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Question

Windows randomly stops working properly

Sep 23, 2016 6:19PM PDT

Over the last 2 weeks I've had the following happen seemingly at random, first directly after waking from standby, but now it also happened twice out of nowhere while the PC was running. It's hard to fully investigate the issue while it's happening but there seem to be at least 3 things that are part of this:

1) Internet goes out on my PC, can't even reach the router anymore
2) No programs open anymore, I've tried a lot of different ones, including process explorer, nothing happens. This also causes the PC to not shut down anymore.
3) Some, not all, currently running programs won't close properly and/or crash while closing.

As far as I can tell so far anything that is currently running keeps running however e.g. I can still do stuff in Word etc. if it is open and also still save my work. There is no indication, no errors, it just seemingly randomly "happens", nothing of note in the event viewer, I haven't installed anything recently, everything is up to date and there are no other problems.

Specs (let me know if you need more):
Win 7 Pro x64
Intel i5 4590
16GB RAM

Discussion is locked

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Thanks
Sep 26, 2016 5:35AM PDT

I'll run with that for now, thanks for the help.

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Then read what Grif wrote.
Sep 30, 2016 9:21AM PDT

It's one of those legacy issues with Windows. Even Microsoft does not offer a way to fix a bum profile.

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The items were in German.
Sep 25, 2016 11:57AM PDT
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Did all of that
Sep 25, 2016 1:41PM PDT

Not sure what you mean by chat apps though, if you mean Discord, I actively use that so that's not going away. I guess only time will tell if one of these things actually fixed the issue, it hasn't happened again for 3 days now

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When I run out of road.
Sep 25, 2016 2:02PM PDT
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disabled flux for now
Sep 25, 2016 3:27PM PDT
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I forgot that. And is this an old PSU?
Sep 25, 2016 5:23PM PDT

W10 has it's own AV and while you do have Defender in 7, it's not an AV.

I think it's from 2013. As components, boards and PSU age the electrical noise increases and you'll get occasional glitches. Fixing these is hard on the client as you are putting new PSUs and boards.

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More.
Sep 25, 2016 5:50PM PDT

I'd treat this like an old PC now that I see old parts. I take it this is a good machine before. I'd do the million mile work. Canned air, pull all the heatsinks (CPU, GPU, other things) replace the compound and hope this helps.

All cables, boards and sticks get pulled and reinserted too.

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It's not old at all
Sep 26, 2016 6:17AM PDT

Built in October 15 with all new and quality components, I did put some research into the hardware of this PC. I think I'll go with Grif's suggestion for now and just see if it ever crashes again on the new user account, so far it hasn't.

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I may have guessed wrong there and did
Sep 26, 2016 7:52AM PDT

I was looking at the dates on what products I could find.

The issue of the "corrupt profile" is legendary.

There's another find by Grif which I've seen but rarely is that some odd issues are cleared up by running chkdsk with it's fix command.

Thanks for be patient with everyone here. I know it's a pain when a Windows PC is cranky. It can make the members cranky as well.

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Issue is NOT fixed
Sep 30, 2016 8:52AM PDT

I was almost ready to transfer all my files over when the problem popped up again.

Everything that is currently open appears to work just fine, I can scroll around webpages, modify and save documents etc, I can apparently also open new documents as long as I select from the "last used" list. However "My Computer" will not load anymore, not even the icons are shown (see: http://i.imgur.com/YpOoYuS.jpg) and eventually crash. Any programs that attempts to use the explorer to open a file will also just crash.

All the things I've tried so far in this thread, just to sum it up:
- checked for heat issues, no there are 100% definitely no heat issues
- deleted all temporary files
- checked autostart/services
- checked that AV is working properly and no conflicts are happening
- ran CHKDSK
- did the whole malware scanning badoozle with AntiMalware, SuperAntispyware etc.
- updated and reset BIOS
- checked RAM with memtest86 for 10 hours, all fine
- made a new account in Windows
- removed USB backup drive

I now also checked the Event Viewer for anything, but literally the only thing there is the boot & kernel power events after restarting, before that there's a load of nothing with only some normal service on/off etc. as usual.

Anything left to try or is it time to wipe Windows and start from scratch?

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Wipe The Drive And Reinstall Windows Is Probably Best
Sep 30, 2016 12:12PM PDT

There appear to be some damaged system files causing the issue and although you could try running the System File Checker (open a command prompt in admin mode and type: "SFC /scannow", then press the Enter key) which allows SFC to scan for damaged or missing system files and replaces them, I'm not sure it will take care of the issue.

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/instantanswers/bd832f07-1420-0c14-d2a5-0a5a24ba40be/using-system-file-checker-in-windows-10

Here, we've had to simply start from scratch to fix some of the glitches in Win10.

Hope this helps.

Grif

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You could try another file manager
Oct 4, 2016 10:43AM PDT