Downgraded older laptop to compatible OS, still getting bluescreens

[chuser52]

Hey.  About a month ago, I came to the chatrooms to report that I've been getting bluescreens every while on my Acer Aspire 7741G that's been upgraded to windows 8, I was then told to install BlueScreenViewer so I can generate a log of all recorded bluescreens, and gave them it, consisting of ~6 recorded bsods.  I was advised that the problem was there was errors all over the place due to incompatibility with windows 8.  (Basically, acer's driver website didn't have "windows 8 drivers" for my laptop model, so I had to download drivers from hardware-manufacturers websites, and stuck with the "windows 8 included" video card driver because the "windows 8 ati-hd5470 beta drivers" failed)

Anyway, just a week ago, I downgraded my laptop back to windows 7 with all working drivers, it's been working just fine.  But today, I got a "SYSTEM_THREAD_EXCEPTION_NOT_HANDLED" bluescreen out of nowhere.  (see html report attatched)

Now what?

[recovering disk space, attachment deleted by admin]

[DaveLembke]

Out of nowhere being nothing was running it was just system idle at desktop or was a program running or a bunch of stuff running? If anything was running other than the OS, please share details.

[chuser52]

Out of nowhere being nothing was running it was just system idle at desktop or was a program running or a bunch of stuff running? If anything was running other than the OS, please share details.

At the time, I think I only had a few web browser tabs open in the background, and at the time I was actually interacting with a HTML5 web app.  I didn't pay too much attention to what else I had open if anything else was.

[chuser52]

Update:   I ran a CHKDSK on my HDD, and it reports that it has made the following corrections:
Cleaning up 297 unused index entries from index $SII of file 0x9.
Cleaning up 297 unused index entries from index $SDH of file 0x9.
Cleaning up 297 unused security descriptors.
CHKDSK discovered free space marked as allocated in the
master file table (MFT) bitmap.
CHKDSK discovered free space marked as allocated in the volume bitmap.

Could of this been the source of the problem?  Should I then wait to see if I get another random bluescreen in a few days/weeks?

[patio]

Since you re-installed the OS the new BSOD has nothing to do with the old ones...
Chkdsk was a good move...let's wait and see what happens.

[chuser52]

Update:

Ah, nope.  Today (the day after I made this topic, and experienced the first BSOD), the machine froze in the middle of my youtube video watching spree (audio still played while its frozen), this was in the afternoon.  I took that as a fluke and simply hard-shutdown restarted the machine

Then in the evening (a few minutes before making this post), I got another BSOD.  This time, it was while I was in the middle of saving a FL Studio MIDI project (they take 2 minutes to save, and that's normal), and I was chatting on a website in the meantime.  Again, the HTML report of the blue screen has been attached.

[recovering disk space, attachment deleted by admin]

[chuser52]

Update:

I gave it 2 weeks.. And I'm still getting occasional  problems.  Here's the stability problems I've had within these two weeks:

-- My browser or flash player suddenly crashed out of nowhere, and when I restored it, streaming video (eg youtube) starts showing a green screen, and I needed to reboot to fix the "green screen".    This happened once in this time period  This is actually a problem I remember having several times with this laptop on older windows 7 installations and my previous windows 8 installation.  However for this to happen I would have very high RAM usage from having lots of tabs open (which I sometimes do) that may include things like youtube and html5, and this crash doesn't happen every time.

-- out of random, my screen would become black for 10 seconds then get "dwm.exe has stopped working".  This has happened twice in this time period.  These error details are posted below.  First incidence, I had intense CPU usage by 4 cpu-intense html5 website tabs I was interacting with at once.  Second incidence, I cannot remember what I was doing.

Code: [Select]

Problem signature:
  Problem Event Name: APPCRASH
  Application Name: Dwm.exe
  Application Version: 6.1.7600.16385
  Application Timestamp: 4a5bc541
  Fault Module Name: atidxx64.dll
  Fault Module Version: 8.17.10.286
  Fault Module Timestamp: 4c75d140
  Exception Code: c0000005
  Exception Offset: 000000000000fa23
  OS Version: 6.1.7601.2.1.0.256.48
  Locale ID: 1033
  Additional Information 1: 24fb
  Additional Information 2: 24fbbbfb1b5b4af4f34642a12720aede
  Additional Information 3: 18d7
  Additional Information 4: 18d76c3ac23197fdab9c558c11dfacee

Code: [Select]

  Problem signature:
  Problem Event Name: APPCRASH
  Application Name: Dwm.exe
  Application Version: 6.1.7600.16385
  Application Timestamp: 4a5bc541
  Fault Module Name: atidxx64.dll
  Fault Module Version: 8.17.10.286
  Fault Module Timestamp: 4c75d140
  Exception Code: c0000005
  Exception Offset: 000000000000fa23
  OS Version: 6.1.7601.2.1.0.256.48
  Locale ID: 1033
  Additional Information 1: 24fb
  Additional Information 2: 24fbbbfb1b5b4af4f34642a12720aede
  Additional Information 3: 18d7
  Additional Information 4: 18d76c3ac23197fdab9c558c11dfacee
What should be done about this?  Is there a chance that this is a GPU-hardware problem requiring me to take my laptop in to a local pc-support place?  I'm also hoping to get this resolved soon because I'm thinking of buying an 480-512gb ssd (Either Crucial MX100 or M500) for my laptop soon (and will be moved to my new laptop I will get in 1-2 months) and yes I will be re-installing windows again but I don't want this unreliability to persist when I got the SSD.

(and yes, the re-installation won't take as long as I got all my key program installers and drivers right on my USB hard drive)

[DaveLembke]

Replacing the systems HDD with a SSD might actually resolve the issue. I bought the Crucial M500 240GB SSD for $125 and its a great drive.

[chuser52]

Replacing the systems HDD with a SSD might actually resolve the issue. I bought the Crucial M500 240GB SSD for $125 and its a great drive.

Update:  So I got a SSD a week ago (512gb crucial mx100).  On June 26th I fresh installed windows 7 pro, ran windows update, installed all the drivers, installed all the programs and updated them, restored my documents and settings.  Then it's been working fine, and I really appreciate the faster data speeds from this ssd upgrade.  (Even though I noticed that ever since I've downgraded to windows 7, the task manager is showing that it has a higher priority using cpu threads 1 and 3 instead of all 4 threads more evenly.  But I'm assuming this could be normal windows 7 behavior with my cpu, and that windows 8 better manages multi-threading.)

Well last night (~1 week later), I decided to run a Malwarebytes scan on both my os-drive and external drive and leave it overnight, and when I came back I noticed that it has restarted due to a bluescreen, dunno if this is connected to the same issue or not:

[recovering disk space, attachment deleted by admin]

[patio]

The invisible type was a nice touch...

[chuser52]

The invisible type was a nice touch...

Oh sorry.. I meant to do that to say that the sentence was slightly-unimportant.  Fixed.