computer crashing

hey everyone i built my fiancee a new computer is 2012 and it is a core i5 with 16 gigs and everything was good till recently, she got a virus and asked me to remove it and i tried but i couldnt so i backed up all her files and reinstalled windows on her machine, and after that is when the problems started, random bsods and now even with all hard drives disconnected it still happens even in the bios, does anyone know what the issue could be?

What are the contents of the errors? They usually give a good indication of what is failing.

thideras said:

What are the contents of the errors? They usually give a good indication of what is failing.

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not sure it crashes so much i dont have enough time to get in, it also crashes without any hard drives connected and while in the bios

You can do one of two things, disable auto restart on failure (spam F8 while the system is booting) or check the Windows Event Viewer to see a history of the error.

EDIT: Wait, what do you mean it "does it in the BIOS"? The system can't blue screen error in the BIOS.

This is how it looks when it crashes

Since you are in the BIOS, it could be the main board, processor, RAM, or graphics card. RAM and graphics card are the easiest to check. If you have on board video, switch to that. Pull sticks and rotate them through to see if one works.

thideras said:

Since you are in the BIOS, it could be the main board, processor, RAM, or graphics card. RAM and graphics card are the easiest to check. If you have on board video, switch to that. Pull sticks and rotate them through to see if one works.

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ok i fully disconnected the hdds and took out the video card and have it sitting at the bios screen and will wait and see if it happens again, i think i will also look into replacing the sata cables as they are a few years old just to be on the safe side

SATA cables are solid copper with no electronics in them. They shouldn't wear out.

If it is working after removing the graphics card, you probably have found the culprit. Make sure the connectors (to the monitor, to the board) are clean and try to put it back in.

thideras said:

SATA cables are solid copper with no electronics in them. They shouldn't wear out.

If it is working after removing the graphics card, you probably have found the culprit. Make sure the connectors (to the monitor, to the board) are clean and try to put it back in.

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well if it is, then i will just buy a new one, its a 6800 series ati card and wouldnt be to bad of an idea to replace it but i will check on it at 6:30pm CST and see what happened

just checked on it and it is frozen on the bios screen so the video card is not it

ok so i just checked on it again with just one stick of ram and it was fine, so i turn it off and put in another stick in the same colored slot for dual channel mode and hit the power button and it didnt work, so i tried the other 2 slots and they works and finally i put in 3 sticks of ram except for one in the slot giving me issues and it came right up, i am thinking that slot is bad so i am going to leave it running a while and see what happens

Yep, definitely sounds like the slot is bad.
Is there any reason she needs 16GB? You could just run 8GB in the good pair of slots if she doesn't use more than 8GB.

ATMINSIDE said:

Yep, definitely sounds like the slot is bad.
Is there any reason she needs 16GB? You could just run 8GB in the good pair of slots if she doesn't use more than 8GB.

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she does alot of 3d modeling and photoshop, also i went to hook everything back up including the hard drives and as soon as i hit the power button i got a blank screen nothing came up, so i unhooked all of them but the main windows drive and it started up fine, looks like a hdd is bad or going bad or there is a bad sata port aswell, may need to just replace the whole motherboard

Ok I am still getting crashes with nothing in event viewer, here is a pic of how it looked



Edit forgot all temps are good nothing is overheating

That looks like graphics card corruption. Drivers or the card is dying. Since it happened in the BIOS, my money is on a dead card.

thideras said:

That looks like graphics card corruption. Drivers or the card is dying. Since it happened in the BIOS, my money is on a dead card.

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Only problem is that one of the times it happend in the bios I took the card out and used onboard video, also I did get some blue screens recently about video card drives so I may need to reinstall them

If it happens on the added card and stock, then it is likely memory or the motherboard.

alright so its been 3 months since i last posted in this thread and i wanted to give an update, since that time the computer in question has been sitting unused and in a corner for 3 months until recently, we needed some files off the hard drives and so we drove up to her parents place to grab it and bring it back

well after bringing it back it sat in the backroom for a few more days til i got bored one and started messing with it, i took out all but one stick of ram and the video card and unhooked all of the hard drives except for the main one with the OS on it and turned it on, it came up and i left it on over night and checked it the next day to find out it had not froze up or anything,

so i installed resident evil revelations 2 and played it on the onboard video for half an hour and it ran like crap but the computer was still going, so i decided i would hook the video card back up but used the second pci-e slot and the second power connector, i turned the computer on and started resident evil again and this time i played for 2 whole hours with no issues at all

so i shut down the computer and installed a second stick of ram to see what would happen, this time i installed zombi for pc and played that and it worked great, so far i have played 6 different pc games and ran 3ds max and blender with no issues, no freezing nothing and right now i am not at home but as soon as i am i will be putting in the other 2 sticks of ram to bring it back up to 16gigs total

now i am not saying this is a bad thing that its working perfectly again but i am just wondering what you all think may have fixed it? only thing i havent dont yet is hook up the other two hard drives so far i have only hooked up the main and one with files on it.

I think you need to take the RAM and the video card and try them in another computer that is running normally. Try each RAM stick in each memory slot one at a time.

i had a similar issue a while back, and it actually ended up being a bad DVI cable.

trents said:

I think you need to take the RAM and the video card and try them in another computer that is running normally. Try each RAM stick in each memory slot one at a time.

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please read my reply above yours, the computer in question has been working perfectly for a little while now