Hi. I use 64-bit Windows 10 Home 21H2, on a Predator PH315-54 laptop with an 11th Gen Intel i7 processor and 16 GB of RAM. (Am I doing this right?)
This computer is still pretty young, as I got it back in February. Despite this, I've periodically had some weird (but ultimately minor) issues with it, such as the audio drivers occasionally not behaving properly (i.e. audio coming out of the laptop speakers sounding like a loud and obnoxious static-y screeching), and the whole computer exhibiting extreme slowdown after a few hours of use (which always fixes itself after a basic reboot). These issues began pretty much as soon as I got it, though they were always easy enough to deal with that I didn't think much of it at first (in hindsight, this was probably a mistake, since my previous laptop wasn't nearly as powerful and never had those concerns).
In the past few months, however, I've been growing more frustrated with it. Several times, now, the computer has just randomly shut off while I'm using it. And I don't always mean that the entire system shut off; a few times, the screen's gone dark and the audio stops, but I can tell from the lights on the keyboard that the hardware is still running. When this has happened, I'm tempted to do a reset, but turning the computer off proves difficult; The computer simply doesn't respond to the power button, even if I hold it down for ten seconds or more to do a "hard" reboot. I'm only able to get it to power down if I do something weird like unplug the charger, and only then does the computer finally respond to the power button and let me hear the whirring of the fans die down. This has only happened a few times, irregularly, and I've noticed that it happens less frequently as long as I keep the computer powered down as often as possible, and I've also noticed that having my second external monitor plugged in seems to make it slightly more likely for this to happen, though I'm not entirely sure. I haven't had this happen in a few weeks now, thankfully.
Recently, however, I turned the computer on, and not even five minutes later I got the blue screen of death. I wasn't even doing anything with it yet, I had just opened a PDF file. It just happened again a few minutes ago, after only around an hour of use (and again, not even using any RAM-intensive applications).
Other things:
- As far as I can remember, I didn't make any changes or installations prior to this happening. As I said before, the minor issues with it have been going on ever since I first got the PC, though the crashes started becoming more frequent around the time that this college semester began. The only thing I can think of installing around that time was Wolfram Mathematica, but that should be innocent enough (my college uses it, and it worked fine on my previous laptop).
- I've occasionally looked into what the causes might be, but I can't find other instances of people having these same issues, which is a little concerning. I've tried re-installing my audio drivers, since that was my first sign that something was funky, but every time I've tried to do so, Windows has just told me that all my drivers are already up to date.
So yeah. Any ideas as to what on earth is going on here? Thanks in advance.
[Edited the thread to add model name to the title]
