Yet another computer crash thread

[Toonces]

This has really got me stumped.

My computer is doing something weird.  It started yesterday.  I'll go on the internet and the computer will work fine for a few minutes.  But then at some point the cursor will freeze and the whole computer freezes.  Eventually it will start working again after maybe 30 seconds.  This might happen one or two more times, or immediately, where the program internet explorer will crash and I get a pop up window that it's stopped working.

The crash varies, but in general after this crash other programs will start to crash one by one until finally windows explorer itself crashes, I lose all my desktop icons and I have to hard re-start the computer.

After about 3 re-starts yesterday I booted into safe mode and ran a virus scan.  Then I re-started in normal mode and got the crash yet again.  I ran AVG in normal mode and then was able to play War of the Roses for an hour with no issues and even get on the internet and post here.

Today when I got home from work I started up the internet and right away it went into that crash sequence again.  I ran AVG again, whole computer scan with updated definitions and it came up clean. 

The computer is working right now as I write this but I don't know if the problem is just waiting or if it's spontaneously fixed itself.

This is a tough one.

[GDS_Starfury]

how old is it?

[Toonces]

Less than a year.  I'm wondering if it's hardware related, too.

I haven't done anything new- installed any new programs or hardware or anything like that.

It just crashed. 

[GDS_Starfury]

after googling 'pc crash, lost icons' it might be a registry error or Iexplorer error.  YMMV
while its a pain in the ass things like this are why I reformat at least once a year.

[GDS_Starfury]

last week when it was a frosty 50 degrees out and I woke up all bundled in blankets and sweat clothes I went to turn on my pc but made the mistake of touching the metal frame first.  I got a nice shock and 30 minutes on degaussing my pc so it would start properly.

[eyebiter]

Do you have the CPU and/or memory overclocked?  Usually you can check temps inside the bios.
If temps are very high, open the case and verify the CPU & case fans are spinning.  Power down, get a can of air and clean dust from the CPU and memory.

If temps are normal, install malwarebytes do a full scan to make sure you don't have any spyware. 
Then load CCleaner, do a registry scan and  let it delete all temp files.
 
Did you load any new video drivers recently? 

[Toonces]

Nothing's overclocked. 

The only thing I can think of that is consistent is that the crashes were intially coming out of a powered down (not off) state, except for the re-starts obviously.

I can believe it's registry related.  It's too long to type out, but basically some of the errors are leading me to believe that that could be a component of it. 

Everything's working fine right now.  But I can almost be that I'll let the computer hibernate tonight and then when I boot up tomorrow after work it will immediately crash.

[GDS_Starfury]

its the Chinese!

[Toonces]

Oh man, my computer is seriously pooched.

I just went to play War of the Roses and my Steam library is all jacked up.  A lot of games are fine, but a bunch that were previously installed are showing as not installed.  WTF happened to my registry?

[GDS_Starfury]

reformat it.  I know it sucks but it sounds like you leave it on all the time and do lots of stuff with it.  consider it a tune up.

[MikeGER]

Toonces, i also had problems sometimes when i 'only woke up' the PC and had played Steam related or other games before.... also some Matrix games (CoH) sometimes don't like running after 'woke up'  too. 

while you had those crashes some files may have get corrupted.

I would restart the PC and go to Local Drives  / Properties / Tools /  and run the 'disk error check' on your HDs
(terms are in German here so i 'translated' those terms windows uses above... it may read difference but you get the idea). NTFS file system will repair them.   

And adjust to fresh restarting the PC before a game session, especially before any MP or PBEM-server ussage.     

   

[GDS_Starfury]

so any luck?

[Toonces]

It seems to have spontaneously fixed itself.  Weird.

When you reformat, are you saying reformat it to factory condition and then reinstall everything? 

[Gusington]

Also, how often do you run the clean-disk utilities like defrag and disk cleanup?

[GDS_Starfury]

yes reformat to brand new and reinstall everything.  if you have a Windows OEM disk its even better.  just get all the latest drivers first that youll need.  I defrag the hd maybe once a month.