Having BSOD problems...

[snapzilla]

So I just built my first PC, and everything went great:

Asus P8Z77-V mobo
i5-3570k w/stock heatsink (temps are hovering in the 30s at idle)
haf 912 case
antec bp550 power
8gb corsair vengeance ram
samsung 830 ssd boot drive
samsung f3 1tb hdd

I get it all put together, not a thing goes wrong, I do all of the SSD stuff without hassle, then I get around to doing Windows Updates.

And that's when I start having problems. While trying to update them, it hangs, downloading one of the updates endlessly, so I have no choice but to power down the system. When I power it back up, I get BSOD. Reset and this time it just freezes on the desktop. I boot to safe mode and start deleting some of the drivers that I'd just installed, and I get it stable. So I figure I'll try to dl the Windows Updates again. And it hangs, again. And I power down again and it starts acting funky again. This time, in addition to BSOD, firefox keeps shutting down at random.

Anyway I deleted some of the updates and thought I had fixed it. I've left Windows Update alone since then, and that was several hours ago. Well, just a minute ago I was rifling through Steam (just installed it), and I got another BSOD.

So, what exactly is going on here? Am I going to have to delete every single update? Is my copy of windows already screwed? I really don't want to have to go through all of this again.

 

[AM2A]

Sounds like you got some bad RAM. Try running one module at a time. If one of them is giving you BSODs, run it through memtest.

 

[snapzilla]

I'm not sure how I'd deduce which one. The BSOD thing is infrequent now. Also, now I'm having Windows telling me that things have stopped working. I forget all of them, but just now some media controller thing stopped working, and search indexing stopped working.

 

[snapzilla]

I just ran the Windows memory diagnostic thing and it didn't come up with anything. Not sure if that's reliable or not though.

 

[snapzilla]

Ok, just got another BSOD while I was doing nothing more than downloading a game on Steam. I ran the memtest thing for several minutes and it showed no errors. Could this be a problem with the windows updates? I'm this close to deleting all of them just to see...I don't even have that many installed to begin with.

 

[snapzilla]

One last thing I've thought of: sometimes after one of these problems happens, my mouse will stop working and I'll have to unplug it and plug it back in. Not sure if that's important.

 

[chaotixblade]

Dude windows updates generally don't have issues, I mean Microsoft is a big company. Any-who I would check again, RUN ALL diagnostics LOCATED on your MOTHERBOARD diagnostic page. I would definitely recommend that, before doing something drastic. Like sending your ram back.

 

[AM2A]

Generally you have to run memtest longer than a few minutes. Anyway, sometimes it doesn't detect faulty ram. Run one module at a time, if one works and the other gives you BSODs you know what the problem is. Bad Ram will cause all kinds of things to go haywire, appears to be completely random.

 

[snapzilla]

As usual, you all were right and I was wrong, lol. I took out one of the RAM sticks about an hour ago and so far I've had zero problems. I hope that's all there was to this.

 

[AM2A]

Good to hear, make sure to run checkdisk on the hard drive, all those bsods can screw with the filesystem