I've been experiencing some serious issues with my PC over the past couple of months. My computer frequently freezes, and I get this weird colored bar across half of one of my monitors. The only way to get it back to normal is to force a shutdown by holding down the power button. Even during the freeze, I can still hear and communicate with others, but as soon as I click anything, it all goes dark. I've tried reinstalling Windows, using Display Driver Uninstaller to refresh the drivers, and even reverted to an older driver that worked well. My setup includes a Ryzen 7 5700X, a B550 motherboard, and a RX 6800 XT, all of which are less than three years old. Sometimes the freezes happen back-to-back, but there are days when I don't experience any at all. Usually, it occurs when I'm loading or closing games. I'm really hoping I don't need to buy a new GPU. I have pictures of the freeze but can't share them here.
1 Answer
Have you tried checking the event viewer? Just search for it in the start menu. Go to Windows Logs then System, and since you have to force a shutdown, look for any critical events with the kernel power Event ID 41. It should log the last time you had to force a shutdown. This might give you some clues about what’s going wrong.
I found some kernel-power sources, but the Event IDs are 42, 566, and 187. Right before them, there are warnings and an error related to DistributedCOM, which seems tied to the game bar. Could that be the source of my issue?