Hello, A little bit of background: I am due to look at one of my dad's office computer on this upcoming Saturday. I can access it remotely if we need to get certain information before then though. -- The computer blue screens throughout the day (2-3 times). Revvit is the main program that is being used. The computer will still crash however outside of CPU intensive times. The computer is reasonably high spec for its time - 8gb-16gb ram, 2600k cpu, SSD hard drive. My immediate thoughts is that it is not a software issue – most likely to be the RAM or maybe the SSD failing? The reason I say this is because there are 4-5 other computers running the same software, yet this is the only computer to fail. -- I know I can test the RAM using MEMtest – how should I test the SSD though to find out if it was failing? Also Memtest can take ages to complete – is there a shortcut to find out whether I should be replacing the ram or not? I imagine there is a firmware update for the SSD (considering that it is around 2+ years old however it has Windows on it and therefore there is a chance that I wouldn’t be able to update the firmware without having to reinstall windows/programs. It could be the GPU – its not a particular workstation GPU however (my experience is that these GPUs are very expensive and for the type of work being undertaken, there is no noticeable difference in speed) – I would like to be corrected on this though! Could someone please help me diagnose this BSOD – I can post some logs up if necessary but would need to be told where to find these. Thank you!
As you have already surmised there are many reasons a pc may blue screen, you should consider malware as something to check for as well. Event viewer is the place to start looking, to see if there are any drivers involved in the blue screens, also look at the 0X12345678 number that comes as Googling this number may help find the source If the blue screen isn't up long enough to see the code, you need to disable automatic restart on blue screen
If the RAM is truly knackered, a Memtest will likely show errors up fairly swiftly. However, random blue screens, aside from temperature issues (or bad overclocks), suggest RAM to me, so I would advocate a full Memtest. Also - check the event viewer? Might give some clues. Could be unstable PSU, could be all sorts of things. I'd start with temp checks, RAM and graphics drivers though. Oh, and install CrystalDiskInfo to check the SSD
Try downloading bluescreenview. http://www.nirsoft.net/utils/blue_screen_view.html Its a great starting point to solving bsods (shows the files involved in the bsod error) which you can then google to find the culprit. I have used it a few times and found the fix pretty quickly.
Ok so I have downloaded that program and it says that the crash was caused by dxgkrnl.sys - which I think is direct x kernel? I have updated the nvidia drivers (clean install) - is there anything else I need to do? Or can I test it somehow? Thanks, Ed
Take a look at the bug check code which is the 4th column from the left in bluescreenview. Its the last 2 or 3 characters you want eg: 0x000000xx or 0x00000xxx where x should be numbers or a letter and number. Out of curiosity do you have any cd burning/emulation drivers/software installed on the machine such as daemon tools/alcohol%.
Sorry for the slow response - the bug code is 116 and no there is no such software installed. Logmein is installed though.
