I had the same problem about a year or more ago and it was caused by not setting the ahci in my bios and then making sure the win 7 loaded the correct ahci drivers. Here was my scenario, bought an ssd, did a clean install of windows 7 onto that drive. I forgot to make the proper changes in my bios. Random crashed to desktop in any program. Googled it and tried changing the bios settings and loading the ahci drivers after the fact but didn’t work. Crashed all the time. Finally I made the bios change, then did another clean install and the problem went away. I know clean installs are a big pain, but if this is the cause of your random CTD’s then this may be your only option. Possible solution: update ahci firmware on mother board; get most current ahci windows 10 drivers and if that doesn’t work then do steps 1 and 2 and then do a clean install. If you do a clean install always back up important data.
So, quick update if anyone is interested, I may have fixed the problem by swapping my memory.
This thread has been awesome, so I was trying a bunch of different suggestions with no luck. I went into my bios and fully disabled my onboard audio (was surprised I’d not done that before) checked all my other settings to make sure nothing was amiss, turned off my computer and checked all my connections to ensure everything was fully seated and tight. Did all that, and still, soft crashes back to desktop.
I’m lucky enough to live in Chicago near a Microcenter so, in a bit of desperation, I decided to bike over there and grab 16Gigs of DDR3-2400 ram. With games like Battlefront now asking for 16Gigs of ram in their recommended specs, I justified it as a nice little upgrade even if memory wasn’t my problem. However, it seems like memory actually may have been the problem. After swapping in the new sticks, I played multiple games with chrome open, watched some videos and generally did a bunch of things that often seemed to precipitate these annoying crashes on my machine. After about 6 hours of play last night, I’m still crash free.
Obviously, I don’t wanna jump to conclusions here. I’m going to need to go several more days without experiencing any crashes to really feel comfortable, but this looks promising. I’m curious, if ram was indeed the culprit, anyone know why it would have been causing soft crashes like that?
I hope that your luck holds and it just turns out to be the RAM. Is your old RAM something you can return to the mfr under warranty or something?
Well, I personally have never had bad RAM manifest with soft crashes like yours. Which I suppose is why most of my suggestions pointed in other directions.
However, I do know that bad RAM can manifest in a whole variety of different ways, so it wouldn’t exactly surprise me if that was your problem. Likely someone more knowledgeable than I could give a more technical reason as to why it did what it did.
I’m going to guess that since not ALL of your memory was bad, your software was using whatever good memory it could, and when your games, which require more memory, demanded the bad stuff, it kicked out to Windows, which was only using the good stuff.
That’s just a pure non-techie layman’s guess though. Hopefully someone will come along and correct me, because I’m curious too.
Hello! I know this thread is old but I have a working solution! I was having the same problem and it has to do with the memory but not the way you thing. While replacing my solid state drive due to corruption I had moved the ram position to 2 and 4 to see if that made a difference. After getting my PC up and running again I was having this issue thinking suddenly of the RAM I changed the slots and the problem was no more. When you got the new memory you probably put them in the right slots. Thanks!
Not a bad guess, motherboards do have specific slots they prefer ram to be in. Sometimes they are also placed a bit loose, big custom heatsinks gamers like to use don’t help either because the ram ends up hard to reach.