Question Help! Windows crashing and then not!

[Kiryu Type-09]

Windows 11 crash help...

Alienware M15R7 Laptop
Intel i7 12700H CPU
3070 Ti Laptop GPU
32 GB Ram
1 TB SSD.

My windows since yesterday night kept crashing (Blue Screen). It was happening every 10 minutes. Tried everything; full update, rolling back updates, disc check, turning off antivirus real time protection etc. Couldn't check via system restore because I never created a restore point. Didn't even know this feature was a thing.

I was left with only the option to do a clean install and I decided to go for it. I was backing up some important files including all my picture files from which my desktop background was made. The pictures are in my hard drive and the hard drive is still connected and I was looking at network adapter driver I would need for my WiFi card in case windows doesn't install that and so I was on device manager when my background wallpaper goes black. On both screens (dual monitors).

Now it's not crashing. I don't know what happened. Is it my wallpaper or my dual monitor set up with extended view? Maybe I should make my laptop screen my main monitor screen? Please help me understand what happened and how to ensure it doesn't happen again.

 

[Lutfij]

Welcome to the forums, newcomer!

It could be a corrupt driver or a corruption with the OS. It could also be possible that the HDD might be showing signs of degradation.

Just an FYI, you should install the OS in offline mode, then manually install all drivers in an elevated command, i.e, Right click installer>Run as Administrator. Once you've installed all drivers, connect to the www and then run the update on your OS.

Did you recreate your bootable USB installer for your OS?

 

[johnbl]

if you have a minidump file I can take a look at it and see what the bugcheck was. if you wiped the drive it is most likely gone.
generic fix for a bugcheck is to update your motherboard bios and update the motherboard drivers.

 

[JayGau]

If getting rid of the background solved the problem, then it's likely that for some reason the laptop didn't like to extend this image on two monitors. Did you already have this background when it started happening or did it start right after you applied it? Did you get the image online on one of those (not always safe) background websites? Was the image resolution more or less matching the monitor's resolution?

Also, did you update the Nvidia driver recently? The new drivers have a lot of problems, each version bringing more issues than it solved, and this is definitely the kind of problems you could get with them.

You could try another generic background image (like one of those available in Windows), and if starts crashing again, try to install the GeForce Game Ready driver 566.36 (the latest good Nvidia driver).