I've never really looked at my Event Viewer so I don't know how tedious it would be, but you might be able to find the error there too. Not sure about that though.

Hmm. Thanks for the tip.

I'm mostly worried about using my USB at this point.

Backup your data, do a fresh reinstall.

A clean environment shouldn't fault unless there's a common bug that no one has fixed or you've some damaged electronic components that are fucking with the drivers.

Fresh reinstall of what... the drivers or Windows?

(November 15, 2016 at 6:23 pm)Aristocatt Wrote: I've never really looked at my Event Viewer so I don't know how tedious it would be, but you might be able to find the error there too.  Not sure about that though.

You only find something there, that could mean anything or nothing. Typical generic Microsoft error code pointing to a general problem, but not an inch closer to what actually is the cause.

I found out what's wrong more or less by trial and error. Considering everything that could be a at the root and closely monitoring it. That's how I learned that my system was actually overheating under certain circumstances. I would have never found out if I only followed the problem. In my case it was web videos, such as Youtube or Vimeo or ingame cinematics crashing the system. I spent quite a lot of time looking for some common dnominator there and overlooked the real cause.

(November 16, 2016 at 7:22 am)Alasdair Ham Wrote: Fresh reinstall of what... the drivers or Windows?

Windows.

Complexity is rather high these days in operating systems and they often lack a transactional nature that would allow complete restoration to an earlier state (even in the filesystem layer).

(November 16, 2016 at 2:10 pm)Moros Synackaon Wrote: Windows.

Complexity is rather high these days in operating systems and they often lack a transactional nature that would allow complete restoration to an earlier state (even in the filesystem layer).

I would wait doing that. First a check if it isn't a hardware issue is in order. Temperature, memory, power. These things are seldomly software related and the error codes thrown out by windows are less than reliable.

I think I'll back everything up before doing anything drastic. I have a two year warranty on this laptop so I could always back everything up, take it to the store, and then either it gets fixed or I get to replace my laptop with a new one--having backed it all up already.

Splitting apart most hardware issues from nontrivial software issues can be a significant time sink.

Unless you've got an obvious problem (overheating for example).

(November 16, 2016 at 2:34 pm)Moros Synackaon Wrote: Unless you've got an obvious problem (overheating for example).

Which isn't obvious unless you run the necessary checks. Same with memory. As I said, in my case it was videos that crashed the system. I spent weeks fretting over some software or driver conflict only to notice when running speed fan that my CPU kept overheating when under strain.