TLDR: PC is crashing and slow. I have no idea why and can’t fix it. Every piece of technical info I can think of is stuck to the bottom of the post.

Hi folks - looking for some PC help. I don’t really know where to start - I’ll just go from the beginning.

A mate of mine built my PC for me about 10 years ago. I learnt a lot watching him do it - so I started trying to upgrade/maintain it myself. I’m no expert - but I like to think I have the basics down.

I’ve been gradually upgrading parts over the years. For that reason it’s hard to say how old it is - kind of a ship of Theseus situation. I did a pretty comprehensive rebuild in 2020, where I replaced the motherboard, CPU, GPU, RAM… basically everything but the PSU.

I have also been incredibly unlucky with my PC. I’ve had about 5 SSDs fail on me. At first, I thought this was just astronomically bad luck. Then - I thought I was being punished for my loyalty to Seagate. But then I had a bunch of ram sticks fail, and a 1 yr old motherboard fail on me too. I figured something was off, but couldn’t tell what. I seem to get a catastrophic part failure every 6 months or so.

For context, I am on my PC almost constantly. I need it for work, where I use it for a bunch of animation/video editing stuff, and then I play games on it in my down-time. As a result, It’s got some decent bits (64G ram, 3080). Also as a result, when it fails I need to get it working again fast (work deadlines).

Every time it failed, I’d basically panic and hyperfocus on getting it up and running ASAP, rather than actually fixing the underlying problem. I could handle basic wipes and stuff myself, but when larger bits would fail, I’d lean on my heroic local computer repair guy (who’s kind of a family friend).

Recently, my PC ethernet port inexplicably died. The two lonely brain cells in my head managed to connect this to an issue I had a few months back where my webcam was getting really strange image artefacts. Could it be a power supply to the ports thing? Something PSU related? At this point, I suddenly realised that the only part I’ve never upgraded since the original build 10 years ago, was my PSU.

I went down to a parts store, asked the bloke there for some PSU advice. He tells me I’m running a hilariously outdated PSU. He’s surprised my PC ever ran given the GPU is way too greedy. He suggested that my various issues may have come from intermittent power outages to my hard drives. No idea if that scans. I am out of my depth.

So - I replace the PSU. Ethernet port seems to work! For like two days. Then my PC crashes while I’m out of the room (it just does that sometimes) and the port’s dead again. Plus, I’m still getting all those intermittent crashes and weird slowdowns.At this point, I kind of just give up. I buy a cheap USB to ethernet, and fix it that way. I know the underlying issues are clearly still there, and I’m likely just weeks away from another major failure, but I am completely out of ideas. I’m ready to throw up my hands in despair, decide that this “maintain your own tech” thing just isn’t for me, and buy a pre-build.

But I’m not giving up yet!! /rtechsupport, please, help me figure out what’s going on!

Here’s a bunch of logs, additional (possibly irrelevant) information, and wild theories I have about what exactly is happening.

PC INFO

• I run windows 11 on a 1TB SSD. I have a HDD I use for storage which I’ve had for a while. I also brought a new HDD recently. It’s in the machine - but I haven’t set it up yet.

GPU is a NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080. Processor is Intel® Core™ i7-10700KF CPU @ 3.80GHz. Motherboard is H510M DS2V. My new PSU is a DA850.

• Software wise - I have tried every combination of driver update. The problem persists. It has also persisted through various full wipes and resets.

SIGNS OF MAYBE WHERE THE PROBLEM IS - I DON’T KNOW

• In Task Manager - Performance, I see that my DISK (the C: drive) is often at 100% - Internet says that’s bad. I feel like it’s always done this - I also note that my read speed seems to be miniscule (I think?) - it sits fairly regularly at 0, and rarely gets above 2MB. Usually hovers somewhere around 500KB/s.

• Event viewer reports that I absolutely cannot get “Realtek Gamging GbE Family Controller” to start. No amount of un-installing, re-enabling, driver messing, or incense burning seems to fix this.

• Maintenance reports (and event viewer) seem to imply that the crashes I’m getting often occur when windows tries to install updates. I’ve googled every variant of the various messages, AFAIK, it’s just a symptom.

• My best “real” guess is that my old PSU has somehow fried a bunch of the remaining components in my PC… In which case, I guess the solution is just to buy a new pre-build…

• My storage drive does appear to have some corrupted segments. CHKDSK ran bad on it, and CrystalDiskInfo throws up a “caution”. I’ve disabled it, and I still seem to get the same performance issues.

I’ve attached (as best I can, if they’re not here I’ll comment them right away) my crystal disk info, a screengrab of my resource manager… I’m not sure what else to attach? Happy to get anything that’s needed. (Pretty sure they all read as normal…)

I absolutely do NOT want to break rule 4 - But I am happy to share a funny picture of my cat after she woke up from anaesthetic as thanks for help. (This is meant to be a joke - Do cat memes constitute payment? Please disregard if so.)

Anyway, cheers.

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