After a recent power outage, my PC showed a blue screen the next morning. I booted into Safe Mode and ran Windows Memory Diagnostic, which found no problems. DxDiag and Device Manager also report no errors for the graphics card. Since then, the computer has been freezing intermittently, and the display sometimes shows sudden contrast or brightness changes. A PassMark check suggests the storage drive is performing poorly. My system has an RTX 5070, an AMD Ryzen 7 8-core processor, 32 GB of RAM, and a 1 TB KLEVV CRAS C715 drive. What should I check next, and could the outage have damaged the drive or another component?
2 Answers
A UPS would be a good idea for preventing problems from future outages and voltage drops. For now, reseat the power and display cables, reinstall or clean-install the graphics driver, and test with another monitor or cable if possible. Contrast changes could be caused by the GPU, display connection, monitor settings, or unstable power rather than the storage drive. If the SSD health report shows warnings or the system keeps freezing, replace it after securing a backup.
Start by checking for crash dumps in C:WindowsMinidump. Those files can identify the driver or component that caused the blue screen. If the folder is empty, configure Windows to create small memory dumps and see whether another crash produces one. Also check the drive’s SMART/health data with a reputable disk-monitoring tool, because a benchmark alone is not enough to determine whether the SSD is failing. Back up important files immediately before doing more testing.
That makes sense. I’ll back up the important files first, check the SSD health data and minidump folder, then test the display and graphics driver before replacing anything.