Question Random restarts and BSoDs

[Maxinity]

After a few days of pain and annoyance I finally figured out why my computer constantly turned on and off, after thinking it was the HDD and the PSU and all the other nonsense I came to the conclusion that my drivers are causing my computer to restart. I tested this by booting up in safe mode and my pc seems fine. My question is: now that I know it's the drivers that are causing the problem, how do I fix it?

 

[PerplexedMatt]

Hi there,

Be careful here with your conclusions. Safe mode does not just disable auxiliary drivers, but also 3rd party programs. So any third party software (music, games, strange .bat files) on your computer could be messing with your computer. The safest way to address this would be to simply do a clean install of Windows. You can try keeping your personal files, but if one them is the culprit the problem will persist. If you don't have any files on there that are unique to that machine I would recommend doing a full hard drive wipe and reinstalling Windows. From there you can reinstall your apps individually to make sure they all work.

 

[NightHawkRMX]

First, I would run a malware scan using Malwarebytes and be sure to uninstall any unneeded programs from your computer.
What message does the BSOD show? This can help us to diagnose the issue, driver related or not.
A clean Windows install has a very high chance of solving this issue, but I would at least give the above steps a try before spendings a lot of time reinstalling windows and backing up files.

 

[mdd1963]

Naturally in safe mode, merely surfing, sitting at desktop, you might only be inducing a 20-50 watt load on the system...

If your system is hard powering off/resetting, check your temps, then, look hard at at least trying another known good PSU of a little more than sufficient wattage. (BY 'more than sufficient', I personally dislike running a 300 watt PSU for a system known to hit 250 watts peak load..., etc; I'd prefer to have double what I need, where a 300 watt peak-use system gets a quality 550-600 watt PSU, etc..

 

[Maxinity]

Naturally in safe mode, merely surfing, sitting at desktop, you might only be inducing a 20-50 watt load on the system...

If your system is hard powering off/resetting, check your temps, then, look hard at at least trying another known good PSU of a little more than sufficient wattage. (BY 'more than sufficient', I personally dislike running a 300 watt PSU for a system known to hit 250 watts peak load..., etc; I'd prefer to have double what I need, where a 300 watt peak-use system gets a quality 550-600 watt PSU, etc..

The PSU was replaced a week or 2 ago so it is 100% not the problem, it's a 650w PSU and I doubt my PC takes anything over 300w, I've been checking temps non stop and CPU stays at 30-35 at idle and not above 60 when running a game like CS

 

[Maxinity]

First, I would run a malware scan using Malwarebytes and be sure to uninstall any unneeded programs from your computer.
What message does the BSOD show? This can help us to diagnose the issue, driver related or not.
A clean Windows install has a very high chance of solving this issue, but I would at least give the above steps a try before spendings a lot of time reinstalling windows and backing up files.

I'll be sure to try and check for any programs that might be causing this problem, also I don't remember the previous error messages but the most recent one was something along the lines of KERNEL_SECURITY_CHECK_FAILURE. And about reinstalling windows, I've tried it 3 times and every time my PC restarts and reverts all the changes, would reinstalling windows in safe mode work?

 

[Maxinity]

Hi there,

Be careful here with your conclusions. Safe mode does not just disable auxiliary drivers, but also 3rd party programs. So any third party software (music, games, strange .bat files) on your computer could be messing with your computer. The safest way to address this would be to simply do a clean install of Windows. You can try keeping your personal files, but if one them is the culprit the problem will persist. If you don't have any files on there that are unique to that machine I would recommend doing a full hard drive wipe and reinstalling Windows. From there you can reinstall your apps individually to make sure they all work.

I'll reinstall windows and all my downloaded apps and see if that'll fix the problem, and if it doesn't I'll do a full wipe.

 

[Maxinity]

Yes I was right, it was the drivers. All I had to do was download DDU and reinstall them.