A hearty 'frick you' to my ever-crashing computer

WHY WHY WHY WHY WHY MUST YOU CRASH ALL THE TIME?!?!?!?!?
It’s supposed to be a good computer not one of those cruddy plan obsolescense ones!!! My father built it himself!!! It’s not supposed to die every time I click funny!!!

!!! !!!

Idiot MS Error Report helpfully informs me after the fact that I had a “blue screen error.” ALL RIGHT IT’S A BLUE SCREEN OF DEATH HOW IS THAT SUPPOSED HELP ME???

!!!

&^% Miscrosoft, #%^ computers in general, ^%#@ the guy who discovered electricty, and while I’m at it, %$^& the whole world. Including kittens and puppies.

PS. Don’t tell me to get a Mac. Microsoft messes my blood pressure when it crashes; Apple causes steam to come out of my ears just by looking at the screen display.

well…

even though it sounds pithy, it’s a fair point. I’m not questioning your father’s competence (I build my own too) but the fact of the matter is that the bigger manufacturers spend time testing the components together to make sure there are no weird incompatibilities, say between the memory DIMMs and the motherboard. When you self-build, you’re taking on the responsibility to make sure all of the components you selected work together.

a blue screen of death is almost never due to an actual problem with Windows. It’s nearly always either defective/incompatible memory (the most common) or a bug in a hardware driver.

More info, please.

The most broken 'puter I ever had was crashing over and over again halfway through restoring windows.

Until I unstuck the fan on top of it’s cpu and heatsink.

More info, please.

The most broken 'puter I ever had was crashing over and over again halfway through restoring windows.

Until I unstuck the fan on top of it’s cpu and heatsink.

My laptop has crashed approximately five times in the last 12 months. We’re talking full, system restore, losing all files saved, memory exploding crashed. In between each time it was crashing with great regularity - graphical crashes in games, random issues with the NTFS file system, random BSODs.

Replaced the HD, seems to be solid as a rock now. Obsessive clicking on event viewer shows none of those little twitches it was having before an inevitable crash came along.

Which is to say - planned obsolescence is a very small part of the computer market. The problem is that electronics with very low tolerances to certain things are jammed into boxes, overheated, overcrowded, dropped a few times (whoops!), covered in dust and cat hair… They will break down. And sometimes the parts themselves are just a bit crap.

When it goes to blue screen - there should be error numbers and information on the screen. Write those numbers and info down and then google them or post them back here.

My dad is pretty good with electronics. I mean, he’s an engineering major, he teaches robotics, he’s pretty much been into computers since they invented computers.

Also I’m not in the mood to be reasonable tonight I’m in the mood to scream death threats at my monitor tonight.

I dunno more info. It crashes on a regular basis! Often when I’m in the middle of something!

It doesn’t literally go blue screen. That’s just what the error report thingie says. The error report thingie is a friggin liar. It goes black screen, then it starts up again.

I just had a PTSD-style flashback to my tech support days.

Your dad built a defective box. If Dell had built it instead this would be a rant against Dell. Instead it’s a rant against everyone but the person responsible.

It’s a rant against everyone including the puppies and the kittens.

Look, puppies and kittens are great, but you can’t expect them to do a good job building a PC for you. I bet if you open up the case it’s just totally clogged with fur.

THAT. Not a “Blue Screen”, right?

yeah, but there’s literally nothing like that involved in building a PC anymore. You buy a box of parts, put them together, and hope everything works ok.

it’s the same thing; Since Windows XP the default behavior is for the system to restart after a BSOD, in many cases so quickly that you don’t even see the blue screen. The “bugcheck” event will be logged in Event Viewer and you’ll get the notification that the “System has recovered from a serious error” when you log back in.

Yeah. It’s very possible to make a pretty minor mistake that could kill a PC. For example, if you carelessly get 1.65v RAM on a LGA1155 CPU. Might have that one-in-a-thousand cpu that can’t handle the above spec voltage and dies.

I’m offering up screams with you. Sometimes you just need to scream and kick things. Wear shoes while kicking the wall.

I didn’t know that. Cool.

I had built a computer with the same sorts of issues. I am pretty sure it was the memory. I hate how frustrating it is, but you should try to get those numbers down from the blue screen. Google, your Dad, and a lot of people here can quickly help you to figure out the problem. Or at least give you a way to figure out the problem.

In case it helps, I fucking hate your computer too.

I’m not even sure exactly how this works, but my graphics card has been more stable since my HD was replaced.

Not complaining. Just a comment on the vagaries of computer components.

My old computer that has gone to The Great Bitbucket In The Sky did that (actually, usually it would refuse to do anything for a while after the black screen, but sometimes it would black screen and immediately restart). In my case I am assuming the power supply is FUBAR (could be wrong, but I bought a new computer anyway and I am not about to fight with the old one any more to be certain). Definitely just black screen without an intervening blue one in my case. So, maybe try replacing the power supply?

I had a similar problem recently. My computer would randomly reboot. I replaced the power supply (with a slightly more powerful one) and now it works great.