How To Check What Crashing My PC?

[Pawelk198604]

 

How do check what crasing my windows 10 PC computer (my desktop is actually quite old it had 8 years old) I wonder does it's any tool to run to test why my computer had crash very often? 

Recently I was so furious that smashed it front panel, so hard it felt from rest of PC 

[softweir]

Not, strictly speaking, a Science and Spaceflight topic. Moved to The Lounge.

[softweir]

*Moderator hat off*

OK, so there could be so many possibilities, it's hard to tell. (Apologies if I tell you anything you already know!)

First off and easiest is to open the PC up and extract all the dust. A 10-year-old PC may well have a huge amount of dust; this causes overheating, which causes crashes. When removing the dust do not use a vacuum cleaner!  Static can build up in the pipe of the vacuum cleaner, and this can arc to the PC components and cause damage. (I have killed a PC by using a vacuum cleaner.) Use canned "air" (actually a compressed propellant such as is used in spray-paint) to blow the dust out. Pay special attention to the CPU cooler. 

Second, make sure all cables are plugged in properly, and remove and re-insert the memory. Do the same for your memory card. Whenever the PC warms up and cools down, tiny expansions and contractions of plugs and sockets can make them get loose, and when they are loose enough you get intermittent connections, and these cause crashes.

If this doesn't fix things, then it gets harder. You will need a CPU-temperature tool, but you will have to search around for one that can operate on your old machine. If you do find one, use it to check your CPU temperature while playing games. You can also use MemTest, a free tool which repeatedly reads and writes your memory, checking for faulty memory locations. Also do a checkdisk (should be part of Windows) on your hard drive - an old drive like that may well have faults, or even be in the process of slowly dying.

If you tell us more about your PC (the makes and models of your motherboard, CPU and GPU etc) then we might be able to give more specific help on finding safe, free tools you can download.

Good luck!

[Pawelk198604]

9 minutes ago, softweir said:

*Moderator hat off*

OK, so there could be so many possibilities, it's hard to tell. (Apologies if I tell you anything you already know!)

First off and easiest is to open the PC up and extract all the dust. A 10-year-old PC may well have a huge amount of dust; this causes overheating, which causes crashes. When removing the dust do not use a vacuum cleaner!  Static can build up in the pipe of the vacuum cleaner, and this can arc to the PC components and cause damage. (I have killed a PC by using a vacuum cleaner.) Use canned "air" (actually a compressed propellant such as is used in spray-paint) to blow the dust out. Pay special attention to the CPU cooler. 

Second, make sure all cables are plugged in properly, and remove and re-insert the memory. Do the same for your memory card. Whenever the PC warms up and cools down, tiny expansions and contractions of plugs and sockets can make them get loose, and when they are loose enough you get intermittent connections, and these cause crashes.

If this doesn't fix things, then it gets harder. You will need a CPU-temperature tool, but you will have to search around for one that can operate on your old machine. If you do find one, use it to check your CPU temperature while playing games. You can also use MemTest, a free tool which repeatedly reads and writes your memory, checking for faulty memory locations. Also do a checkdisk (should be part of Windows) on your hard drive - an old drive like that may well have faults, or even be in the process of slowly dying.

If you tell us more about your PC (the makes and models of your motherboard, CPU and GPU etc) then we might be able to give more specific help on finding safe, free tools you can download.

Good luck!

Processor: Intel Core 2 Quad Q8400

Motherboard is Gigabyte EP45-DS3 

Graphic Crad: Gigabyte NVIDIA GeForce GTX 750 1024 MB GDDR5 (i originally had different card (Galaxy GeForce 9800)    and this is my 2nd GPU so far   

 

[YNM]

First of all :

- When did it crash ? Is it purely random or perhaps after (or during) a certain amount of time or after a certain action (running a program etc.) or noise (or other emmanation) or such ?

- How does it crash ? BSOD, loss of power or a bit of smoke and/or smell ?

Now, aside from these questions, some things :

- Hardware : I hope it's only "historically 10 years old" and not technically 10 years old, as it runs Win10. You want to try clean the thing up, tight the nut, bolts and cables. Also, check the PSU, try to compare it's output with theoretical peak power usage.

- Software : Being 10 years old, I suspect there might be some "residual data" within the hard drive. I'm not entirely sure if it can crash your computer but it's never bad to check such things. Unfortunately, Windows have a bad detection for partitions it didn't made when installed, so you might want a second OS, or bootable OS (likely some form of linux) from a flash drive.

Edited November 19, 2017 by YNM