Question I need help(Bluescreens, major windows/driver/hardware problem)

[The-Creamster]

Context:
Over the years that i've owned my PC various hardware components have outright eventually failed on me. First it was the original 8GB of RAM, 2nd the original PSU(that took me up to 6 months to properly diagnose and get replaced), 3rd the original GPU just decided die on me one day without warning; all of these things have happened over the previous 5 or so years with the point of this thread concerning the type of event that has been happening more consistently over the last 2 years with the last 12 days being the most "frustrating" of all such that i'm clueless as to exactly what is going on now

Another problem that has been plaguing me for 6+ months now is inconsistent booting(like not booting, giving me misleading beepcodes and after fiddling around with a number of things like disconnecting/reconnecting all power/data cables, reseating components etc... it would eventually start for me but then a few days to weeks later do the same thing again with random periods of working as things should.

Problem:
The actual problem at hand is that my GPU/video driver does the "driver crash and recover properly" action with the first few instances ever going back 4ish years and very rare up to now 1-5 every 2 days(not joking there) with periods of time in-between where it wouldn't occur for months. What exactly that has happened over the last 12ish days is related to this but much worse and something that i never knew could happen let alone know what to do about it. The first time that concerned me was when about 12 days ago "it appeared to be a typical driver crash and recover" but it wasn't and gave me a loss of video signal 3 times in a row all within 10-30sec then after the 3rd complete loss of video signal of which only a forced power off would get me back in; while this was occurring any audio playing back would be "glitchy" as if instantaneously my hardware was being maxed out but it wasn't. So i thought that was the first and only isolated case but it come back to bite me even worse with more "driver crashes and recoveries" at least 1 a day for the next week.

The 2nd "complete loss of video" occurred 4 days ago which naturally raised my alarm bells so i looked into various things like the windows event viewer logs and found "LMS cannot connect to Intel MEI driver"(google that for yourself to get an idea of what you can find solution wise which isn't mush aside from warranty returning/buying a new one or updating the corresponding drivers). Now in-between 4 days ago and last night(25/02/2019) the video driver would "crash and recover" around 5 times a day with the first bluescreen 2 days ago with a msg of something like "SPF_NON_CORRUPT" after the video driver failed to recover successfully obviously. Then it blue-screened again on me last night with the msg "video driver crashed and didn't recover successfully"

Now when it comes to tech things i'm not "stupid" as i've got things working again after they stop working and diagnosed other hardware/software problems with other PC's in the house but been able to do nothing about it:

1. the first was a LAN driver that suddenly stopped working all of a sudden and manually re-installing it would get it working again for a few hours at most before it disabled itself
2. the second was something somehow "uninstalled(literally or just disabled and made it invisible to the user)" the third part security and then infected windows such that it "broke" the original user profile to the extent that it was rendered 100% un-usable and any subsequent accounts created were not able to be created as admins

Solutions:
So naturally one goes to google with a search phrase and finds "1001 solution threads" all of which are useless, so i tried to get the windows SDK debug tools installed to no avail as it gives me the msg "incorrect config" and closes the installer; So here's what i've tried:

1. 2 video driver updates have dropped over the last week and those made no difference
2. After the 3rd bluescreen i thought i would try safemode/system restore but found another problem that being safemode with networking but to my surprise no net connection even in that mode; so system restore it was which didn't take long to do.

Now the restore date i chose was the 07/02/2019 which was before all of this even had started to show signs of occurrence and to my disgust after logging on this morning the video driver crashed on me again and had to force shutdown which was the last straw and is why i'm here. Is anyone able to tell me what on earth is wrong with my PC as i can't even watch YT without it going crashy on me...

note:
I will be able to provide any crash logs/files and maybe "screenshare, what ever method will work best" if it means i can understand what is going wrong and potentially what i can do to fix this frustrating issue!!!(i may still be in warranty return period for my GPU but i doubt that a new/replacement GPU will fix this as it's now erroring out windows itself so the software side of things is personally more to blame for this in my eyes)

Thanks, The-Creamster.

 

[The-Creamster]

So for the rest of the day after i made the initial post and for the whole next day i had no problems; but today has been very different!! I started my PC and went to put the bins out and when i got back i saw no video signal, so forced shutdown #1. Over the next few hours the video driver would successfully recover after crashing once, have to force shutdown 2 more times and a game i launched would completely glitch out as far as getting no video from it then have to force shutdown again.

I NEED HELP NOW!!!
AS I HAVE NO CLUE WHAT TO DO AND NO APPLICATION IS SAFE FROM THESE RANDOM VIDEO DRIVER/GPU/SOFTWARE RELATED ISSUES

Anything that'll point me in a direction will be of help beyond what you could imagine!!!!.

Thanks, The-Creamster.

Edit:
This morning upon PC startup again i had to force shutdown then about 25min later i had to do so again!!!
Is anyone going to help me???

 

[dennis48309]

I've always found it to be a pain in the butt to diagnose which component is faulty. If you can, enable the option in Windows to prevent auto-restart on BSOD so that you can read the error code. In some cases it can help you determine what is causing the reboots.
When I have a faulty machine I always install a fresh copy of Windows on an extra drive laying around to rule out software/OS corruption and whatnot.
Your track record of failing components seems odd. I have never seen RAM die before. Power supplies and GPUs I have seen fail. Do you use a surge protector to protect your PC?

I would say start with a fresh install of Windows. If the problems still persist then start swapping major components like GPU, PSU, etc...until you determine which part is faulty.

 

[The-Creamster]

Thanks for a reply(after 8 days!!!),

About 6months ago i did a clean windows re-install and have kept that drive free of any un-necessary programs/files etc... My GPU is out of warranty so can't return it without paying $120 to get it "looked at"(even if it's problem free) and i don't have anything that i can try my parts in and also can't replace parts as replacing something like the MOBO would mean having to replace the CPU and RAM too given i have a 7ish yr old one(5yrs in my PC; Intel H67 chipset MOBO, I5 2400K CPU, 8GB DDR3 RAM). There is also no "system" driver updates like bios, audio drivers etc... and already rocking the latest GPU driver of which hasn't made any difference at all.

So at this point i just want to as closely as possible identify the issue and if i can eliminate or reduce it's occurrence. Anything program wise that'll help achieve that would be appreciated.

The-Creamster.

 

[dennis48309]

I am not familiar with any programs that can actually determine if a component is faulty. HDDs use SMART which can tell you if they are failing but I'm not sure of any equivalent for motherboards, power supplies, GPUs, etc... Power supplies can be tested using a relatively cheap device that you plug the 20 or 24 pin cable into. I'm willing to bet you are having a power supply or motherboard issue but I can't be positive. The number of components you've had fail does raise some red flags as I've never seen RAM sticks die, I still have DDR1 sticks that are 15-20 years old that work.
Random beepcodes on your motherboard is definitely not good as well as not booting sometimes, and I think that rules out a Windows/driver issue. That could mean your motherboard is failing but again I am not certain.
If your motherboard has onboard video then I would suggest removing the GPU for several days to rule out that component.

 

[The-Creamster]

It's been a few days so i'll give an update;

I haven't had any video driver crashes/force shutdowns but instead been getting "glitchy audio"(audio will 'de-sync' and cause it to be heard is if i'm experiencing 'hardware max load/lag' but not and the corresponding video component will look the same 'disjointed'. Warframe is playable when it does this but after about 4ish hours games are unplayable! WoT is by far the worst candidate as i can't even have 'fluid' sound and video in 'the lobby interface' let alone in a match where it's literally un-playable...

And here's what i've done and been able to find out as far as a potential source of my problems:

1. there was approx 1.6GB of windows updates which in the 2nd batch included "Other - Windows 7 Intel MEI Driver" ; so i have it now but it doesn't want to start as it just gives me a code 10 error in device manager
2. So i decided to "google the impossible" that being 'mothereboard diagnosis software' and got a hugely varied mixed bag of results of which a lot were red herrings but found one that gave me a little more in-depth logs that it pulled directly from event viewer which sparked a different and to me then unthought of search which sorta yielded results

• "ESET sysinspector" detailed further the event viewer logs which prompted searching for a Intel MEI driver hotfix dating back to 2017 of which i eventually got the correct file download link but it just gave me an error due to that particular program not supporting the Intel H67 chipset which my mobo has
• bluescreenview also helped elaborate a little more on all the bluescreens i've been getting

So if any of the extended information that is available through these i'll gladly share any bits that might be of interest.

The-Creamster.

Edit:
I found a program called "DPC Latency Checker" for Windows 7 and i'm definitely getting mild->severe latency spikes even when watching just YT. Apparently HPET can be a cause of these but the recommendation is "trial and error driver disable/enable" until your find your culprit/s...

Edit 2:
So the numerical values displayed on the DPC LC graph are measured in micro(greek letter 'Mu') seconds and are marked as 500(green), 1000(yellow) and 2000/4000/8000/16000(red). So the value i got when i would get a 'audio lag spike' in a video was max 2900 with an occasional 1000ish here and there. So i launched warframe to check what it spiked to when it gets the 'audio lag spikes' and it registered a whopping 265k(the warframe spikes are only 0.2-1.5sec in length) but after seeing that i can assume that what Wot is triggering is constant spikes or spikes in the millions much more frequently...

The site that i got the download of DPC LC from also mentioned the HPET(windows "high precision event timer") so i googled that and another program was available for download so i downloaded and ran it and it's telling me my system has a "query performance frequency" of 3MHZ which is an indicator that HPET is not enabled and has to enabled in the bios(if it's listed in the bios in the first place) then an admin privilege command prompt command run to force select it as the "windows timer". So i'll try that and re-update here with my findings.

(YAY, finally making some sort of progress )

 

[The-Creamster]

So the audio glitchiness is definitely related to the "windows timer" but no amount of adjustments in the bios and OS(they both have to be changed to the same to be effective) in regards to the HPET has made any difference at all... So the "trial an error to find your culprit/s" atm may be the only choice that may yield results. I had kinda high hopes that i was on the right track but that doesn't seem to be the case now.

Edit: So a day or 2 later and the audio glitchiness has "all but disappeared"(well i can now play warframe{i did have to drop the graphics setting down from a medium-high custom to preset low to get my stable 60fps back, surprisingly it looks a little better there for my system } and YT is much better, but WoT is still a no go) which is a bonus atm; but as it's still occurring albeit much less frequently i'm unsure as to what is triggering it now given the HPET had to be disabled in the OS via CMD/device manager and bios.

Any ideas now??