Question PC crashes when not playing games

[Devlinn]

Hi, making a post here because I've been racking my brain trying to find a solution to this problem. Basically, when my PC is NOT under load, it will consistently, after 20 minutes to a few hours, soft crash. It doesn't BSOD, but windows explorer becomes nearly completely unresponsive. Taskbar icons don't highlight when hovered over, most applications freeze, and I can only exit out of them. Trying to restart windows explorer causes a harder crash, where the mouse inevitably stops moving, but still doesn't BSOD. Task manager doesn't update either. Once, I was calling someone when this happened, and while their video feed froze, along with everything else, I could still see my camera moving with no lag, and they could still hear me through my mic. Sometimes I'll leave task manager open on one monitor so I can see if there's anything strange when it freezes, and occasionally it will show one or both of 0% disk usage and 100%/0% GPU usage. It produces no critical error in event viewer other than the one caused by me force turning off my PC, and reliability monitor doesn't show anything either. MSched showed nothing wrong with my RAM, and it doesn't seem like I've taken any performance hit to my GPU or CPU. I've tried defragging my SSD to find corrupted files, but that didn't turn anything up, either. I've scanned windows 10 for corruption multiple times, and nothing has come up. I thought it might be a sleep mode issue, but turning it off completely hasn't fixed it. I found one other thread with a similar issue to mine online, and apparently turning on XMP fixed it for them, but did nothing for me. I've tried running my RAM at a slightly lower frequency, turning performance options on and off, reinstalling drivers, and restoring windows to an earlier point. My temperatures are completely fine, idling between 32 and 41 for the CPU and GPU, respectively. Even running games that aren't quite as intensive don't prevent it from crashing, it seems like only more intensive ones do. Eventually I'll try doing a full reset, but I'm not optimistic it'll fix it. Thank you for any help.

Specs:
RTX 3060
Ryzen 5 5600x
32 GB RAM
1 TB SSD
MSI B450I Mobo

 

[Aman_James]

Remove your ssd, clean pins, clean ssd slot in board or replace cable if you are using sata ssd. Boot your PC, run CMD as admin, type sfc /scannow

 

[Bob.B]

Hi, making a post here because I've been racking my brain trying to find a solution to this problem. Basically, when my PC is NOT under load, it will consistently, after 20 minutes to a few hours, soft crash. It doesn't BSOD, but windows explorer becomes nearly completely unresponsive. Taskbar icons don't highlight when hovered over, most applications freeze, and I can only exit out of them. Trying to restart windows explorer causes a harder crash, where the mouse inevitably stops moving, but still doesn't BSOD. Task manager doesn't update either. Once, I was calling someone when this happened, and while their video feed froze, along with everything else, I could still see my camera moving with no lag, and they could still hear me through my mic. Sometimes I'll leave task manager open on one monitor so I can see if there's anything strange when it freezes, and occasionally it will show one or both of 0% disk usage and 100%/0% GPU usage. It produces no critical error in event viewer other than the one caused by me force turning off my PC, and reliability monitor doesn't show anything either. MSched showed nothing wrong with my RAM, and it doesn't seem like I've taken any performance hit to my GPU or CPU. I've tried defragging my SSD to find corrupted files, but that didn't turn anything up, either. I've scanned windows 10 for corruption multiple times, and nothing has come up. I thought it might be a sleep mode issue, but turning it off completely hasn't fixed it. I found one other thread with a similar issue to mine online, and apparently turning on XMP fixed it for them, but did nothing for me. I've tried running my RAM at a slightly lower frequency, turning performance options on and off, reinstalling drivers, and restoring windows to an earlier point. My temperatures are completely fine, idling between 32 and 41 for the CPU and GPU, respectively. Even running games that aren't quite as intensive don't prevent it from crashing, it seems like only more intensive ones do. Eventually I'll try doing a full reset, but I'm not optimistic it'll fix it. Thank you for any help.

Specs:
RTX 3060
Ryzen 5 5600x
32 GB RAM
1 TB SSD
MSI B450I Mobo

It's not a good idea to defrag a ssd.
Set optimize to run on a schedule and leave it alone.

If you boot to the desktop and open task manager does task manager freeze after some period of time?

 

[Devlinn]

It's not a good idea to defrag a ssd.
Set optimize to run on a schedule and leave it alone.

If you boot to the desktop and open task manager does task manager freeze after some period of time?

I know you're not supposed to, I was just curious if there was a corrupted file that was getting scanned in the background, although I'm sure there's a better way to figure that out. And yes, from what I can tell, the freezes happen mostly unconditionally.

 

[Bob.B]

I know you're not supposed to, I was just curious if there was a corrupted file that was getting scanned in the background, although I'm sure there's a better way to figure that out. And yes, from what I can tell, the freezes happen mostly unconditionally.

For checking the files perhaps use chkdsk or sfc.

Try a 'clean boot' then open task manager and let it sit......does it freeze?

 

[vl6njh]

Hi, making a post here because I've been racking my brain trying to find a solution to this problem. Basically, when my PC is NOT under load, it will consistently, after 20 minutes to a few hours, soft crash. It doesn't BSOD, but windows explorer becomes nearly completely unresponsive. Taskbar icons don't highlight when hovered over, most applications freeze, and I can only exit out of them. Trying to restart windows explorer causes a harder crash, where the mouse inevitably stops moving, but still doesn't BSOD. Task manager doesn't update either. Once, I was calling someone when this happened, and while their video feed froze, along with everything else, I could still see my camera moving with no lag, and they could still hear me through my mic. Sometimes I'll leave task manager open on one monitor so I can see if there's anything strange when it freezes, and occasionally it will show one or both of 0% disk usage and 100%/0% GPU usage. It produces no critical error in event viewer other than the one caused by me force turning off my PC, and reliability monitor doesn't show anything either. MSched showed nothing wrong with my RAM, and it doesn't seem like I've taken any performance hit to my GPU or CPU. I've tried defragging my SSD to find corrupted files, but that didn't turn anything up, either. I've scanned windows 10 for corruption multiple times, and nothing has come up. I thought it might be a sleep mode issue, but turning it off completely hasn't fixed it. I found one other thread with a similar issue to mine online, and apparently turning on XMP fixed it for them, but did nothing for me. I've tried running my RAM at a slightly lower frequency, turning performance options on and off, reinstalling drivers, and restoring windows to an earlier point. My temperatures are completely fine, idling between 32 and 41 for the CPU and GPU, respectively. Even running games that aren't quite as intensive don't prevent it from crashing, it seems like only more intensive ones do. Eventually I'll try doing a full reset, but I'm not optimistic it'll fix it. Thank you for any help.

Specs:
RTX 3060
Ryzen 5 5600x
32 GB RAM
1 TB SSD
MSI B450I Mobo

Hi,
I have a similar issue. My PC crashes with blue screen with hardware failure code.
So, I unplugged my video card, deleted the hard drive partition, reinstall windows 10.
Crashing occurred multiple times during windows installation.
Finally, got windows 10 version 21H1 installed. (No graphic card)
It kept on crashing with blue screen every 5 to 15 minutes . (for sure is hardware issue)
Then I plugged back the video card (Nvidia 1060), still crashing.
Installed a game for my kid. The game could run, my kid played for 4 hours with no crashing at all.
Closed the game, PC crashed immediately.
Now, I need to run a game in background to prevent the PC from crashing.
As long as a game is running in background, I can use Skype for Business, word, outlook , remote desktop at the same time.
Once I quit the game, it crashes immediately.
I have scanned the memory, no issue found.
I am going to take it to repair shop to check for the CPU and motherboard later.

I am so curious why my PC does not crash when a game is running but crashes when there is not too much loading.

 

[redgeeee]

Hi,
I have a similar issue. My PC crashes with blue screen with hardware failure code.
So, I unplugged my video card, deleted the hard drive partition, reinstall windows 10.
Crashing occurred multiple times during windows installation.
Finally, got windows 10 version 21H1 installed. (No graphic card)
It kept on crashing with blue screen every 5 to 15 minutes . (for sure is hardware issue)
Then I plugged back the video card (Nvidia 1060), still crashing.
Installed a game for my kid. The game could run, my kid played for 4 hours with no crashing at all.
Closed the game, PC crashed immediately.
Now, I need to run a game in background to prevent the PC from crashing.
As long as a game is running in background, I can use Skype for Business, word, outlook , remote desktop at the same time.
Once I quit the game, it crashes immediately.
I have scanned the memory, no issue found.
I am going to take it to repair shop to check for the CPU and motherboard later.

I am so curious why my PC does not crash when a game is running but crashes when there is not too much loading.

Hi,
I have a similar issue. My PC crashes with blue screen with hardware failure code.
So, I unplugged my video card, deleted the hard drive partition, reinstall windows 10.
Crashing occurred multiple times during windows installation.
Finally, got windows 10 version 21H1 installed. (No graphic card)
It kept on crashing with blue screen every 5 to 15 minutes . (for sure is hardware issue)
Then I plugged back the video card (Nvidia 1060), still crashing.
Installed a game for my kid. The game could run, my kid played for 4 hours with no crashing at all.
Closed the game, PC crashed immediately.
Now, I need to run a game in background to prevent the PC from crashing.
As long as a game is running in background, I can use Skype for Business, word, outlook , remote desktop at the same time.
Once I quit the game, it crashes immediately.
I have scanned the memory, no issue found.
I am going to take it to repair shop to check for the CPU and motherboard later.

I am so curious why my PC does not crash when a game is running but crashes when there is not too much loading.

Hi may I know if your PC is already fixed?, bcz I also have the same problem as yours.
I'm already frustrated looking for solution

 

[vl6njh]

Hi may I know if your PC is already fixed?, bcz I also have the same problem as yours.
I'm already frustrated looking for solution

No, It has not yet been fixed. I did not bother to take it to repair shop.
The blue screen crashing problem still exits but it is not crashing as frequent as every 15 min.
I now use this "problem" machine mainly for games only and cannot use it for any normal "work from home" activity due to its stability issue.
For games, it had crashed 3 times for the past 2 weeks.

I am sorry that my reply cannot help you to resolve your problem, but I am as frustrated as you are.