Ok, so I've been having these problems for a while now and it just hit me to come here and post them, to see if I can get any kind of response.
My first problem is this: Ever since I got a flash drive for Christmas (1 GB Geek Squad thing), my computer has at random times been giving me the Blue Screen Of Death (with different error messages each time; the only one I can remember at the moment is IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL) and then restarting. This has never resulted in any loss of data or anything serious like that, it's just been a huge nuisance. Lately it's been happening that whenever I plug the drive into a USB port to put files (usually AMVs that I download to my family computer and have transferred to my own) on my computer, the BSOD pops up the second I pull the drive off. Clearly the USB drive is the problem - my question is, has anyone ever heard of this happening before? Is there any way to fix it without buying another flash drive? WHY is this happening in the first place?
My second problem: This hasn't happened for a while, but mainly because I've learned to predict when it will happen so I can avoid it. Basically, back a while ago (I'm talking like, last November) my computer would randomly shut off when I was doing tasks that I had done many times before without problems, such as rendering out a video file from Vegas. No error/stop messages, no nothing. The screen would just go black, and that was it. I'd turn it on, everything would be fine, and when I tried to render again, it just shut off, again.
Eventually this stopped happening, but started up again, this time while I was playing older games on my computer. In particular, EVERY SINGLE TIME I fired up Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri (remember that game?), the computer would shut off, without fail. There was a point where I'd play a turn, have the game auto-save, and in the middle of my next turn it'd just turn off. Start it up again, same thing would happen. Eventually I just gave up. This also happened in Independence War 2.
So I avoided those games. By this time I was suspecting a PSU issue, but I have a 350W PSU, and due to the inconsistencies of the crashings (the computer NEVER shut down when I played games that would take far more horsepower, like Counter-Strike or Call of Duty 2) I concluded that that probably wasn't the issue.
THEN the problem cropped up again, THIS time when I tried encoding a video to .mp4. I tried like four times, and about halfway through each encode the computer would just shut off. One of the other things I had suspected was overheating, so when I restarted my computer I took off the side and pointed a box fan at the interior. Voila, the computer encoded my video fine.
Now, I'm confused because it seems that logically, a game like Alpha Centauri would take far less juice (and, I would assume, would therefore generate less heat) than rendering a video out of Vegas or doing an .mp4 encode, yet the problem was the most persistent there. So I don't know quite what to think, does anyone have any thoughts?
Again, neither of these problems are things I'm worried will end in the deletion of data, they just annoy the hell out of me and I'd like to be able to play the two games in question without fear of my computer just turning itself off for no good reason (especially because there's no nice autosave feature in I-War 2).


