My PC''s been doing this for the past month or so. Randomly freezing or throwing up blue screens when I'm just word processing or browsing the internet, restarting when I'm watching videos or playing games. Thought it might be a problem with a recent Windows update or it was just the system needing a re-install. Didn't work.

So, next thing I thought was that maybe the RAM had gone bad because they were all "STOP" error messages but after running some tests on each stick they seemed fine.

Next thing I checked was the CPU temperature since AMD's chips are known to run very hot. With an idle machine, it was floating around the 65C mark which obviously wasn't good. So, I opened up the machine, took the CPU fan out and re-applied a new blob of silicon on where the die was. After that the idle temperature dropped to just under 60C. Problem solved!

It wasn't fun taking the PC apart and fitting the CPU fan back on but it had to be done. The fan was a pain to put on when I built the PC 4 years ago. Now I can continue working on those guides, reviews, translations, blog updates and what not without the interruptions.