Random Hard Crashes / Computer Crashes After Sleep

[RyanTaylorrz]

So my computer has been running for at least 3 years strong now on the same hardware with no issues. Recently though, my computer has been hard-crashing at random points for seeming no reason. Not blue-screening or freezing temporarily, just locking up entirely until I force restart.

What would be my first step in looking up the cause of this issue? My computer's performance has not been lacking in any other areas, so any advice would be welcome. I do have two theories that might be related to these crashes, though:

1) I am running my headphones through a Line 6 UX1 interface (USB). Line 6 are notoriously awful, and on previous versions of Windows 10 their software/audio drivers were prone to crashing, meaning I had to switch to another audio device, but never caused a system-wide crash. I have noticed that the audio cutting out has stopped happening after a recent Windows 10 update, but no driver updates have been released for the UX1. Is it possible the audio cut-outs relating to driver issues are now causing hard crashes instead?

2) My second theory - and a much stranger one - is that my computer has always had an issue with going to sleep. If I turn my computer back on after it goes to sleep, it will hard crash at some point. I noticed a correlation between these two things years ago and have subsequently learnt to never put my computer in sleep mode. However, recently I've had applications pop back up from before I had turned off my computer (not just Chrome, but Paint or other applications that don't auto-restore your last session). Is my computer somehow going to sleep instead of shutting down properly even though I hit "Shut Down"? I'm not even sure how I'd go about finding out.

If it's relevant, here's some of my specs:

Processor: AMD FX-8350 Eight-Core 4.00GHz
RAM: 8GB
GPU: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970
Windows 10 Home 64-bit

If anyone has any suggestions for finding out the root cause of this issue, it would be greatly appreciated!

Cheers <3

 

[monttukani]

Hi, found this post while trying to solve my problem so had to sign-up. I'm having the same thing happening here for a few months now.

Specs:
CPU: AMD FX-8350
GPU: Asus AMD R9 Fury nano
MOBO: AsRock 990FX Extrme4
RAM 16GB G.Skill PC3-12800
Windows 10 Pro 64-bit

Symptoms are same. Randomly just picture and sound freezing, no error messages and have to force shutdown. Eventviewer logs show only wrong shutdows, no other errors.
Hangs are random and not related to high load, but the possibility of hanging seems to be higher soon after turning on the computer.

I've ran Memtest86+ for 24 hours, no errors.
Prime95 with the maximum power usage option got a hardware error on core 6 after 1h38min of usage but that didn't crash the computer an I closed the program after 3 hours.

Can u also run Prime95 to see if it gives a error message to you?

I have windows installed on a 128Gb SSD And a storage space pool for gaming and personal files with 500Gb 10k RPM HDD and a 500Gb SSD
Now I can hear the HDD randomly stop and spin-up few times in-a-row realy quickly and sometimes, but not allways computer hangs soon after that.
I've ran HDtune on all hard drives, no errors and SMART health report is good on all drives, a bit lower on windows drive. Maybe due to frequent forced shutdowns?
Once I've got a SMART error message on bios boot screen and once in windows, but they go away so quickly didn't see what was the message about.

My theories are:
1) We are having similiar symptoms with the same CPU and since Prime95 detected a error, a faulty CPU

2)A faulty PSU can't suply steady voltage witch causes CPU to hanging and HDD stops and spin-ups.
My PSU has had a water accident in the past from bad watercooler connector. I opened her up and cleaned and it's been working good since, but soaking in engine coolant newer does any good to electronics.

3) Failing HDD crashes the system, witch i doupt since there are no system files on that drive.

4) Corrupt windows. My current windows is a Vista home premium -> updated to 8 pro -> updated to 8.1 pro -> updated to 10 pro.
I've had problems with failing windows updates in win 10 but eventually they do get installed.
Assassin's greed game series won't run on my computer. Eventviewer shows a crashing system DLL, though i can't remember what dll it was. Ubisoft support adviced me to do a clean windows install but I haven't bothered to do that yet.

Can u relate to any of these conditions?

Would be nice to have others comment on this issue too. I will probably format windows soon to see if it helps, but I'm not willing to buy new CPU, PSU and HDD for just in case.
Thank you!