Black screen, audio stuttering

[Listrapid]

Every day my computer seems to crash. Roughly every 24 hours, it ends up at a black screen and the monitor stops receiving video. The audio also seems to stutter. If I am playing music at that exact moment, the audio will stutter and repeat. I originally thought it might be a problem with my installation of Vista, but I've been considering other possibilities as well. Any help would be much appreciated.

Specs: Nvidia GeForce 9800 GT, Intel Core 2 Duo E8400, Soundblaster Audigy Card, Windows Vista SP1, GIGABYTE GA-EP35-DS3L/S3L Mobo, Corsair 2GB DDR2 800

 

[gwailo247]

I'll get some questions out of the way.

Do you have any sort of heat monitoring going? If so, does it indicate any spikes before you crash?

Are you doing something specific, or will it also just crash while idle?

When it crashes, are you running audio?

There could be a lot of reasons. Heat is a good possibility, as is an audio driver crash.

If you don't have any heat monitoring going, you can install coretemp or something similar, and start logging, then next time your computer crashes, you can pull down the log and see if it indicates any thermal spikes when it crashes.

Other thing you can try is just disable your sound card and see if it still crashes. Audio stuttering can be indicative of driver issues.

 

[oxygen]

I've had the exact same problem for almost a week, and the same once every day but yesterday it happened 4 times! I downloaded core temp and started loging but now i cant get it to happend . will post results if i get it to do.

 

[gwailo247]

The last time I had to replace a motherboard I had a problem that it was shutting down all of a sudden, usually when I tried playing HD MKV files.

CoreTemp showed me that while the temperature gradually rose, right before shutting off there was a huge spike. I cleaned out all my coolers and fans, even directed a room fan at it to see if I could alleviate the heat problem, but no matter what I did it just spiked until shutdown.

 

[oxygen]

so finally got a crash with core temp logging. no spike really. my temp maxed at 51. dont know what to do for now but after christmas when im at my dads im going to turn it in and let them test it.

 

[gwailo247]

What kind of CPU and cooler do you have?