My PC constantly freezes if I’m not playing a game or have a game running.
✅ If I’m playing a game, it’s fine.
✅ If I have a game running in the background while doing other stuff, it’s fine.
❌ If I leave my PC while playing a game and the lock screen pops up, it will freeze.
❌ If I do anything other than gaming, such as browsing the web or digital art, PC will freeze.
❌ If PC goes to sleep overnight, it will freeze.
The frozen PC will typically show no error code and display will show “no input” until I hard reset.
If I hard reset, it often won’t successfully turn back on unless I move the mouse while it’s resetting, otherwise it will freeze again on the windows loading screen.
Sometimes I will actually get a blue screen with the error code of DPC_Watchdog_Error or something like that.
Anyone know where I should look first to try and fix this? It’s been happening for weeks now and it’s driving me crazy. I can’t figure it out.
Google suggests perhaps a bad a Realtek WiFi driver associated with DPC watchdog BSOD / kernel panic.
To diagnose that, remove all wireless adapters and boot.
More generally, symptoms on this scale on modern operating systems mean that the crashes are in kernel mode code, which mostly means device drivers of some type.
So a decent diagnostic method is to remove pieces of hardware one at a time to see if there’s one that clears up the issue.
Graphics adapters can also lead to these error codes