Random Program Crashes

biovah

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Feb 1, 2012
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18,510
Salutations.

I have nearly pulled every hair out of my head on this one.

For about a week now I have been experiencing various program crashes and a few BSOD's. It first started with just Firefox crashing and now it doesn't seem to matter the program at all. IT happens about 5 or so minutes after running a program. I've also noticed that I'm having a problem viewing flash type media, like youtube for example. FlashPlayer often crashes without crashing my browser, and sometimes when I go to load a video, I'll get the Error loading video screen that YouTube displays without flash player actually crashing and I can NEVER view that video again. No matter what browser I try I will get the same error message from YouTube. I built the machine about 4 or so years ago and everything has worked fine until now.

I've narrowed it down to what I think it may be, two possibilities:

RAM issue. For example, I've noticed that when when I'm trying to play something like Minecraft, Java will crash, and after I reload the game areas of the environment(map) have giant black holes that never go away after restarting and corrupt the map if you fall into one. So it sounds like something glitched when it was trying to write data.

Video Card. It seems that most crashes occur when I'm doing something that involves some type of graphic media, but not always. I can be doing something in Photoshop and it will crash. I even tried to see if an old install of Battlefield 2 would work and about 5 minutes in the game crashed with no error message what-so-ever.

I'm not super duper tech savvy, but I know enough to where I've always built and repaired my own/friends/families machines. I just can't figure this one out and it's getting pretty damn annoying. Have any of you ever experienced anything similar to what seems to be happening here, and know the culprit?

Thanks
 

biovah

Distinguished
Feb 1, 2012
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18,510
I'd like to add that I just ran a Windows Memory Diagnostic test and it found no problems. I also updated my video card driver, it's an older card that's never done me wrong and I've had for a long time, an 8600GT. I can't imagine it's a driver issue as I have never had a problem in the many years I've been using it.

Can anyone suggest any programs I should use to test other items? I really need tog et this resolved as soon as possible.