Computer Randomly Crashing, Blue Screens, etc.

[Scythiroth]

Trying to figure out what could be causing my computer to crash so much. Unfortunately, I do not have any known working parts to swap in and test which parts are faulty and the problem is really difficult to "force" it to happen anyways due to its random nature, so that may take too long.

Basically, my computer will just have bad days where it will blue screen or just completely lock up multiple times in a row. This happens at random times, even at times of low activity or no activity. When trying to restart, sometimes it won't even attempt to load at all or gives me random errors about a faulty hard drive (I don't think this can be true though, since I've tried multiple hard drives in my computer). Other times, it will run fine for days and have no issues at all.

The best I could think of is possibly a dying motherboard or power supply, but was curious if anyone else had any better input on this situation or has dealt with it before.

[Kohan]

You've said that you haven't any parts to swap for testing purposes, yet you've tried multiple HDDs. That made me wonder: do you have extra cables, and/or SATA or IDE ports?

What I'm getting at is this: perhaps the on-board port you're using for your HDD is bad. If you have multiple SATA or IDE ports—whichever your HDD uses, naturally—try connecting it to another one. Also, if you have multiple devices that use the same cables (e.g., a SATA DVD-R and a SATA HDD), swap those cables. Your motherboard may require changing the settings in your BIOS after you've made this swap, so be ready to do that if you boot up and it complains about being unable to find your boot HDD.

That's something you can do without having extra hardware for swapping purposes.

Of course, the other usual things you'd want to do are: update all of your drivers (including your chipset drivers for your motherboard), see if any Windows updates are pending, run general troubleshooting programs like Memtest+, and so on.

[Scythiroth]

Thank you for the advice, I'll try that after work tomorrow.

[Jintu]

Post your most recent minidump files(C:\Windows\Minidump.dmp) or download bluescreenview (http://www.nirsoft.net/utils/blue_screen_view.html). Can also try enabling driver verifier and let it run in the background and try and find the cause from its dump file.