Yeah I have checked the drives, it isn't anyone of the SSD's they are all fine. Yep and I ran "SFC /scannow" in CMD but nothing bad came up.
I removed the ASUS programs as suggested before, the PC seems to be running fine now. At this point I'm just waiting for it to crash so I can bring the motherboard into the computer store so they can give me a new one.
Well, shit. I was hoping this would be easy. What I would do is update bios, see if that runs fine update all the drivers for mobo, and if that doesn't work then I am not sure what the issue is. I personally would go the nub route and do a fresh install of windows. If you already didn't clear cmos the easiest way is to power off unplug pc, and pop out the battery and let it sit for a minute. That would reset bios to original settings.
Okay it crashed, I'll take the PC apart now and take the motherboard into the computer store, be back soon.
They will let me know if the motherboard is faulty or not, have to wait till tomorrow.
So anyway... I got a new motherboard, apparently the one I sent to the computer store was faulty, they said it had to do with the memory slot. So I got a new motherboard of the same type. So I went home today, installed the new motherboard, powered on the PC and after about a minute I got the BSoD, again...
This time it said, "The video memory manager has encountered an unexpected fatal error".
*sigh*
Okay so a progress report so far.
After realising that even with a new motherboard installed I still get the BSoD, I decided to go with another approach.
I unplugged all the drives, plugged in an old drive that was lying around, installed Windows on it and booted up the PC. I managed to get into the section that lets you decide on a PC name and all those other setup things. While in this installation part, I wasn't able to use the keyboard and mouse that was plugged into the PC, so I decided to try and restart the PC, this turned out to be a bad idea because now I just get the BSoD error when I boot up. Knowing this I dumped that drive and re-plugged all my main drives back in. I then tried to boot up the PC as normal, but now it doesn't boot at all. It just holds at the "Starting Windows" screen for a very long time.
What should I do now?
Launched startup repair... resulted in a BSoD.
Goodness, that is a lot of other BSOD's.
Have you tried a live Linux session with a USB or CD/DVD yet? I'm fairly certain this second motherboard is also bad, which does happen occasionally (especially with the same model, they would have the same failure rate), but a live session crash would be concrete proof toward that theory.
Yeah there are ALOT of different BSoD errors.
I will go and pick-up the new RAM today that I had ordered in as I wanted to give that a go first. Then I will put Linux on a USB and give that a go if the new RAM makes no difference.
Also this is the 3rd motherboard not 2nd :P doesn't seem like anything is going my way.
Have you tried booting with only one dimm installed? Might have to move it around to different slots til it boots if the mobo has known issues with dimm slots.
check all of the capacitors and resistors on the board to see if any of them have split/cracked/bulged/discolored/etc. These are very likely to give you unexpected errors that look like something else. I had an old Pentium 4 system which had 7 bulging capacitors which would blue-screen anytime there was a substantial draw on the PCI bus.
Yeah I've tried this, didn't entirely fix the problem.
An update so far:
I have received a new stick of RAM, I put it into my system this morning and I haven't had a PC crash since.
Does this mean the problem is solved? Probably not, but it is good news.
So maybe this means the stick of RAM I had was bad, I'll have to wait and see if the PC crashes. If it doesn't crash now, I will return the previous stick of RAM for warranty.
Also I performed numerous test on the RAM previously. I used Memtest86 (I let it run for a long time and all I got were passes) so I don't exactly know why Memtest86 didn't determine any problems in RAM, it really is quite strange. As well as this I also stress tested the RAM and it held up fine. I can only assume from this point that there was a faulty sector in the RAM, and every time it was accessed, it caused the system to crash. I may be wrong, I may be right, I don't know, but I am just guessing after all.
I'll post back here if it crashes again, and thank you to everyone who stuck around :D
I got a new motherboard under warranty, so it should be fine. Just to not take any chances I had a second look and everything seemed fine.