The Problem
My Acer Veriton X4610G freezes up suddenly and unexpectedly from time to time. I'm running integrated graphics (HD2000) on the Intel Core i5-2320 CPU. Sometimes I see a flash of distortion in the bottom of the screen (like when you put a VHS tape on pause) for a brief moment. Then the computer is completely frozen-up. The information on the screen is still visible. The mouse nor keyboard respond (not even the cap-locks light can be activated). The only thing I can do, is press the power button for a long while to abruptly power off the system
My hypothesis / expectation is some kind of hardware failure
- A. Maybe the power supply is deteriorating?
- B. Maybe the on-board Intel graphics HD 2000 is failing?
- C. Maybe the motherboard is failing?
- D. Maybe RAM is failing?
- E. Corrupted Windows
What I managed to investigate and exclude
The random freeze-ups also happen when running Linux. So that makes corrupted driver issues under Windows less likely. This excludes expectation E.
When I inspect the system logs with Windows 10's Reliability Monitor, then I see no consistent pattern. Log entries I can see fall in the categories:
- Shut down unexpectedly
- Windows Stopped working - exception code 0xc0000374: indicates a heap corruption
- The computer has rebooted from a bugcheck - The bugcheck was: 0x0000003b: corrupted RAM can give rise to blue screen 0x0000003b stop errors
I did rigorous memory testing with Passmark MemTest86. The memory tests which took over 4 hours turned out well. No problems were found. This excludes expectation D.
Sometimes I get a blue screen (BSOD). I did get one Windows system dump from those and saved it.
I wanted and started monitoring and logging temperatures and voltages with SpeedFan (a freely available tool). But it only shows temperatures. I can't get it to monitor voltages. In the BIOS voltages are displayed. The temperatures look fine there, but I can't get real-time measurements on voltages in SpeedFan. Only the Temp 2 sensor (Chip: IT8728F, ISA bus address $A30) shows 50 C, which is the higerst value of all sensors and doesn't alarm me.
What I'd like to do next and need advise on:
Voltage monitoring
I'd like to add real-time voltage monitoring and logging in order to spot weird voltages. Who knows how to do that on the X4610G? (or enable SpeedFan Voltage monitoring for the X4610G).
Furthermore I'd like to analyze the Windows dump file. How can I do that best? and will that be helpful?
Any advise on how to trouble shoot and pinpoint this problem is appreciated, especially the on-board Intel graphics HD 2000 (B) and the motherboard (C).
How can I pinpoint the cause of these random freezes?
[Edited the thread to add model name to the title and issue detail]