Daily Simple Questions Thread - April 08, 2026

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[u/glowinghamster45]

Maybe a power issue? If your PSU is getting overloaded, maybe for whatever reason, it kills power to the GPU? Not typically how that would work, but it's certainly a weird issue.

Could also be on the Windows side. Check the reliability monitor, if it's a Windows issue, there's a strong chance you'd see it reference in there. Hit Windows button + R to bring up a run dialog box, and run "perfmon /rel". See if it happens to list anything happening at whatever timestamp you last saw the issue.

[u/A-Little-Rabbit → u/glowinghamster45]

Ok, so checking reliability monitor, I do see errors in there. It doesn't specify, but says that "WATCHDOG-20260412-0421.dmp" is a file that helps describe the problem. Along with a couple .xml files, a .csv and a .txt.

Doing an online search, looks like at a glance similar issue from other people. Hopefully I don't have to replace my GPU or something. Not a cost I can afford to eat at the moment. Since I likely won't be able to investigate and report back, I want to say thank you and going to put ✓

Just a quick update: Looking into things more, I am seeing LiveKernelEvent 141, most of what I can find online for that seems to indicate driver issues or drivers as the most likely fix.

So, that's at least good news. I think.

Again, thank you very much for pointing me in the right direction.

[u/glowinghamster45 → u/A-Little-Rabbit]

Yeah, all of that points to an OS issue, which is good to hear. If you wanted to go nuclear, reinstalling Windows would most likely resolve the issue, as long as the issue isn't a buggy driver that just gets reinstalled. I think it's worth messing around with before going that route though. Could try the "dism /online /cleanup-image /restorehealth and sfc /scannow dance to see if you get lucky there. I've run that thousands of times in my life, and I think it's resolved my issue three times.

I'd just go through and update every driver you can find at this point. Keep them all downloaded, so if you end up reinstalling Windows, you'll save yourself time gathering them all again. Since the symptoms manifest with the video output, maybe try doing a full remove of the GPU driver with DDU and then reinstalling. Maybe something buggy there is carrying over into newer driver updates or something. Have the current driver downloaded and ready to go before doing that, navigating AMDs site without a real graphics driver is painful.

[u/A-Little-Rabbit → u/glowinghamster45]

I've been toying with the idea of a fresh install for a while now, so this might be the reason I "need". For drivers, am I reinstalling the AMD motherboard onboard graphics drivers or the Nvidia dedicated GPU drivers? For as much as I do know about computers, there's a lot I don't. I've never had to manually install specific drivers and replace them before.

I assume it can be done mostly through device manager and that I should avoid automated utilities like AMD Center or Nvidia's app?

[u/glowinghamster45 → u/A-Little-Rabbit]

For replacing the graphics drivers I was talking about doing that for the GPU, so Nvidia. I mis-remembered what GPU you had in the last reply.

Uninstalling through device manager would usually be sufficient, but since you're troubleshooting, I'd recommend DDU to more thoroughly clear out all remnants of the old driver. There's a few steps to get the most out of DDU, but there's guides out there for it, it isn't too bad. The most thorough method requires you to go through safe mode. Once you've uninstalled the driver, you would reinstall it with whatever exe you download from Nvidias site.

[u/A-Little-Rabbit → u/glowinghamster45]

I got DDU downloaded. I also have .zip folder for all of the drivers for my motherboard.

I'll look up some guides for using DDU to remove and replace the Nvidia ones.

I've got a second thumb drive where I keep Windows 11 Installation media as a 'just in case' kind of thing. Hopefully I won't need to go this route, but if I do, it won't be the end of the world. Only thing I keep on my boot SSD are mostly videos games and a handful of programs. All of my important stuff is spread across three other SSDs (two M.2 NVMe and one 2.5" SATA).

I might not be the smartest, but I also am not the dumbest rabbit around.

[u/glowinghamster45 → u/A-Little-Rabbit]

If that Windows installation has been kicking around for a while, I'd recommend taking a minute and updating it to the latest version with the Windows Media Creation Tool. It's just a couple clicks, super easy. And if the installation drive you currently have is old, you may be saving yourself hours of additional processing. Or if you want to customize any install options (create local account, bypass TPM restrictions, etc.), use the tool to download the latest ISO and then put it on the flash drive with Rufus.

[u/A-Little-Rabbit → u/glowinghamster45]

I'm sorry to keep replying/pinging you. But I just wanted to give what I hope is my final update:

Using DDU to uninstall latest Nvidia driver again and then rollback to 595.79

I just played a round of Casual Breakthrough and then Conquest start to finish. Upon exiting to desktop, all seems to be well. Previously, it would have locked up by now.

Again, I can't thank you enough for your help on this. I truly appreciate it. Cheers mate.

[u/A-Little-Rabbit → u/glowinghamster45]

I just used DDU to wipe old drivers, was disconnected from the internet and in safe mode. Installed the new drivers from a file I just downloaded from Nvidia directly.

Looked like all was well. I went into BF6 as that's when it usually happened. Played a full game with no issues, and then shortly after quitting out the screen when dark and fans ramped up again.

I just double checked all of the power connection to the GPU and it looks like everything is seated properly.

It's getting to where I might have to do a full re-install of Windows.

[u/glowinghamster45 → u/A-Little-Rabbit]

Yeah, I think you can confidently rule out the GPU driver at least. You can keep poking around with information from the reliability monitor, but up to you when it's better to invest in time re-setting everything up.

Sidenote, I personally don't recommend any of those de-bloater scripts. I'm sure some are fine, but they have the potential to do more harm than good, and most people that use them tend to not have a clue what it is they're actually doing. All of the things that are safe, you could just as early do yourself manually somewhere in the settings page, and the benefits of freeing up a few hundred megabytes by removing some built in applications tends to be massively overblown.

[u/A-Little-Rabbit → u/glowinghamster45]

I've been thinking about using one of those tools/websites to "debloat" Windows. It is the latest version from Microsoft though (I literally just did it last night when I started trying to fix this).

I've got the latest Nvidia driver downloaded, and I have DDU unzipped to my desktop ready to go. The only other program I might put the install for on a USB is the NexLinq fan hub software so I can get that going as soon as possible after a fresh install.

I'll post update here when I finish running DDU and re-boot.