Dear God Someone Help Me (blue screen).

Robomoo

Honorable
Jun 13, 2013
29
0
10,530
It's finally happened. My (I thought) medium-ok to pretty decent PC has been getting slower and slower over the last couple of months, running most games fairly well, occasionaly crashing when it gets very stressed but on the whole nothing deeply worrying and never very often. Today it blue-screened eight times and I just don't know what to make of it. I installed War of The Vikings through Steam last night and started playing it this morning, it runs smoothly with perfect framerate then just crashes without warning. I load it up again and it blue-screens me. This keeps happening, I uninstall it, play other games, reboot, leave it for several hours to cool, blah blah blah etc, now every time I play any game (even like TF2) it'll crash with no warning after 10-20 minutes and about 1/4 of these crashes cause it to bluescreen.
I don't have any idea why this is, is it just my PC getting old? (I've had it about a year)
parts are:
CPU: AMD FX(tm)-6100 xis-core processor
GPU: Radeon HD 7870

At the moment I'm thinking it's most likely the hard drive, probably, but I really don't know. I think I'll have to buy a new one and a new OS licence.
 

RealBeast

Titan
Moderator
Wow -- pretty dramatic title. :D

I would look at the PSU first and also monitor your temperatures -- could be overheating.

Run the free memtest86 from HERE.

If you are running Windows 7 you would not need to buy a new OS unless you change to a different motherboard, replacement of the same board that is bad or any other part is within the OEM license.

Also startup from an optical disk (your install disk) go to the command prompt and run chkdsk on your HDD.
 

Robomoo

Honorable
Jun 13, 2013
29
0
10,530



This is my PSU: http://www.scan.co.uk/products/550w-xfx-core-edition-p1-550s-xxb9-85-eff-80-plus-bronze-sli-crossfire-eps-12v-quiet-fan-atx
I don't think it would be the problem as I haven't had issues with it before and sometimes the games were just crashing to desktop, which I don't think would happen if it were to do with power..?

What does memtest86 do?

(and yes I know I was just reading up about keeping the OS licence when you get new components)

 

RealBeast

Titan
Moderator
Memtest tests your memory and indirectly the CPU and motherboard, it is a standard test tool for those of us that do hundreds of repairs a year. As I said it sounds like heat, but you cannot rule out your PSU based on your common sense -- rule out nothing until tested. And of course check out the HDD.