Frequent BSODs during gaming

[garrettfromthief]

Hi everyone.

I bought a laptop 4 months ago, I guess it's a medium-end:

Acer VN7-592G (Acer Aspire V 15 Nitro - Black Edition)
OS: Windows 10 Home (10.0.15063 Build 15063)
CPU: i7-6700HQ 2.60GHz, 4 core
RAM: 16gb DDR4
Integrated Graphics Card: Intel HD Graphics 530
Dedicated: GTX 960M (4gb, drivers updated 384.76, I even tried to rollback, but nothing)
Storage: Toshiba 1TB + 960 EVO 250gb (I didn't buy the laptop with the SSD included, I added it)

After installing the SSD and the drivers (and Windows 10 itself), I had no problems at all, never experienced a BSOD, with any game. But since a month ago I started experiencing BSODs whenever I play with GTA V and Forza Horizon 3, they are almost all "WHEA_UNCORRECTABLE_ERROR" or "IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL"; I get them every time I play those two games, 5 minutes of gameplay, or up to 1h, they always pop up at a certain point. I thought about overheating (cause my laptop is pretty slim, so airflow isn't at its best), but I played Hitman 2016 today with no problems (except some fps drops, but that's due to the game itself, and my specs as well), no BSODs, same with other games.

The dumps aren't saying that much, they are too generic and they rarely link to a specific driver or issue:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B6yC6RXOdHAGZ2x2T2VYenk3bzQ/view?usp=sharing


I already ran the Intel® Processor Diagnostic Tool (I thought the CPU was the problem), and it passed. Ran the memory test, and no problems. HDD's okay, ran a Defrag and a Windows scan (chkdsk). The SSD doesn't show any problem (I even tried to move GTA V back and forth, from the HDD to the SSD, but nothing). And I updated, downgraded, and updated again Nvidia's drivers, with no results.

I was thinking about reinstalling Windows itself, but I want first to see if we can fix it without doing that.

Thank you people for any kind of help, and sorry if we made this thread trillions of times.

 

[kruxpavilion]

I've actually run into this IRQL error before on my 2014 alienware laptop. It came with windows 8 and really struggled to be compatible with windows 10. Sometimes the hardware on these units simply do not like a newer version of windows. I had reinstalled windows 10 on that laptop countless times but it never wanted to stick. I'd always come up with IRQL errors, no matter how many times I would update my drivers or even back them off to older versions. If the manufacturer doesn't support windows 10 upgrade you might find it isn't compatible.

My suggestion is to roll back to something like windows 7. When I did that, the laptop worked like a dream, no more BSOD's or driver errors.

 

[garrettfromthief]

Hey, and thanks for the help!

Actually I bought my laptop with Windows 10 already in it, I probably guess Windows 7 wouldn't fully support my laptop's components as Win10 does, and by checking Acer's website, seems like they aren't even giving Win7 drivers for this laptop.

Anyway, I managed to find a workaround, seems like I installed some old and incompatible driver with Win10, I still haven't found the specific driver which is causing all this mess, but I haven't seen any BSOD yet: I just ran "msconfig" and left only "Use original boot configuration" selected, on the "General" tab. Gonna use this till I find out the faulty driver.

Thank you for the help @kruxpavilion