After more than 5 years of near faultless service my main PC has developed a major issue

With no warning it started crashing suddenly complete with blue screen of death and blaming the video drivers

I got it running long enough to get the latest drivers installed (it was only 1 version out of date) and it got even worse
So I managed to get it running on a old driver from last year, but it was still crashing
Next I swapped to a spare old GTX8800 that I had and now it randomly hanging instead of crashing.....

Any suggestions for the next steps?


The machine is an 1st gen i7 (920) running win7 x64 (fully updated) with 6GB of RAM
The graphics card is a GTX285

Cheers
-Robert

First thing, has it ever been cleaned out inside. Overheating can cause many of these issues and a blowout inside and quick hoover around can make a world of difference.

The GTX will need a seperate power supply, have you got that plugged into the side of the card?

I would go for memory modules, if clean and correctly seated and still no better. Try new ones.

+ 1 for full of dust, mine looked like the inside of a dyson!

Dust is not an issue, its quite clean at the moment....

I have now stripped-down the GTX285 just incase, but hardly found anything (can't reassemble it now though, I've run out of thermal paste )


Power is not an issue, I've got a 1kW atx2.2 bronze certified beast and all the GPU supplies connected up


I'd be very surprised if it was the RAM, its reasonably decent Corsair stuff - I don't have any spares to test it with but I guess I could narrow it down by pulling them one channel at a time (its actually 6x 1GB in a triple channel setup)



The only other thing I wondered about was corrupted system files or bad disk sectors - but I've never dealt with that on a win7 machine before so I'm not 100% sure what my options are here....

[Edited on 18/9/2015 by mcerd1]

It isn't unknown for CPU fans to stop running and cause a blue screen, restart the PC and the fan starts running again

check your cpu fan as others have said
remove the CPU fan clean up the thermal paste with tim and reapply and reseat - cures many ills, especially after 5 years the paste wont be doing much - there's a kit in maplins for a tenner
remove the memory modules one at at time (i have had bad memory modules on at least two occasions)
make sure everything is backed up and then run a chkdsk
make sure nothing metal is between the case and the motherboard (have seen that at least once (random screw or similar, paper clip)
try reseating the gpu in another socket
remove all gpu drivers - just see if it runs on the default windows signed drivers

run chkdsk

http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/windows-vista/guide-to-using-check-disk-in-windows-vista/
above also applies to win 7

you can also use sfc/scannow

https://support.microsoft.com/en-gb/kb/929833

5 years same disk - disk end of life I reckon - 3 years tops is the norm in my world - ebuyer have some cracking deals today

At 5 years old, it's going to be near end of life...harsh but that's the reality.

At our workplace we ditch all our Laptops every 3 years or so as they start to fail - I'd be tipping water over it ala the latest PC World advert :-)

quote:

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Originally posted by rm0rgan
At 5 years old, it's going to be near end of life...harsh but that's the reality.

At our workplace we ditch all our Laptops every 3 years or so as they start to fail - I'd be tipping water over it ala the latest PC World advert :-)

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try a boot in safe mode and then try disabling things in the start-up, do a half at a time to try and narrow down what may be causing it ie. disable half the start-up items and see if it crashes if not enable that half and disable the other half and see if it crashes again.

Sounds like a typical main RAM fault. I've had three lots of good quality RAM fail in two different machines.

If you can access a working machine, pay a quick visit to http://www.memtest86.com/ and create a bootable disk or USB stick. Boot from that and leave it running overnight.

Run the PC with a Linux live CD for a few hours. this will narrow down to a hardware/software problem

Mint is a nice linux to try

mini update:

Memtest86 found no issues

Check the HDD with both windows and seagate tools - no issues detected

removed a couple of recent windows updates and it seems a little more stable, but still doing random things like starting up with no video signal being sent (although that could be this old 8800GTX as I don't really trust it either)


I'm thinking this is a good time for a fresh install (and maybe a new graphics card)
so I'm thinking about starting with a SSD - maybe around 250GB+ but I've never played with SSD's before....
so can anyone recommend good reliable one ?


[Edited on 20/9/2015 by mcerd1]

Late here but my PC did that as well.

All it was the memory modules and everything plugged in was loose.

Hoover all over and make sure everything is fully plugged in.

quote:

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Originally posted by mcerd1
mini update:

Memtest86 found no issues

Check the HDD with both windows and seagate tools - no issues detected

removed a couple of recent windows updates and it seems a little more stable, but still doing random things like starting up with no video signal being sent (although that could be this old 8800GTX as I don't really trust it either)


I'm thinking this is a good time for a fresh install (and maybe a new graphics card)
so I'm thinking about starting with a SSD - maybe around 250GB+ but I've never played with SSD's before....
so can anyone recommend good reliable one ?


[Edited on 20/9/2015 by mcerd1]

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I've been using 2 Crucial CT1024MX550SSD1 (MX550) in a raid 0 stripe now for 9months now, machine doesn't get turned off, drives are great, no problems.

My Dad and sister also have one in their PC and laptop.

Not the fasted, but I felt safe and secure, whilst not being tooo expensive.

Unfortunately they have already been superseded!

So kinda giving the thumbs up for crucial, and at a quick glance I would say the mx200 is what replaced it.. never used one tho.

(on thing I noticed on my Dad's pc win 8.1 was that with acronis 2014 or 2015 it would hang the ssd. seems to be a known bug with acronis, but they didn't fix it in 2015. I've not tried 2016 yet, but didn't want to have to pay to upgrade it anyway, cut over to using windows backup and file protection, not so great as no incremental image backup, but does and doesn't hang the ssd!)

[Edited on 20/9/15 by Chris_Xtreme]

quote:

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Originally posted by britishtrident
Time to retire it perhaps? , technology moves on and it gets harder to maintain the older hardware, the days of buying motherboards and slotting expansion cards in and hunting for device drivers are coming to an end.
Our main PC is now a decent spec all in one device it didn't cost an arm and a leg but has zero expansion potential but worth it just to get rid of all the cables.

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if you play games or do video editing the graphics card could help out by being upgraded.

The SSD will amaze you.