Hey,
Would really appreciate some help. I'm not a computer geek. Everything I've learned about PC troubleshooting was in the last year.
I've got a Windows 7 Home Premium SP1
AMD Athlon(tm) II X4 620 Processor, 2600 Mhz, 4 Core(s), 4 Logical Processor
BIOS American Megatrends Inc. 5.22 4/15/2010
6 GB of RAM
500 Watt PSU
Nvidia Geforce GTX 560 ti GPU
The old hard drive burned out a couple of years ago and I wanted to try restoring the PC, so I consulted a friend for advice.
I got a new 1000MB harddrive, put in the new 500 Watt PSU, and purchased that Nvidia GPU.
I installed all these new parts myself and booted up. Everything worked except for some random BSODs.
I did a bunch of reading in forums like this one and found a solution. I booted into safe mode and uninstalled/reinstalled the graphics drivers.
After trying that, the PC started running much better. That was this spring, and for a few months I had a good time with it, games running fine with only the rare crash after hours of playing. I thought everything was ok.
HOWEVER, last week, the random BSOD crashes began again with more frequency. I'd just installed a few old PC games, Hunting Unlimited 2, 18 Wheels of Steel American Long Haul, etc.
Anyway, I went back online and read articles and troubleshooting stuff.
I checked the crashdump file and it pointed to the nvlddmkm.sys file as the culprit.
So, I tried the nvlddmkm.sy_ nvlddmkm.sys input fix, but that didn't work.
I've reinstalled the graphics drivers multiple times with no change. I was using the 388.31 driver. I even reverted to the 314.22 driver but still am having crashes. I also changed the TdrDelay timer to 0, which stopped some of the BSOD crashes but if it doesn't crash, the screen just freezes until I restart via the power button on the tower.
I even installed Device Driver Uninstaller (DDU) and ran that tonight. I found that DDU was detecting two other previous drivers in the system, a Radeon one and another Nvidia 9100. So this evening I ran DDU, cleaned all three drivers out of the system, and restarted the PC.
I thought maybe things were fixed, but no, the same freezes are still happening. I'm so frustrated tonight because every avenue I try is failing.
What have I missed? Why can't I stop the freezing/crashing? It is doing it for every game I try now.
The PC boots up fine, everything looks ok, until I try running a game.
I would really appreciate some feedback. I'm sorry if this is rambling and/or incoherent. As I said, I'm not a computer geek. Everything I'm talking about in this post is the stuff I've learned in the last 10 months.
Is there anything else I can try? Please tell me, and thanks in advance!
Would really appreciate some help. I'm not a computer geek. Everything I've learned about PC troubleshooting was in the last year.
I've got a Windows 7 Home Premium SP1
AMD Athlon(tm) II X4 620 Processor, 2600 Mhz, 4 Core(s), 4 Logical Processor
BIOS American Megatrends Inc. 5.22 4/15/2010
6 GB of RAM
500 Watt PSU
Nvidia Geforce GTX 560 ti GPU
The old hard drive burned out a couple of years ago and I wanted to try restoring the PC, so I consulted a friend for advice.
I got a new 1000MB harddrive, put in the new 500 Watt PSU, and purchased that Nvidia GPU.
I installed all these new parts myself and booted up. Everything worked except for some random BSODs.
I did a bunch of reading in forums like this one and found a solution. I booted into safe mode and uninstalled/reinstalled the graphics drivers.
After trying that, the PC started running much better. That was this spring, and for a few months I had a good time with it, games running fine with only the rare crash after hours of playing. I thought everything was ok.
HOWEVER, last week, the random BSOD crashes began again with more frequency. I'd just installed a few old PC games, Hunting Unlimited 2, 18 Wheels of Steel American Long Haul, etc.
Anyway, I went back online and read articles and troubleshooting stuff.
I checked the crashdump file and it pointed to the nvlddmkm.sys file as the culprit.
So, I tried the nvlddmkm.sy_ nvlddmkm.sys input fix, but that didn't work.
I've reinstalled the graphics drivers multiple times with no change. I was using the 388.31 driver. I even reverted to the 314.22 driver but still am having crashes. I also changed the TdrDelay timer to 0, which stopped some of the BSOD crashes but if it doesn't crash, the screen just freezes until I restart via the power button on the tower.
I even installed Device Driver Uninstaller (DDU) and ran that tonight. I found that DDU was detecting two other previous drivers in the system, a Radeon one and another Nvidia 9100. So this evening I ran DDU, cleaned all three drivers out of the system, and restarted the PC.
I thought maybe things were fixed, but no, the same freezes are still happening. I'm so frustrated tonight because every avenue I try is failing.
What have I missed? Why can't I stop the freezing/crashing? It is doing it for every game I try now.
The PC boots up fine, everything looks ok, until I try running a game.
I would really appreciate some feedback. I'm sorry if this is rambling and/or incoherent. As I said, I'm not a computer geek. Everything I'm talking about in this post is the stuff I've learned in the last 10 months.
Is there anything else I can try? Please tell me, and thanks in advance!