Comp freeze & reboot while gaming.

[chmadi]

As brief as possible.

Back in January I had a wild compulsion to clean up my registry. I used registry cleaner and long story short, it screwed up everything. It gradually got worse as time went on but what was most annoying is whenever I played a graphically intensive game like Far Cry 3, the game would freeze, get BSOD and quickly reboot. Then I got "Reboot and select proper boot device."

Long story short, I reinstalled Windows 7 and partitoned my HDD.

All the software quirks I was experiencing went away but I was still getting the "freeze" whenever I tried gaming. But you see, it wasn't consistent! At times I can play a game hours upon hours without a stutter and it was all good in the hood! It was like this for two or three weeks with the occasional freeze. Now whenever I game, within thirty minutes my comp freezes with the BSOD and "Reboot and select proper boot device..."Until I turn it off for a while and start up again. When I'm just browsing on Chrome, once in a blue moon my comp will freeze for a few seconds and resume like nothing happened. There was only one instance it froze completely and reverted to BSOD.

Must be my hardware right?
I know it can't be overheating, I recently installed two new fans.

The three culprits I'm thinking are my HDD, PSU and motherboard in that order. Momma is last because I'm in denial of the absolute worst possibility.

Anybody care to help a PC novice overcome Mr.Freeze?

Spoiler

AMD Phenom II X4 955 3.2 GHz
NVIDA GEFORCE GTX 460 SE
4GB RAM
HDD: Samsung HD502HJ 500 GB
Motherboard: ASUS M4A79XTD EVO
PSU: Corsair 650 watts I believe.

Windows 7 Service Pack 1.

 

[crewton]

BSoD is generally a RAM issue. However, you seem to be in a driver mess. How long did you have the system before the BSoD start occuring? Was life fine for a few years before you decided to go registry clean crazy or did you recently purchase this?

 

[chmadi]

I built my rig in June 2011. A year and a half.

 

[crewton]

Hmm, I'd test your RAM. Use one stick at a time and run memtest86+ and see if one stick gives errors.

 

[chmadi]

Finally had time to do this, I ran both sticks on memtest86+ for roughly 10 hours each and each displayed no errors. However, when I tried booting to Windows 7 with one, things ran slower than a turtle stampeding through molasses. I knew I was operating with half the RAM but it was ridiculous. I rebooted, it appeared it took longer for my MOBO to reach the splash screen. Then I got some sort of "Disk read error".

Now with the second stick of RAM it was slow initially but everything worked fine. I haven't tried gaming on it yet.

 

[chmadi]

I've found the solution. The SATA cable connecting to the HDD was bad. Since I replaced it, I didn't get any major lock ups.



Thanks for the input though!