Not sure what this critical process died is!

msikora · February 1, 2014

So I've gotten several "critical process died" blue screens in the past day.

When it has happened I've usually been doing something related to graphics (1st time was with borderlands 2, 2nd time I was watching a youtube video). Upon restart of the initial blue screen I would lose access to my second hard drive (a WD blue 1TB). The hard drive still appears in BIOS, and is working ATM. The WD drive has my games and chrome installed on it.

Some troubleshooting I've done:

- Removed the graphics card: I did this and my system works fine for the several hours I kept it like this.

- Detect WD drive in BIOS: This works too, after i go to BIOS and make sure its there the error doesn't happen.

- made sure my drivers were up to date.

I'm going to try a new port on my MOBO for the WD drive. I'm backing up all my data just in case this is dealing with my HDD.

The 2nd time the blue screen appeared was about 6hrs after my computer had been on, I'm pretty sure the issue is not temperature related. It happened with my GPU installed. I know this is very general but if anyone has experienced this I'd appreciate the input!

Specs:

- Windows 8 (not 8.1)

- i7 4770K (no overclock)... stock cooler ATM

- MSI 760 2GB (no overclock)

- Samsung 840 120GB (OS drive)

- WD Blue 1TB (secondary drive)

- 16GB Corsair Vengeance RAM

msikora · February 1, 2014

Sorry for the bump, but I just found the error logs for my blue screens. They all involve different drivers. Any idea as to why they are all different?

Akolyte · February 1, 2014

First things first make sure your computer is clean as viruses and other malware can cause blue screens and other problems. So download Malwarebytes www.malwarebytes.org and run a quick scan, also make sure you have good antivirus software installed and its the latest version (Avast 2014, AVG 2014, Bitdefender free antvirus or Microsoft Security Essentials).

Now I would advise installing all the important updates and looking at updates you've installed just before the blue screens and find out if the update causes any issues.

Also, are your cores unparked? I found that I got blue screens from ndis.sys after unparking my CPU cores, so check that and if they are unparked restore the registry value to its default and turn power mode onto high performance so Windows can unpark cores when the cores are needed.

Run a memory test because who knows if your RAM is bad or not, so you can run the Windows built in memory tester on the hard core mode and leave it on for about 10-12 passes. Or you could do memtest86 for a more thorough test.

Check your temperatures, how hot does your CPU get during load? also how does the graphics card effect the CPU temperature, run a CPU and GPU stress test at the same time and leave it on for about 15-20 minutes, at that point your temps should have reached about as high as they will get.

And update your BIOS, its not hard and can really help. Even if it doesn't solve the BSOD, hey! you'll be getting the benefits anyways!

Update all of your sata, chipset and graphics drivers. AND check the graphics card update that you recently installing online to see if it causes a BSOD.

Hope this helps. Good luck!