Help: Weird Computer Problem [NSFW in Spoilers]

I probably should just post this on some tech forum, but I figured I'd see if anyone had any theories here first.

For years now my desktop has had intermittent issues where it locks up, sometimes just a hard freeze where everything is frozen and the only way to unfreeze it is a reboot, and sometimes I get a blue screen of death. I think it's hardware related because it pretty much only happens within the first few minutes of booting up when the computer has been off for a while, and it seems to be more common in the winter and in the morning when the house is cooler.

Because I had made the guess that it was hardware related, I shut off the power supply and opened the case to see what I could see-- each time I did this I seemed to have a successful freeze free boot. I have a PCIe graffics card that draws a lot of power, and I had a cheap off-brand PSU. So that got replaced, and things seemed better for a while. But then the problem came back.

This week the problem was constant and my desktop wouldn't stay on for more than a few minutes without blue screening, no matter what I did. I did some research and it seems that this is often a hardware problem. So, since the ram is easiest to access, I popped the sticks out, then popped them back in, making sure they were secure and installed properly. Now no problems.

Obviously my fix(es) could be false positives since the frequency of lock ups seems relatively random.

Anyone have any guesses?

Spoiler: Show

zomgtits
http://i.imgur.com/FB6g7IK.jpg

Idk much. You may need to be more specific and give details on parts tho.

My laptop has a manufacturing defect where the keyboard connector chip thingy is "taped" in place by the company. Tape failed, now I gotta reconnect it every few weeks or not have a keyboard.

Tits are shopped. Tanya/Anna Song. Not sure why some people shop huge tits even huger.

I built the computer, and I remember the date roughly only because I had built it mainly as a multi-tabling computer, and a few weeks after getting all the parts together was April 15, 2011-- Black Friday :-\

Laptops and name brand desktops are easier to troubleshoot, since there is a user base and if you're having a problem some subset of the user base is also going to be having the problem and talking about it.

It could just be a seating problem, which you fixed when you reseated the RAM. I built my own computer a little more than a year ago, and after a few weeks my computer started randomly restarting -- maybe every few days, it would just do a hard reboot with no warning. As a first troubleshooting step, I opened the case and reseated every component/connection. It's been running problem free for about a year after that.

http://www.hirensbootcd.org/
download and burn or create boot usb

boot from it
start linux rescue environment
click the "disk health" icon on the desktop or type: "gsmartcontrol" in the terminal
run the short read/write test, if it fails it's your hdd that needs replacing
check if there are any re-allocated sectors, or "pending" sectors. If yes, that's most likely the source of your problem, just replace the drive.

2nd: open a terminal and type "dmesg"
if there's a lot of red stuff, consider cp/pasting into google.
a little bit of red stuff is ok. "warnings" can be ignored, errors are bad
type dmesg again to make sure there are no recurring error messages.
recurring error messages are super bad.
This will often show sources of blue screens like faulty hardware.

If that didn't bring up anything, run memcheck86 from the hirens boot menu for a couple of circles.

If all of that shows nothing obvious, you can use a blue screen reader (also on hbcd). You can use the intel processor diagnostics tool from windows if you want to make sure it's not the cpu (it's not)

whats the bsod error code?

NightGizmo, thanks for the input, always nice to hear that it might not only be a simple fix, but that the fix has already been done!

oskar, great post-- I've done a good bit of troubleshooting windows boxes, just learning enough to fix whatever is the problem by googling, but never done what you've outlined above. Seems like the pro way to diagnose, instead of just guessing at the diagnosis and applying solutions to see if they fixed the problem. When I get a bit of time, I'll give this a shot and report back with what I find.

You toss it then?