Windows crashing and freezing constantly

[Snowkarl]

Hello, I've got a 5 year old computer that has been running fine and completely without hardware issues for all that time, but around 1-2 months ago I started getting a freeze whenever I booted.
Without fail, every day when I turn my computer, it will freeze at some point; at login, start up repair or sometimes even after 5 minutes of starting up and logging in without problems.

It rarely but sometimes crashes after I successfully reboot or restore to a previous state so I assume there is some sort of startup issue but I am a relative novice and I havent been able to find a solution.

Running w7 on a gtx 260, intel i7 acer aspire predator with 12gb ram, will upload more specs if needed.

Any help would be greatly appreciated...

 

[bailojustin]

Sounds to me like it might be your hard drive, is there a light on your psu that is light up? A 5 year old psu may be the culprit, also check the capacitors, little cylinders that are silver and have a x ontop them, do any of them look like they are bulging from the top. Other then that I would immediately try to get into your bios and see what your Temps look like. Maybe a fan is not working.

 

[bailojustin]

What is your ram exactly? And what hard drive are you using, you should open command prompt and run a chkdsk to see for any errors

 

[BrandonYoung]

Have you cleaned your fans of dust buildup? Overheating components can crash, like stated previously. If you have the ability, try to check the temperature of your CPU and GPU, and ensure all fans are still spinning.

PSU's can deteriorate over time, and can lead to instability. Especially low quality, cheap, or no-name PSUs.

HDD's can also grow old and begin to have bad sectors that create issues when read. Windows is pretty vocal when this happens in most cases however.

Even Windows can mess itself up from time to time (less common with Win7+) but if your Windows install is 5 years old as well, perhaps a simple re-install would cure your issues if you found the previous mentioned issues irrelevant.

Check those fans first!
Best of luck!

 

[Snowkarl]

Sounds to me like it might be your hard drive, is there a light on your psu that is light up? A 5 year old psu may be the culprit, also check the capacitors, little cylinders that are silver and have a x ontop them, do any of them look like they are bulging from the top. Other then that I would immediately try to get into your bios and see what your Temps look like. Maybe a fan is not working.

No lights on the PSU, no lights out of the ordinary anywhere. The cylinders (assuming I found the ones you meant, hehe) are all fine.
It's a challenge getting into the bios because of the crashes but my temps on the processor are min 51 max 63, I have seen it reach almost 70 on a bad day (I never overclock btw).

I did a check on my 2 non C hard drives and neither had any issues, I scheduled a check on my C for next boot.

Now I'm actually on the computer and I used CPUZ and this is my ram;

 

[Snowkarl]

Have you cleaned your fans of dust buildup? Overheating components can crash, like stated previously. If you have the ability, try to check the temperature of your CPU and GPU, and ensure all fans are still spinning.

PSU's can deteriorate over time, and can lead to instability. Especially low quality, cheap, or no-name PSUs.

HDD's can also grow old and begin to have bad sectors that create issues when read. Windows is pretty vocal when this happens in most cases however.

Even Windows can mess itself up from time to time (less common with Win7+) but if your Windows install is 5 years old as well, perhaps a simple re-install would cure your issues if you found the previous mentioned issues irrelevant.

Check those fans first!
Best of luck!

I considered doing an re-install but considering I can usually not boot properly I'm scared I won't be able to reinstall it at all, and I've had bad experiences trying to re install windows previously, as I don't have a windows CD and I've lost the CD that came with the computer, but if I was certain it was the issue I could buy a copy.

I didn't get any notification issues about the hard drives and it's not really making any sounds, but later when I reboot I will check the C drive.

Thanks for quick and helpful answers guys =)

 

[BrandonYoung]

Your temperatures seem on the high side especially for in the bios where the CPU isn't handling any real load, (nor is it handling any idle c states which can reduce the temperature). Have you opened the computer and checked for dust buildup in your CPU/GPU heatsink/fans? I de-dust my computer every 2 months. 5 years of dust buildup adds a blanket to your heatsinks and makes it extremely difficult to displace heat, a very likely cause of erratic instable behavior.

If you have access to a stable computer, and a 4gb+ USB drive, you could download a bootable linux ISO, and boot from the USB instead of into Windows. If this is stable, I would be willing to bet your issue is strictly a software issue (or at most, a storage related issue).

Best of luck!