Hello. Trying to get some help with a few crashes I've been having lately. I have a few ideas I'll get into in a bit but otherwise I cannot find a 100% consistently trigger these crashes. I can run my machine for days on end, stressing it daily with no issues until one day it finally decides to crash. This has become extremely stressful for me because, even though my PC might be running "fine" most of the time, I'm constantly in a state of paranoia.
Here are my minidumps if you'd like to look through them: https://files.catbox.moe/jsmffw.7z
All my crashes are memory related (Memory_Management and Faulty_Hardware_Corrupted_Page) so of course the first thing I did was to run memtest86. God knows how many memtest runs I've done at this point but they all pass 100% every single time. I've also used SEAtools to test my SSD and it too has passed. I have updated all the relevant drivers I can think and am currently on the latest BIOS update for my motherboard. I'm at a complete loss.
Here are some theories and information that are hopefully relevant:
My machine is a few years old. Never had a problem in the past until I decided to reinstall Windows several months back then the crashes started creeping up. Could a faulty windows install be behind this misbehavior? I've ran the sfc and DISM commands everyone recommends countless times already. Most of the time they come out clean but a few times they did find corruption that was "successfully fixed". But every time I look at the log files after a successful repair I cannot find anything referencing any repair of any faulty files. I believe most of those are "false positives" and they're only repairing registry mismatches after various windows updates and the like. That's just what I gathered from them I'll freely admit that I'm not an expert at reading those logs.
Two of these crashes happened when I was in the middle of playing a game. The games I was playing seem to be very RAM intensive and have reports of memory leaks (my system has 16GB of RAM and both of the games that caused a crash also have 16GB as their recommended) . What I noticed is that these games use a lot of virtual memory and they've even crashed a few times because of extremely high virtual memory loads (program crashes, these crashes did not end in a computer crash). Could memory leaks potentially lead to these bugchecks? Maybe if a game starts devouring too much of my pagefile or if my pagefile isn't big enough that it starts overwriting things it could cause system instability?
minidumps all point towards "Memory Compression" leading to the fault. From what I understand that's a Windows 10 feature where windows might compress things inside the RAM if resources become scarce so I'm once again left wondering if these BSOD might be caused by a memory leak or resource exhaustion. Something inside the compressed RAM might be getting overwritten or windows is otherwise not able to decompress it properly leading to the crash. That's my theory but again I genuinely have no idea what I'm talking about I'm just trying to rationalize how all of this functions from what little reading I've done.
Recently I deleted and recreated my pagefile and manually set it to a higher value than normal. It's only been a few days though so I'm still testing this out to see if this helped.
Thoughts? I'm not sure if I should swap out my current set of RAM sticks, add more RAM, or do something else. Even though memtest isn't picking up any errors I assume it could still be some very obscure fault inside the ram which would explain why these crashes are triggered so rarely. I always assumed that resource exhaustion would simply cause an application to crash and not crash the entire system or lead to memory being overwritten/corrupted so I'm not sure if adding more RAM is the right idea here. If you have any suggestions or more tests you'd like me to run then feel free to tell me, I'm willing to try out anything at this point.
Here are my minidumps if you'd like to look through them: https://files.catbox.moe/jsmffw.7z
All my crashes are memory related (Memory_Management and Faulty_Hardware_Corrupted_Page) so of course the first thing I did was to run memtest86. God knows how many memtest runs I've done at this point but they all pass 100% every single time. I've also used SEAtools to test my SSD and it too has passed. I have updated all the relevant drivers I can think and am currently on the latest BIOS update for my motherboard. I'm at a complete loss.
Here are some theories and information that are hopefully relevant:
My machine is a few years old. Never had a problem in the past until I decided to reinstall Windows several months back then the crashes started creeping up. Could a faulty windows install be behind this misbehavior? I've ran the sfc and DISM commands everyone recommends countless times already. Most of the time they come out clean but a few times they did find corruption that was "successfully fixed". But every time I look at the log files after a successful repair I cannot find anything referencing any repair of any faulty files. I believe most of those are "false positives" and they're only repairing registry mismatches after various windows updates and the like. That's just what I gathered from them I'll freely admit that I'm not an expert at reading those logs.
Two of these crashes happened when I was in the middle of playing a game. The games I was playing seem to be very RAM intensive and have reports of memory leaks (my system has 16GB of RAM and both of the games that caused a crash also have 16GB as their recommended) . What I noticed is that these games use a lot of virtual memory and they've even crashed a few times because of extremely high virtual memory loads (program crashes, these crashes did not end in a computer crash). Could memory leaks potentially lead to these bugchecks? Maybe if a game starts devouring too much of my pagefile or if my pagefile isn't big enough that it starts overwriting things it could cause system instability?
minidumps all point towards "Memory Compression" leading to the fault. From what I understand that's a Windows 10 feature where windows might compress things inside the RAM if resources become scarce so I'm once again left wondering if these BSOD might be caused by a memory leak or resource exhaustion. Something inside the compressed RAM might be getting overwritten or windows is otherwise not able to decompress it properly leading to the crash. That's my theory but again I genuinely have no idea what I'm talking about I'm just trying to rationalize how all of this functions from what little reading I've done.
Recently I deleted and recreated my pagefile and manually set it to a higher value than normal. It's only been a few days though so I'm still testing this out to see if this helped.
Thoughts? I'm not sure if I should swap out my current set of RAM sticks, add more RAM, or do something else. Even though memtest isn't picking up any errors I assume it could still be some very obscure fault inside the ram which would explain why these crashes are triggered so rarely. I always assumed that resource exhaustion would simply cause an application to crash and not crash the entire system or lead to memory being overwritten/corrupted so I'm not sure if adding more RAM is the right idea here. If you have any suggestions or more tests you'd like me to run then feel free to tell me, I'm willing to try out anything at this point.
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