Hello... So yesterday I had the pleasure of troubleshooting my sister's computer for an ENTIRE day, and the entire morning of today too! (How fun!) Her computer seems to be dying but for the life of me I cannot figure what exactly is causing all these problems; is it the power supply? hard disk? RAM? I can't seem to figure it out so it would save me a WHOLE lot of time if I posted what I've been able to determine so far and get some opinions here as well, you have no idea how badly I need a second opinion right now. This is somewhat alot of information so i'll try to compress it down into bullet points so it's easy to read and digestible, i don't exactly feel like posting a wall of text and overwhelming people with info and bad structure
What is the problem?
Well... it seems that the computer freezes briefly, explorer will freeze for about 3 minutes and then unfreezes again. Sometimes the mouse freezes too and in even rarer scenarios the computer blue-screens with some weird errors I cannot find online. It's mostly a "Kernel inpage error" which apparently has something to do with either the hard disk or RAM. Some of you may go "Well okay there's your answer" but not really, i'll explain later on.
How is the freezing triggered?
This is the interesting part that makes things confusing. It started yesterday when she tried to install Fortnite, the Epic Games installer would attempt to install Fortnite and the computer would start freezing like CRAZY! It would even BSOD sometimes, you might think this is software related but something tells me that it's not.
What do I make of this?
Interestingly when it BSODs it would often run checkdisk on next boot and repair drive errors but although the drive may of have had some corruptions, checkdisk fixed them and SMART information is good, I also did a sector check just in case and it came out good, so the drive MUST be good, right? So that leaves RAM, I did a memtest86 and it gave RAM a pass with zero errors, so that's out of the window too. So what's next? Well I am not sure, is it the motherboard? Is the power supply dying? Well I doubt it's the power supply because it actually remains completely stable on a Prime95 Stresstest as shown below:
So... if the freezes were happening because the power supply was sending unstable power, now would be a good time to freeze but it didn't so therefore I don't think this is the problem
So what could it be?
I wasn't sure. But when I tried installing the latest NVIDIA drivers something interesting happened and so it gave me an idea of what the problem might be, the system started becoming unstable again and freezing all over the place when the installer was extracting the files... take a look in this screenshot:
This is a screenshot of when the system started becoming unstable again, which as I said was during the extraction of drivers, the system was freezing when the disk activity was full... and as a matter of fact, I was ONLY able to capture the screenshot when the system became slightly more stable again, which happened to be when the disk activity went down to 35% (see the task manager graph) so... coincidence? I think not... but then again I already said that the drive was fine, so how could this be?!?! Well perhaps it's not the drive itself, but maybe the SATA controller in the motherboard. This is the only logical conclusion I was able to deduct
This is all I have for now. For now I can only blame the motherboard. It could be a software issue but I don't really have any reason to believe that right now (maybe you can give me one?) I'll post a screenshot of HWMonitor for any people that want this information:
If you guys can help me figure out what the exact problem is I would greatly appreciate it. Here are the full system specs:
CPU: Core 2 Quad Q9300
GPU: GTX 580
RAM: 2x4GB DDR3 @ 1066 MHz
Mobo: Biostar G41D3+
Power Supply: Evga W1 500W (Aware of the not so great quality but it's all we can do for now)
SSD: Weird Sasmung SSD that was probably pulled from a laptop @ 120GB
In case this turns out to be a bad motherboard, I can give her my H110M-R with a Core i3 6100 (Should be much better too) which I was planning to do eventually but didn't have any DDR4 sticks for it to actually work. Plus I want to be 100% sure it's the motherboard and not something else that might cause damage to the H110M-R once I install it, just being safe.
What is the problem?
Well... it seems that the computer freezes briefly, explorer will freeze for about 3 minutes and then unfreezes again. Sometimes the mouse freezes too and in even rarer scenarios the computer blue-screens with some weird errors I cannot find online. It's mostly a "Kernel inpage error" which apparently has something to do with either the hard disk or RAM. Some of you may go "Well okay there's your answer" but not really, i'll explain later on.
How is the freezing triggered?
This is the interesting part that makes things confusing. It started yesterday when she tried to install Fortnite, the Epic Games installer would attempt to install Fortnite and the computer would start freezing like CRAZY! It would even BSOD sometimes, you might think this is software related but something tells me that it's not.
What do I make of this?
Interestingly when it BSODs it would often run checkdisk on next boot and repair drive errors but although the drive may of have had some corruptions, checkdisk fixed them and SMART information is good, I also did a sector check just in case and it came out good, so the drive MUST be good, right? So that leaves RAM, I did a memtest86 and it gave RAM a pass with zero errors, so that's out of the window too. So what's next? Well I am not sure, is it the motherboard? Is the power supply dying? Well I doubt it's the power supply because it actually remains completely stable on a Prime95 Stresstest as shown below:
So... if the freezes were happening because the power supply was sending unstable power, now would be a good time to freeze but it didn't so therefore I don't think this is the problem
So what could it be?
I wasn't sure. But when I tried installing the latest NVIDIA drivers something interesting happened and so it gave me an idea of what the problem might be, the system started becoming unstable again and freezing all over the place when the installer was extracting the files... take a look in this screenshot:
This is a screenshot of when the system started becoming unstable again, which as I said was during the extraction of drivers, the system was freezing when the disk activity was full... and as a matter of fact, I was ONLY able to capture the screenshot when the system became slightly more stable again, which happened to be when the disk activity went down to 35% (see the task manager graph) so... coincidence? I think not... but then again I already said that the drive was fine, so how could this be?!?! Well perhaps it's not the drive itself, but maybe the SATA controller in the motherboard. This is the only logical conclusion I was able to deduct
This is all I have for now. For now I can only blame the motherboard. It could be a software issue but I don't really have any reason to believe that right now (maybe you can give me one?) I'll post a screenshot of HWMonitor for any people that want this information:
If you guys can help me figure out what the exact problem is I would greatly appreciate it. Here are the full system specs:
CPU: Core 2 Quad Q9300
GPU: GTX 580
RAM: 2x4GB DDR3 @ 1066 MHz
Mobo: Biostar G41D3+
Power Supply: Evga W1 500W (Aware of the not so great quality but it's all we can do for now)
SSD: Weird Sasmung SSD that was probably pulled from a laptop @ 120GB
In case this turns out to be a bad motherboard, I can give her my H110M-R with a Core i3 6100 (Should be much better too) which I was planning to do eventually but didn't have any DDR4 sticks for it to actually work. Plus I want to be 100% sure it's the motherboard and not something else that might cause damage to the H110M-R once I install it, just being safe.
Last edited: