I've been getting a couple random crashes lately. Last time it crashed I was watching a video the time before that I think it crashed while playing World of Warcraft. Anyways while I was watching this video all of a sudden my screen said no signal and the song playing in the video started skipping, my computer was still running but unresponsive. I urgently need help!
If you've overclocked it then reset your BIOS settings back to default to start with (at least while you diagnose the fault). Check what the CPU and GPU temps are while it's running, if you can setup some temp logging software to run in the background then next time it crashes you'll be able to look at the log at see what the temps were just before the crash. As far as components that can cause stability problems, could be lots of things - cpu, gpu, psu, mem or motherboard. If you can just switch some parts around between PCs (1 at a time) and see if the problem goes. I could of course just be drivers. sorry to be so vague.
It crashed again while watching a movie in Windows Media Player. My computer is pretty much stock, I haven't overclocked anything. Think reformatting will do anything?
re-formatting will only fix software problems. To test the RAM get a memtestx86+ iso, burn it to CD and boot from said CD. from here To test the CPU get stress Prime 2004 (or Stress Prime Orthos if a dualcore/hyper threaded CPU) from here Make sure all the drivers are up to date, including, but not limited to, chipset, graphics, sound. Shouldn't have caused the WOW crash, but check your codecs are up to date as well.
I got the blue screen of death and it said something about memory dump then it restarted and I got a black screen saying something about a disk check.
also normal... Memtest, chkdisk, prime all good advice... you wanna pinpoint where it's coming from... also monitor temps. Sometimes thermal paste just gets old and crap (especially the stock-stuff), and overheating might cause that...it's a long(ish) shot though