Retrace your steps

Recently my relative started complaining about video freezes in games and I started investigating. After a short investigation, I found that Windows created a dump file after each of such cases and after checking them I found that the crash in 90% of cases was in the video driver. Moreover, 10% could also be related to the video driver.

My relative confirmed that recently they updated the video driver and my natural guess was that it is a bug in the video driver. I have shown my relative how to install the previous video driver and I thought that problem is fixed.

But the problem returned in a few hours. We tried one version of the video driver before that and then a version that is a few months old when my relative confirmed that everything was rock solid. But unfortunately for us, the problem continues to persist and dump files still point to the video driver. Clearly that any bug would not stay for that long and my relative stated that one of the previous drivers was around that time.

The videocard was around a year old and usually they last for quite some time. The other components are around 3 years old except the power supply which is around 11-12 years old. But it is a very good quality power supply that I bought for $150 in 2011 and I think it still should work fine.

So in the beginning, I had 2 suspects: the video card and the power supply. But I wasn’t sure about the power supply because it was hard to imagine that all problems were only related to the video card. I would imagine that occasionally some other components would be affected. But I cannot rule the power supply out because technically there could be different rails in the power supply: one for CPU and everything else, and another one for video card, and technically that one could go bad.

We monitored the power supply with Hardware Info for quite some time and we didn’t see any anomalies. All voltages were within limits and nothing suspicious at all. Temperatures were normal too for the CPU and the video card.

It was hard to blame the video card too because it was new, it was used in a well-ventilated case without any extreme temperatures. Also, the video card is not particularly power-hungry so there should be no reason why the video card would fail. But there is always a place for a bit of bad luck.

Anyway, while we were discussing what else can we do, my relative reminded me that we took the video card from the motherboard and cleaned it around a week before the problems start. And I completely forgot about it. Moreover, my relative didn’t realize what happened to the computer at the beginning and thought it is just a bug in the game.

So most likely the video card wasn’t fully seated in the PCI Express slot, or perhaps the power cable wasn’t connected properly. Or perhaps it was connected at the begging but the connector wasn’t properly locked in place, and with time vibrations pushed it out a little bit. Another possibility is that the contacts were oxidized and when I plugged it back, maybe it was touching the contacts on the video card differently.

After that, I took the video card out, re-seated it, unplugged the power cable, and plugged back the power cable a few times to ensure that the cable was properly seated and to break any oxidation. After that problem was fixed and the game and other applications work properly.

And that reminds me of another case a long time ago. I decided to change some Windows setting. It was Friday and by Monday I completely forgot about that setting and on Tuesday I started having weird issues and problems. It took me quite a bit of time to remember what I did and find out how to return it back. That happened before the internet was a thing and it didn’t make it easier.

And after that, I introduced a new rule: any changes I do, I will put changes in a journal on my computer. It is just a text file where I add the date, what I changed, and how to revert it back. And it helped me quite a lot. Much more often than I anticipated.

But after that case with my relative I introduce a small addition to that rule: I will add to my journal any maintenance I did for my computer. It is really easy to forget especially if something happened in a few days or even weeks and it can give me an idea of what to check when something strange happens.

And if my relative would not remember maintenance, I would probably buy a new power supply or a new video card. And there is a high chance that any of that would fix the problem because I will re-connect the power cable and I would probably push the video card to its socket too. As a result, it would be a waste of money.

I hope it will help someone.