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Help.
I have a custom computer I built three years ago. For the most part, it's been snappy and reliable with minimal crashing/errors. Occasionally, I'd get a weird freeze or BSOD, but they were very infrequent and the issues resolved themselves after a driver update or the like. I'm not the most tech savvy person in the world, but I'm fairly confident that my installation and upkeep has been primo for the machine -- drivers are up-to-date, temperatures are under control, and the machine only uses standard surface net stuff when connected to the internet, so the probability of getting viruses is very low. I still use a generic anti-virus software and run scans occasionally as a just-in-case.
One month ago, my computer started hard-freezing constantly. "Hard freeze" means that the machine didn't BSOD, but retained a static image of whatever I was doing on my monitor at the time of the freeze. Further, none of my peripheral devices could communicate with the PC (my keyboard wouldn't recognize that the caps lock key had been pressed, for example). The only way to reboot the computer was by cycling the power. Upon resetting the computer and checking event viewer, a kernel-power event was flagged, but a minidump file was never created, so things like WinDBG couldn't be used to assess the cause of the hard-freeze. There were no DPC_WATCHDOG errors flagged.
