Hiho! I've been battling with this problem for a month or two now. My computer works normally for some time, might even do fine all day, but at some seemingly random point freezes start to occur. Sometimes they start happening within an hour from turning the PC on. There are three kinds of freezing the PC does:
1. The screen/PC starts freezing for a few seconds every 30 seconds or so. This happens until I restart or if I stay on for long enough it evetually freezes forever forcing to hit the power button. It can freeze forever almost immediately too.
2. The graphics card crashes and then comes back (gives a little message from the taskbar). After this the computer will freeze every time a video starts playing (youtube, VLC, stream, any video) and every time I go fullscreen in a video or video game. This video/game freezing might've happened even without the graphics card crashing though, I think.
3. BSOD about once every other day. The BSOD messages differ. I have not written any of them down at the moment.
Restarting always stops the freezing but obviously doesn't fix the problem. I've tried all the things I know and found some new tricks (checked for viruses and malware many times, recovery, cleaned the dust, kept an eye on the CPU usage, disabled some features, etc.). I think the CPU usage is normal during the freezes. I don't think it's overheating because the freezing can occur right when I turn on the PC even on a cold morning? Well, there is one fan out of the many that isn't working, I can't tell why it isn't and when did it stop. As a last measure I did a clean install of Windows and am pretty sure it's nothing internal, but let me know if you think otherwise.
There is one thing I'm not knowledgeable about at all. Hardware. I've never shopped for hardware and opening the computer I don't recognize the parts. So I imagine it's the video card in its death throes? Makes sense to me, but still it's a bit of a shot in the dark for me and would like some confirmation before I go spending money. Can it be some other part? Processor?
I've been quite careful with software so there's two things that changed when the problems started that I can think of: the warmth of summer coming in and the PC was transferred once. Could it have taken a little blow during the transfer? How does hardware usually break?
Did I post this in the right place? I'm on Windows 7.
1. The screen/PC starts freezing for a few seconds every 30 seconds or so. This happens until I restart or if I stay on for long enough it evetually freezes forever forcing to hit the power button. It can freeze forever almost immediately too.
2. The graphics card crashes and then comes back (gives a little message from the taskbar). After this the computer will freeze every time a video starts playing (youtube, VLC, stream, any video) and every time I go fullscreen in a video or video game. This video/game freezing might've happened even without the graphics card crashing though, I think.
3. BSOD about once every other day. The BSOD messages differ. I have not written any of them down at the moment.
Restarting always stops the freezing but obviously doesn't fix the problem. I've tried all the things I know and found some new tricks (checked for viruses and malware many times, recovery, cleaned the dust, kept an eye on the CPU usage, disabled some features, etc.). I think the CPU usage is normal during the freezes. I don't think it's overheating because the freezing can occur right when I turn on the PC even on a cold morning? Well, there is one fan out of the many that isn't working, I can't tell why it isn't and when did it stop. As a last measure I did a clean install of Windows and am pretty sure it's nothing internal, but let me know if you think otherwise.
There is one thing I'm not knowledgeable about at all. Hardware. I've never shopped for hardware and opening the computer I don't recognize the parts. So I imagine it's the video card in its death throes? Makes sense to me, but still it's a bit of a shot in the dark for me and would like some confirmation before I go spending money. Can it be some other part? Processor?
I've been quite careful with software so there's two things that changed when the problems started that I can think of: the warmth of summer coming in and the PC was transferred once. Could it have taken a little blow during the transfer? How does hardware usually break?
Did I post this in the right place? I'm on Windows 7.