PC crashes

[ppppenguin]

My new(ish) W7 PC tends to crash about 10 minutes after I turn it on in the morning. Completely stuffed, no keyboard, no mouse, no nothing. Display is frozen. Sound has made a nasty continuous noise once when it crashed in the middle of playing a BBC news report. Switch off, switch on. All comes good for the rest of the day.

Any ideas on diagnosis?

[Nick]

CPU fan failure = overheating?

PSU fan failure = overheating?

Dead slug crawled in through the back and exploded = messy.

The time delay smacks of a thermal-related issue. Check for jammed fans (obstructed by cables etc.) or failing PSU.

[ppppenguin]

All nice, tidy and clean inside. As far as I can tell all the fans are working, though if one had failed it would more likely cause a crash when the PC had been on for hours and was doing compute intensive stuff.

Are there any diagnostic tools that will heavily exercise the hardware and report back?

[Nick]

If the CPU fan fails, you'd crash in minutes. I've seen situations where when the case closes, the power harness from the PSU jams the fan.

Does it still crash with the case open?

Unlikely to be a timing error, but you can use a bootable version of memtest86+ to thrash your memory - this is written by an ex-Intel team - http://www.memtest.org/.

It's what we use to test suspect servers...

Or, you can use Windows' own:

• Click Start, type mdsched.exe in the Search box, and then press Enter & follow the instructions.
  

May also be a driver issue - are you all fully Windows Updated and drivers patched?

[ppppenguin]

I'll leave the case open for a few days and see what happens.

Thanks for the recommendations of memtest and mdsched. I'll give them a try, possibly overnight.

Windows is fully up to date. I need to update the Radeon graphics driver.

Just to be annoying the monitor where I replaced all the PSU electrolyitcs is up to its old tricks again. Going blank for second or 2 every now and then for no good reason. I know it's not the cable (I have 2 monitors and have used it both positions). It claims to have no input before going into standby.

[Nick]

Have you swapped the monitors over to isolate the problem? I've had video cards fail on one channel before... Even had video cables die too, odd as that may seem...

We have a lot more more video card than monitor failures. Don;t use Radeon any more - I use Nvidia K620-series boards - only the ones with fans on the heat sinks...

[ppppenguin]

The monitor problem was present on another PC. I've also swapped the monitors. The problem is definitely the monitor.

[ppppenguin]

Getting a number of errors on the system log. Is this normal? The critical error this morning at 0620 was the crash.

I just ran mdsched.exe. Where do I see the results?

PS: Found the results: No errors

[Nick]

Not healthy at all.

Lot of disk errors. Not nice.

How old is the disk? Is this a shop-bought system or one you built yourself?

[unrealdave]

Check you have the latest version of the bios.