BSOD, black screen, random restarts... help!

So, I'm dealing with this constant headache:
- the screen goes black (and then everything freezes—like, totally unresponsive—or the whole thing just restarts)
- it mostly happens when I'm browsing the web (and I'm pretty much always online) — though, honestly, it also happens when the PC is just sitting there idling with nothing running
or if I'm just listening to music, for instance.
- this happened back when I was using my old hard drive and a different version of Windows—now I've switched to an SSD and Windows 7, and yeah, it's the exact same story.
- there’s no real pattern to it—I could spend five minutes on Facebook and it might reboot, or maybe half an hour—then again, some days it works perfectly fine.
- sometimes I get a blue screen, other times it just dies without warning.

I've been trying to troubleshoot this by digging through Google. So far, here's what I've tried:
- ran a memory test overnight—everything came back clean.
- cleaned out all the dust from the case—so overheating isn't the culprit (I'd go as far as to say the PC actually seems more stable after running for a while, even with the heat we're having lately!).
- tried swapping RAM sticks, testing them one at a time—same result.
- I thought maybe it was a browser issue—but it doesn't matter if I'm using Chrome, Mozilla, or Opera.
- I once opened a ton of tabs—maybe fifty or so, just random stuff—and everything worked flawlessly, no freezing
or restarts—basically, there are days when everything runs without a hitch.
- most of the advice I find online boils down to this: install certain updates, and if that fails, just revert to your old settings.
settings.

But, I mean... I feel like we should probably figure out what's actually causing this first. Like, why is it happening? If this was happening with my old drive and my old OS, and now it's happening again, then an update or a reinstall isn't going to fix it. We need to find the actual root cause (I guess I'm not quite "tech-savvy" enough to pinpoint it myself).

Screenshot of Event Viewer:

View on imgur

So, any ideas on what this could be?
Thanks!

It’s a different issue every single time—it’s not tied to just one specific part, so we can't exactly point fingers at the GPU and call it a day.

What's the build look like, and what kind of power supply are you running? (You'll probably have to pop the side panel off to check the PSU).

The power supply is a 550.

The setup is: an AMD Athlon processor, a Gigabyte MA78G-DS3H motherboard...

Looks like either a corrupted hard drive with busted OS files or your RAM is dying... seeing this many different errors at once is usually a bad sign. 😲

Try running a scan with WhoCrashed and let's see if it can actually make sense of this mess.

I don't know, smells like a dying power supply to me if it’s an older unit. Capacitors tend to lose their juice over time, which leads to this kind of nonsense (happened to me a few times, actually). Especially since you mentioned it gets more stable the longer it runs—that's a classic sign of a capacitor heating up and temporarily regaining some capacity. Maybe try swapping in a different PSU, or you could just crack this one open and see if any capacitors look bloated.

fadedorca66 said:I don't know, smells like a dying power supply to me if it’s an older unit. Capacitors tend to lose their juice over time, which leads to this kind of nonsense (happened to me a few times, actually). Especially since you mentioned it gets more stable the longer it runs—that's a classic sign of a capacitor heating up and temporarily regaining some capacity. Maybe try swapping in a different PSU, or you could just crack this one open and see if any capacitors look bloated.

Well, the PC is about 5 years old—though, I guess, nobody really knows the exact lifespan of a power supply, or how long one can run before things go sideways...

William Richardson12 said:Looks like either a corrupted hard drive with busted OS files or your RAM is dying... seeing this many different errors at once is usually a bad sign. 😲

Try running a scan with WhoCrashed and let's see if it can actually make sense of this mess.

Here:

Scan

Usually, at the very end of the right-hand column, ntoskrnl.exe pops up, which is:

ntoskrnl.exe (Short for Windows NT operating system kernel,) also known as kernel image, provides the kernel and executive layers of the Windows NT kernel space, and is responsible for various system services such as hardware virtualization, process and memory management, thus making it a fundamental part of the system. It contains the cache manager, the executive, the kernel, the security reference monitor, the memory manager, and the scheduler.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ntoskrnl.exe

And hal.dll

Hal.dll
The Windows hardware Abstraction Layer (HAL) is implemented in Hal.dll.[1] The HAL implements a number of functions that are implemented in different ways by different hardware platforms, which in this context, refers mostly to the chipset. Other components in the operating system can then call these functions in the same way on all platforms, without regard for the actual implementation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micros..._library_files

Like I said earlier, MemTest says the RAM is fine—and instead of an old hard drive, I'm using a newer SSD.

It’s happening every single day now.

Maybe try swapping in a different power supply?