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I am running Windows 8 and for the first few months everything was fine. Then I changed PC cases and all of a sudden, when I attempt to watch a YouTube video or try to do something (such as opening Windows Media Player and trying to play a song) before the start-up procedure has loaded everything and finished , the computer freezes. But its a freeze that freezes absolutely everything. The mouse won't work, you cannot Ctrl + Alt + Delete, nothing. However, sometimes about 10 seconds or less after it has frozen, it will continue to work again. Strange. . .

The weird thing is how inconsistent it is. Some times the computer will not freeze even if you start doing things immediately. Sometimes it will freeze even if you don't do anything.

So I am quite sure that that it is a hardware problem due to it starting after the change in case. But the question is what hardware is causing this? Graphics card drivers are up to date, so that rules out the only software I can think it would be. It is worth mentioning that I do get a message telling me that there might be a problem with the hard drive, but this is because it is old and it had a tendency to over heat, which was the reason for the case change. Another thing worth noting is that no message appears in the event log whatsoever pertaining to the moment it freezes, or before that. Just a message warning me about the hard reset, which is the only way to get the computer to work again.

Any suggestions as to what is causing the problem or how to fix it would be appreciated.

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    Run a SMART test to see if that shines anything on the hard drive. Try and test it with a different graphic card.
    – Dave
    Sep 9, 2013 at 14:34
  • Do many hours of RAM tests with Memtest86. Sep 9, 2013 at 14:45
  • I shall try that and report back
    – Sad Panda
    Sep 9, 2013 at 17:35
  • Ran a SMART test and turns out the HDD with the OS on has the "Bad" status claiming that there is only 1 current count of "Reallocated Sectors." Not entirely sure if this is what is causing the problem? The Windows 7 i tested earlier ran on a separate hard drive and the problem did not occur
    – Sad Panda
    Sep 9, 2013 at 17:55
  • You did appropriately ground yourself when touching and moving parts to the new case, right? you used the appropriate stand off quantity and in the correct places?
    – Carl B
    Sep 12, 2013 at 17:07

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I had similar problems: Freezes when playing video streams, or using media players, or playing games, or any kind of extended graphics card usage. In the end, the mainboard turned out to be defective. I only found that out after switching out every single component on it.

You could try switching back to the older case. May be it's a problem with the PSU (power instability for example). The amount of reasons for such freezes are virtually endless, but it does sound like this is indeed a hardware problem. You could check your memory with either the built in Windows tool or with Memtest86.

I know it's no fix, but if you have to use the system you could try a different operating system. Windows 7 with all fancy desktop bells and whistles deactivated proved to be more stable in my case than Windows 8 which seems to make more use of the graphics card and thus caused problems. If you have an onboard GPU and a dedicated card you could try switching between them to see if this makes things more stable.

You can also deactivate hardware acceleration in flash player and your media players. That helped me stabilize things somewhat. Ultimately, you will have to try to replace components to find the culprit, but I bet my hands that it's the mainboard. It's not an Asrock board by any chance, is it?

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  • It is not an Asrock, it is a standard Intel board, but i am not entirely sure which model. I just tried Windows 7 and it seems like the problem does not occur there. Does this mean that the problem has to do with Windows 8? If so, why didn't it do it before the case change? (There was no change in PSU by the way, the PSU was transferred across as well)
    – Sad Panda
    Sep 9, 2013 at 17:34

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