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Problem description: While I've heard of many systems crashing when attempting to play video, it seems that my system is only capable of running in a stable manner while it actually IS playing a video. I've tried running some other applications in the background in order to place a load on the CPU, RAM, etc with inconsistent results. Some other apps seem to lengthen the time between crashes, but video playing is the only surefire way I've found to prevent a blue screen of death or simply a freeze requiring a hard reboot. It would seem that idle hands are the devil's playthings in this case. It doesn't seem to make a difference whether the video is playing in YouTube, Media Player Classic, Windows Media Player, Netflix, etc. Video quality also seems to make no difference. Simply starting a video and then minimizing it doesn't seem to help. I'm not sure whether Windows 7 is 'smart' enough to realize that it doesn't have to do all the processing for video that it isn't actually displaying and therefore not giving the system enough to do. I seem to have better luck physically displaying the video in full screen on my second monitor as it almost never crashes in that situation. Attempted fixes: Starting in safe mode, adding and removing components one by one to test for hardware problems, made sure all drivers are up to date, simply always playing video on my second monitor lately. Recent changes: On a six year old system crashes began sporadically after about three years and have steadily gotten more frequent to the point that I'm doing hard reboots a few times per day lately. The only recent change is the addition of a second monitor (Dell U2415) which has actually seemed to help for the reasons above. Operating system: Windows 7 Pro System specs: basically the hardware thread recommended system circa fall 2010 ASUS P7-P55DE Pro Core i5 760 2.8 GHz Gelid Tranquillo CPU cooling Intel X25-M 34nm Gen 2 80GB SATA II 2.5inch SSD 2x 2TB Western Digital Green 1x 1TB Samsung HD103SJ 2x Kingston DDR3-1333 2GB Atech PRO-35U USB 2.0 Internal/External Card Reader 1x Dell U2415 1x Dell U2410 Antec P183 (Gunmetal Finish) Antec CP-850 850W Power Supply Location: USA I have Googled and read the FAQ: Yes
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Apr 7, 2016 20:48
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What are the BSODs saying exactly? You could try running http://www.memtest.org/ overnight to check for RAM errors. Also, use CDI to check HD health: http://crystalmark.info/download/index-e.html Based on the system age it's possible the PSU/motherboard is just failing.
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Apr 7, 2016 23:27
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I agree with a failing power supply or motherboard. More particularly, I think playing video makes the system more stable because it suppresses the spike from going to idle to high load, because the system can't fully idle. You could probably achieve the same stability improvement by disabling SpeedStep/EIST and Enhanced C-States in the BIOS, as this will prevent the system from saving power when idle. For actual fixes, make sure LoadLine Calibration/vDroop Compensation is disabled in the BIOS CPU settings, this prevents the CPU voltage from sagging under heavy load, but makes it much less stable under light or moderate load, and especially when dropping from high to low load. You might try updating to the latest BIOS and verifying these settings as well, but only if the system passes memtest. If this doesn't fix it, try a different power supply, but it may just be time for a new machine. On the plus side prices are dropping right now, as there's an oversupply of DDR4 memory even as more manufacturing capacity comes online, and Intel has managed to make enough CPUs to resolve their shortage and we are looking at an oversupply there too into summer.
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Apr 8, 2016 19:37
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