PC Woes
stargrace I’ve been saying I’ll get back into streaming for a while now. Set up at our new place, our schedule is a bit flexible since my husband does shift work, but I wanted to eek out some time here and there to get a stream in. Unfortunately, the issues I had with my PC kept expanding and it seemed like no matter what I would do, I couldn’t fix them or narrow down the problem.
It started out simple enough. I had the movers take my computer tower, but they didn’t insulate it or even wrap it up. They just tossed it into a box along with a bunch of my son’s toys. The travel was in -40C weather for two weeks, and I completely forgot that this could have an adverse effect on my water cooling system.
When I started up my computer after the move I was experiencing some serious lag. I would lag while gaming, I would lag while typing. I ran memory tests and disk drive tests but everything came back normal. This marked the beginning. I upgraded the CPU, the motherboard, and the RAM. I reinstalled windows. My lag was cured and I could game again but then other oddities started to happen.
Once every two days or so I would have a BSOD, and a dump file would fail to be created to give me more details. I’d have random video game crashes that referenced memory, and a few other variety of crashes. I was getting a message about my CPU fan and PC temperatures but I didn’t understand why because what I could physically see was all fans working. I installed a program to monitor the temperature and found that all 6 cores would boot up at 85C and then if I did anything at all, they’d jump to 100C and stay there. Well, that wasn’t good.
I was also experiencing an odd bug of white noise when my mic was on mute. I had no idea where it was coming from.
So I got a new fan and heat sink, then my husband bought me a new fan for my case with fancy LED lights. All of that was installed and the temperature warnings stopped – but the BSOD did not. The white noise when my mic was muted also went away.
When I opened the case to install the case fan, I was unable to get windows running. It kept telling me that a component couldn’t be reached and that I should hit escape or F8. Neither of those did anything. I popped in my USB stick that has a media file of windows 10 and tried to repair, that wouldn’t work.
I decided that my SSD was probably the culprit, and I removed the SSD. I tried to install Windows to one of my two remaining drives, but the USB version of windows was also corrupted (even though it was brand new and I had just used it the previous week) – so I had to make a new media file. THEN I installed windows.
That was two days ago, and so far I have had zero issues. Of course right now I’m keeping things incredibly bare bones, I have discord, WoW, and that’s about it. I wanted to make sure the computer ran well for a few days before I started installing other things like xsplit.
This whole ordeal has taught me a few things, like next time we move I’ll be taking my computer with me. Thankfully our items are covered by our movers and I can get reimbursed, but spending a month trying to troubleshoot these issues has been a real pain. I’ve had multiple good friends helping me out, offering advice, providing tech support and showing me what tests to run – for that I am grateful. I’m not a very tech savvy person but I’m a quick learner and I like to think I can at least handle the basics of my own PC.
Now that it appears things are finally solved – lets get to streaming!