Random freezes, bluescreens, slow to react drives

[Drag0nL0rd]

OS: Windows 7 x64 Ultimate (legit and fully updated)
Motherboard: ASUSTeK M3N78 Pro
Bios Rev: 1402
CPU: AMD Phenom II X4 965
GPU: Nvidia GeForce 9800GT 1GB
RAM: Corsair CM2X2048-6400C5 DDR2-800 x4 (matching pairs)

This issue has been going on for some time now, my wife's computer. Randomly and without warning, it will throw bluescreens or hard freeze. I have ran all the mem tests, drive tests, error checks. I have reseated all hardware and peripherals, including the processor. I have checked the voltages, drivers, and heat. I have taken out all but one stick of ram and removed all hardware except the necessary items. I have replaced SATA cables, moved drives around. I can not for the life of me figure this one out....seems to be the only PC I've ever NOT been able to fix. I would post the BSOD's, but I am on a seperate computer. I can say that they usually refer to the nvsmu, which is also the latest version. Any suggestions or help would be greatly appreciated.

*EDIT: The drives are also slow to react, as per the title of the thread here. This happens sporadically and does not always dictate whether or not the system will freeze or crash.

 

[Cobalt006]

Have you tried rolling back your video cards driver. I had the same problem on my old computer with latest up date drivers from nivida.

 

[Tmagic650]

Yes, that 9800 is getting pretty old. Make sure that the card is fee of dust and that the fan is running smoothly. I had a 9600 that had dust caked below the fan and its heat-sink. I removed the heat-sink and cleaned out the dust. I cleaned off the old paste and reapplied a small amount of thermal paste between the GPU and the heat-sink. I reassembled the card, and it is working fine in a friends computer now. Do you have any minidumps to post? They will be located in C:\Windows/minidumps. The files have a .dmp extension

 

[Drag0nL0rd]

Thank you for the replies, I have tried rolling the drivers back, doesn't help. Also, there is no dust at all in the case. There is no dust around the video card, and I had actually removed it to see if that was the issue. I do not have any minidumps, because the pc won't stay running long enough to grab those. There is one "new" item to report, though. Randomly, the C: drive reports that there is a "bad block", for about 1 hour per day. Taking the case apart, jiggling the cables "fixes" this issue until the next day generally. I have replaced all cables, and even went as far as changing the drives out. Is it possible that a bad SATA header is causing these issues? As mentioned these bad blocks appear very randomly, and they don't seem to be there when a drive check is performed. I know that hard drives can very well cause freezes as well as bluescreens, but I have a suspicion that there is a more insidious issue causing this...just can't pinpoint it.

 

[Drag0nL0rd]

Ok, the problem seemed to be small amounts of bad sectors in 2 drives, one being the system drive. New installation of Windows on a clean new drive seems to have fixed the freezing issues. Never had issues like this before, where it works sometimes, and sometimes it doesn't. I think that the bad sectors were causing intermittent freezes and bluescreens because they were located in virtual memory space? This is the only thing that makes any sense, and considering all the troubleshooting I've done, the only thing that had any bearing. Thank you to the posters, and you most certainly can expect to see more of me in the forums.

 

[Cobalt006]

Glad to here you got it fixed

 

[Tmagic650]

The hard drives with the bad sectors are bad. These days any sector problems warrant a new drive. What model drives were they and how old?