Blue Screen on Windows 7?

[Darakor]

Hello,

in the past few days I started getting Blue Screen error messages on my Windows 7 PC. The first time they showed up, they occurred while I was running Avira Anti Virus. The PC got the blue screen and had to be manually turned off to be rebooted. So I deleted Avira, installed a new version and it worked again for a few days.

Today, I fell asleep while my PC was still on and when I woke up, there was the blue screen message again. This is beginning to annoy me as I have no idea what is causing the error message. Is there any way to find out which piece of soft- or hardware is causing this? I have had the Computer for about 18 months and this is the first time it has been causing trouble.

At first I thought it was a virus or something, as it happened when I was running Avira, but I ran other virus programs later as well as Avira after it was reinstalled and nothing was found. Does anybody have any suggestions on what I can do here?

Any help is much appreciated...

Dara

 

[Artanix]

blue screens are *mostly* caused by hardware issues.

Read the info on it, sometimes it'll tell you the device or what caused it specifically. Or try to recreate it to figure out whats causing it.

Did you let windows run Check Disk (or whatever its called) prior to booting? might have some bad blocks on your HDD or something.

 

[Darakor]

I tried to run checkdisk on my boot drive (an SSD), but it froze in the middle. I got the blue screen when I ran defragmentation. After doing some more research on the internet that I did not do at 3am tonight, it seems the error message I receive crops up when chips on the SSD start dying.

I am told an SSD consists of a number of chips in 4GB packages so to speak and when one chipset dies, it can no longer be accessed. When someone tries, you receive a BSOD with the same error message I got.

Another indicator, when I bought the 120 GB SSD, Windows showed the size as 111GB. Now it only shows 107GB, which is what everybody complaining about the same problem also had. Looks like one chip died. Does anybody know whether there is any way to turn that broken chip off? Or do I have to completely replace the drive?

 

[Artanix]

from my experience, the hard drive is split into clusters of memory, with a chip managing them.

Unfortunately for you, repairing such a chip I don't think is possible. Let alone figuring out which one is the one causing the issues. How old is the SSD? if its a common problem and its less than 6 years old, you might be able to get something from the company that made it.

 

[Darakor]

The SSD is 18 months old, but it has a 3 year warranty. So I hope to get a replacement for no cost. Since the problem only ever showed up when I ran virus checks or scandisk / defrag, I hope the PC will keep running until June. As repairs are fairly slow at the shop I bought it from, I guess it is a good time to wait until just before my vacation in June.

They can tinker with it while I do not need the PC - I think I would die of boredom if I had to give the PC away for 1-2 weeks now. It's the center of every form of entertainment I use.

Thanks for the check disk advice, that helped narrow down the problem a lot.

 

[Darakor]

I guess I cannot wait that long after all. I got a blue screen 5 times today so far. And it is not even 10 am. I guess I will be offline for a while then.