Then again, the fact that Windows itself identifies it as the display driver means that there's something wrong with my video card.

The only problem is, which driver? Not even the posters know. I don't want to have to blow all the updates away and then go through every single one...