Newly built PC is unresponsive, hangs and crashes alot, any help?

[meestersquishy]

I built my first PC about 3 weeks ago, and when I booted it up it worked fine for about a day until I noticed that very mundane tasks were being unresponsive. Google Chrome for example, becomes unresponsive fairly often, when I open a new tab etc, same thing with Windows Explorer. Now it only lasts about 20-30 seconds and it usually just becomes responsive again without having to close the program.

On top of this I was having fairly common bluescreens, and so I spent a good amount of time Googling to figure out what was wrong. Eventually the bluescreens stopped, and so I just put up with the unresponsiveness and continued to use my PC for gaming, because that seemed to work perfectly, all games run without a hitch on max.

Until today, when my PC was being incredibly unresponsive and it bluescreened for the first time in 2 weeks, so I thought it was about time I asked for help, because I'm pretty clueless at this point.


My specs are:
i5 2500k 3.3ghz
Asus P8Z68-V/GEN3 motheroard
Corsair Vengeance 8GB DDR3-1600 RAM (2 sticks of 4gb)
Corsair Nova Series 2 60GB 2.5" SSD (my boot drive with Windows 7 installed)
Seagate Barracuda 2TB 3.5" 7200RPM HDD
EVGA GeForce GTX 570 1.25 gb
Corsair 600W ATX12V PSU
Samsung SH-B123L/RSBP optical drive
Here is a link to the exact parts I bought

USB peripherals installed are: a Cyborg RAT 3 mouse, a Razer Lycosa keyboard, and a Netgear N300 wireless dongle (this is a new addition)

P.S a clean Windows 7 install didn't work, I tried. I've ran memtest with no errors.

Minidump files

Any help would be greatly appreciated, thanks for reading.

-Mike

 

[tsnor]

1. Check firmware level in SSD.
2. Underclock memory and CPU -- did that stabilize things ?
3. "P.S a clean Windows 7 install didn't work, I tried. " OK, why not ? not a good sign. Or do you mean win7 installed to the same disk with everything else running the same failed again ? If so -- good. Then it's not a SW problem, or the bad SW (like drivers) is being loaded when HW is discovered, so you get the same bad driver every time you install.

Remove everything you don't absolutely need. Unplug signal and power from optical disks, data disks, remove usb wireless, goto normal keyboard and mouse if the gaming ones you use have their own driver. Load new video drivers. reload MB chipset drivers. Did things stabilize ?

 

[meestersquishy]

1. Check firmware level in SSD.
2. Underclock memory and CPU -- did that stabilize things ?
3. "P.S a clean Windows 7 install didn't work, I tried. " OK, why not ? not a good sign. Or do you mean win7 installed to the same disk with everything else running the same failed again ? If so -- good. Then it's not a SW problem, or the bad SW (like drivers) is being loaded when HW is discovered, so you get the same bad driver every time you install.

Remove everything you don't absolutely need. Unplug signal and power from optical disks, data disks, remove usb wireless, goto normal keyboard and mouse if the gaming ones you use have their own driver. Load new video drivers. reload MB chipset drivers. Did things stabilize ?

Thanks for the reply!

1. According to the Corsair site, the Corsair Nova series 2 firmware has no updates, as it's apparently stable already.
2. I wasn't sure what you meant by this, did you mean underclocking from the stock speeds, or had you assumed I was overclocking and wanted me to go back to stock? I'm not, btw.
3. Well, what I mean is that I installed a... copy that was of questionable authenticity, and it was bluescreening, hanging etc. So I purchased a legit copy, thinking that the problem was the fact that it was a dodgy copy. And the problem repeated, after I had installed a clean, legit install. So my reasoning was that it was some kind of software/driver problem, and not a bad install.

Okay, so I did what you said, unplugged EVERYTHING unnecessary, used plug 'n' play crappy usb mouse and keyboard, and redownloaded all the drivers from the Asus site, and I noticed I was missing one, Intel Smart Response Technology, I don't know how I missed it originally but it was never installed, so I installed it just now, and things seem fairly normal. Now, I don't want to say this has been solved after 5 minutes, because it might just go back to being slow. So yeah, that is the status now.

I also had out of date chipset drivers, so I installed new ones, but that didn't do anything noticeable.

So far so good basically, I'm opening like 15 tabs to try and stress Chrome (doing this beforehand would have guaranteed unresponsive Chrome) and it seems okay. If anything goes wrong I'll post here again.

 

[tsnor]

Excellent. Good job finding the right drivers. Hope it stays fast. p.s. very glad you are legal on win7, that helps everyone.