Windows 10 system corruption

[relytgerg]

I'm supporting this HP 750-514 which has been plagued over it's breif lifetime with numerous OS corruption problems. For a detailed history feel free to visit here and look at all the links. Long story short, analysis of memory dumps never indicate any specific HW or SW to focus on. After a blue screen, often the system can simply be restarted with no apparent problems. SFC and DISM tools have been successful at times in cleaning up corruption. At other times more extreme measures were necessary to get by problems and updates. Extensive research points at bad drivers, often the graphics driver, overheating problems, or flaky hardware. All drivers are up to date according to both HP support tools and Windows 10 device manager. All hardware passed all the extensive tests run from both the BIOS and HP Support Assistant. Multiple changes have been made including limiting startup processes and applications. Speedfan logging shows nothing approaching anything close to overheating on any device.

The system is less than 2 weeks out of warranty and never has been quite completely right, but we have struggled through keeping it afloat.

I'm now contemplating a clean install of either Windows 10 or Windows 8.1 (with associated license costs).

Any thoughts or suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

[Paul_Tikkanen · Accepted solution]

Hi:

The product specs for your PC indicate that it came with W10 Home 64 bit.

https://support.hp.com/us-en/document/c05379721

You can clean install W10 for free at any time by using the Media creation tool at the link below.

Create a USB (you will need an 8 GB USB flash drive) installation flash drive.

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/software-download/windows10

The software will work with the W10 product key in the BIOS and automatically activate once you are connected to the internet.

Then you can install the drivers and available software from your PC's support page.

I have had one issue in the past with a PC that would blue screen, or just shut down whenever it wanted.

I checked the motherboard and found one bad capacitor, and a friend of mine who is an electronics tech replaced it.

I thought for sure that was the problem, but nope, it still crashed and what not.

All the hardware tests showed no failures.

It had two 512 MB memory chips, and on a whim I removed one of them, and the PC ran just fine for days and days.

Then I removed that memory chip and installed the one I originally removed to test that one.

After a few minutes, the PC crashed.

All those issues because of some flaky memory module--even though the tests indicated the memory was fine.

So, I replaced all the memory modules (I decided to upgrade the PC to its max memory of 4 GB), and it worked fine for years and years.

I ended up donating the PC to Goodwill, still running like a champ.

[relytgerg]

Paul, You may have found the answer. Indeed I recall having a similar problem on a PC I bought at a garage sale and was fixing up. The memory was bad so I replaced it. The new memory turned out to be bad too, although it was just good enough to generate the same kind of random problems and took a long time to troubleshoot. 

I tried the same thing you did with the same results. Oddly, HP had a 4GB module and an 8GB module of the same make and speed in this computer. Can't run in dual mode, but should work. Of course it was the 8GB module that was bad. We'll run it on 4GB for awhile to see if errors return. If not, it may run fine on that amount of memory. If they need more speed we'll bump the memory up, this time with 2 matched modules.

I've been fooled before by this PC so we'll let it run for a week or more before I'll be sure that solution was it and mark your reply as the right answer.

Thanks.

[Paul_Tikkanen]

You're very welcome.

And if you think it is operating system related, you can always clean install W10.

I have clean installed W10 on all of my HP desktop and notebook PC's and my PC's seem to run much faster without the bundled software that PC's normally have when they come from the factory.