mystery crashes when idle

[axeman]

I built a budget gaming machine that I sold to my co-worker. I didn't use it much before I sold it to him, but I didn't have any issues with it, other than putting a different video card and PSU in it when I sold it.

The system is: M4A88T-M, Phenom II X4 955 with a Arctic Cooling Freezer 7 Pro, Mushkin Enhanced Silverline Stiletto 16GB 4X4GB PC3-10666, and Powercolor Radeon HD 6850

Thing is, it randomly will BSOD and restart. Like in the middle of the night when no one is using it. Doing a dump of the crashes, it usually points to a problem with the display driver, but the crashes are not the same every time (it's been my experience a driver bug will give pretty much the same error details every time). In addition, he has got the message from the motherboard upon boot that "power surges were detected". Apparently this is an ASUS motherboard feature. Based upon that, I swapped out the power supply (cx430 v2) for a known good one. So no more "power surge" messages, and it seems more stable, but bsod yesterday just idling again. I don't think at this point it is a power issue, since it only happens at idle (although maybe the "power surge" error was the PSU). I'm going to get more details on the dump files, but I'm stumped. Maybe bad motherboard or video card?

[anotherengineer]

hmmm tricky

Could be UPS, surge/power bar, also if he has older wiring it could possibly lack a ground or be poorly grounded.

Check BIOS versions on the mobo also.

You can also (if you disable BSOD auto restart) you can take down the code that is on the blue screen to trouble shoot

[Arclight]

http://www.nirsoft.net/utils/blue_screen_view.html

Use that and post more info about the bsod. Might wanna try to take the machine to a place where you know the current is good (possibly use an UPS) for a few days. Test with another video card as well (that is known to be stable). It could take some time and best way to do it is to test individual things one by one.

[axeman]

I got him to use "WhoCrashed" which usually does a pretty good job of at least pinpointing driver problems from automatically analyzing the minidump files (it automatically runs them through windbg). BlueScreenView looks like a handy utility. In any case, I'm going to get my hands on the BSOD details asap. Good call on the grounding issue. He does have it connected to a very long audio cable, that's connected to a audio receiver. Anyone ever see a ground loop cause weird PC behavior? I'm more familiar with ground-loop induced 60hz hum in audio devices, but I'm assuming they could cause other issues.

[TwoEars]

Has he cleaned out the dust and put it in a well ventilated area?

Dust is the stability killer, it clogs up heat-sinks, causes connection errors etc etc.

Take the case outside and give it a proper blow job - lol.

I like to troubleshoot the basics first - dust, psu, ventilation, ram.

It's the equivalent of checking that there's fuel in the fuel tank and oil in the engine - seems simple and yet people run out of fuel and oil every day.