Question Unkown causes of blue screens, black screens, stutters, crashes.

[morgen3737]

So I've had my pc for a while now, it certainly isn't state of the art, but can get some things done. Couple of months ago, I noticed stutters beggining to form follow by unexpected blue screens popping up at random times, even when it was idle. Fastforward yesterday, I tried opening my task manager to check on something and I was stunned instead, 870 background processes, is that normal? And they were all windows processes at that. So I booted it up today, it was fine at the start but then I tried opening task manager again and it went unresponsive and my whole desktop turned black. Now I don't know what it is with those background processes getting multiplied by the minute but it looks like they are thrashing my processor. I can't help but think that it's a hardware issue too. It's been 7-8 years since I had this cpu so it might as well be on the end of it's lifespan, considering also that it can get up to 92 °C or 197.6 °F while under small pressure. On the contrary, it could just be a virus or a corrupt system, hell it could even be a corrupt disk for all I know. I just need some advice on what to do to ensure that I get to find the issue, or even what steps to take considering the circumstances above, or just plain thoughts about the issue, anything is highly appreciated, Thank you in advance.

 

[geofelt]

You need to provide more detailed info on your system.
It is not unusual to see a very high number of processes.
What might have changed since all was well?
You might run malwarebytes free edition to check for malware.

 

[morgen3737]

Sorry, I forgot to mention that the anti virus software came up negative. I think I also changed my ram since it was fine and running. Maybe I'll attempt a format later and see if that does anything.