System Wide Problems, Programs Acting Weird

Jamesua · July 18, 2020

So to start I'm running on older hardware, but I haven't had any problems I can directly blame on hardware. I finished putting this together at the end of this last December/early January as I got the last few parts I wanted.

I have a 1tb HDD and a 250gb SSD, with Windows is on the SSD. A few months ago the HDD died, it was older but I don't think age was the reason. I headed out and when I got back a few hours later my machine was awake, I have it set to sleep after an hour, and a bunch of icons were missing on my desktop. I checked file explorer and the HDD was missing. Restarted my computer and it just hung on the BIOS screens for a while before continuing and HDD was still missing. I opened the case and reseated the cables at both ends and no change, but I noticed a clicking coming from the drive so nothing more I can do. All I had on it at the time was games, so not a huge loss. I ordered a new drive and went on, but that's when the problems started.

On Chrome I was constantly getting "aw snap" errors. I tried troubleshooting it with no luck, nothing fixed it but it seemed to get less common, but I was getting the message sometimes opening a new page, or several minutes after it was fully loaded I'd be on another tab and see the old one change to the error. Then on discord I'd be typing a message and it would just vanish, then reappear right where I left off typing. This was happening constantly and again nothing was fixing it. Lastly I was watching a friend stream on steam and the entire broadcast page lost all elements and showed nothing on it.

The only thing that had changed was the loss of the HDD, and none of these programs should have had anything crucial on it. Nothing I had done seemed to change anything. Cleared caches, uninstalled, deleted all files, reinstalled, still the same problems. The only thing I didn't extensively try to troubleshoot was steam. At that point I had had enough and just reformatted. After the format no more problems, everything worked properly, which is what I would expect after a format.

That was back in... April? It was pretty early after getting my machine up and running. I've had no problems since reformatting... Until this morning. Got on Chrome, every single tab immediately gave me "aw snap". Tried troubleshooting it with less than stellar results. Same as before: sometimes it'll show up immediately, other times the page will be open for a while and then give the error. Was telling a friend on discord about it and suddenly it restarts, just like before. I keep checking to make sure the D drive is still on file explorer and it's just fine, browsing files, opening files, so at least I didn't lose another HDD, but that also means something else cause the problems before and it was probably just random chance that it was at the same time as my HDD dying, hopefully.

I could keep trying to troubleshoot individual programs in vain, but it's much more likely a single problem with the system since so many programs are acting up at once. At present I have restarted my computer, I told it to restart and left the room, and after coming back at least ten minutes later it was still restarting. My case has a reboot button, so I just used that, and start up took longer than usual. This is older hardware, only sata 2 with an SSD, but at this point I know how long it takes to restart. BIOS screens appeared to be normal, but Windows gave me a "getting things started" screen then sat loading my account for... well compared to the seconds it takes normally, quite a lot longer. Usually I see no message from Windows, and it spins on my account for 5-10 seconds, and now I haven't done much on it since restarting. Made sure the HDD is okay because paranoia. Haven't opened Chrome yet, and I haven't been chatting on discord much but haven't noticed it restarting.

I'm not as tech savvy as I used to be. The last computer I was "good" with was on XP. I could reformat again, but since this is the second time this has happened under different circumstances, it's likely to just happen again if I don't figure out the cause. At present the SSD and HDD are brand new, with new sata cables, the MoBo is a Gigabyte GA-78LMT-USB3, I don't remember what brands of ram I have but it's two different brands but both are 1600mhz DDR3 and 90% sure one brand is Kingston. I have an AMD FX 6300 and a GTX 1050.

Oh, another oddity, I guess it was around this time last year I stress tested the machine with only the Kingston RAM and the old HDD, no SSD but I believe everything else was the same, and found no issues at all. I don't think I did every test you often see in an LTT video, but everything worked then and even ran pretty cool but it is an older CPU. Also when I first set this up to use daily, after adding the SSD, additional ram, but still the old HDD, when it first started it didn't see one of the Kingston sticks, then it suddenly rebooted and it was there again. I don't know what that was about, but haven't noticed any kind of ram issue since, although I did reseat all four sticks after that.

And I don't know if it's related at all, I wasn't haven't any of these issues yesterday, but I was playing a game on steam and it was constantly crashing, sometimes at the start up screen, sometimes a few minutes into the game. I've played it a while since I got it during the sale and had no problems until yesterday. I've messaged the devs about it and it could be completely unrelated, but it's something that happened around the same time so I thought I'd at least mention it.

Jamesua · July 18, 2020

That's what I did. System files should not have been on it in the first place, and I formatted after the first drive died. The new drive is fine and the problem has appeared again.

To be clear, the first time the problems started was between the first HDD dying and receiving the new one, so only the SSD was in the system. The same problems that started today is with both the SSD and new HDD with no signs that either is having problems.

Edited July 18, 2020 by Jamesua
Clarification

Jamesua · July 19, 2020

I didn't see any forum guidelines about bumping threads, so I hope this is okay.

After the reboot yesterday, when I finally started using chrome and discord again I wasn't getting any more problems, even the game that was crashing the day before stopped crashing. I was talking to a friend about it, and they said they had similar, though not the same, problems before when letting their computer sleep all the time instead of shutting down.

I mentioned in my first post that when I set this machine up to be my daily driver one of the Kingston sticks of ram didn't show up, I know it was one of them because I shut down when it wasn't detected and took out the new sticks. I put all the new ram back in and let it boot hoping to get more information from Windows, but instead while windows was loading it just restarted and all the ram was there again. There's been no issues like that since. I've been wanting to replace them with the same sticks I got new, but just haven't had the money for it.

Google is less than helpful, but could these problems be a result of sleep mode with faulty ram? Or I guess just faulty ram in general. I suspected months ago when my old HDD died that the problems were from system files on that drive, even though they shouldn't be. Restarting did nothing and attempting to repair windows fixed nothing. It wasn't until I formatted that everything went back to normal.