Windows 10 restarting without warning

Hi

Win 10 pro 18363

I'm in need of some pointing in the right direction. My Windows 10 PC has suddenly started restarting without warning. No messages are provided as to the cause.

My searches for ideas as the what might be causing this have helped and I've managed to reduce the frequency quite substantially.

The first improvement occurred when I ran Malwarebytes and it pointed to a program called Freevoicerecorder. I've used this program for many years on windows XP and Windows 7 without any issues but that download doesn't function under Windows 10. The latest version seems to have a number of issues widely discussed online including restarts. I uninstalled it straight away. Malwarebytes found a couple of remnants of this program which I then deleted. The frequency of the restarts dropped significantly. A very recent scan using Malwarebytes found no infections related to Freevoicerecorder.

I have just had another restart. As these happen without warning there is a serious danger of loosing a lot of inprocess work.

Since the latest restart the "System interrupts" is running at about 5%-8% of CPU capacity (8 core processor). Whilst this often runs for a while when the computer is first switched on, I can never recall seeing it run essentially continuously. Task manager is usually running in a small window all the time. No other change to the computer has been made since it worked fine.

Any assistance with trackng down these irritating problems would be appreciated

Thanks in advance.

Thank you for your comments - much appreciated

Having been for a walk and restarting I haven't seen anything of system interrupt service after the first 30 seconds or so.

I had hoped that there would be a log somewhere of what happened just before the restart was initiated which would at least give a clue or two where to look for the problem. This seems to be wishful thinking.

Mexicanpete said:

...I had hoped that there would be a log somewhere of what happened just before the restart...

There may yet be. Follow the instructions in the Blue Screen of Death (BSOD) Posting Instructions and the BSoD analysts on this forum may be able to say what happened.

Thanks once again for assistance

I've just had another seemingly arbitrary restart and so I thought this would be a good time to run V2 log collector. Unfortunately it has fallen foul of Bitdefender's firewall.

The easiest solution is for me to turn this firewall off and to use the Windows 10 firewall. Will this work?

I'm a bit cautious about changing the firewall status when it is not impossible that my problem is caused by some form of Malware.

If I temporarily disconnect the wired internet and switch the firewall off completely, would this upset the V2 log collection?

Thanks

Peter

Mexicanpete said:

If I temporarily disconnect the wired internet and switch the firewall off completely, would this upset the V2 log collection?

No, it shouldn't upset it.

Thanks

I had just about come to this conclusion after three or four attempts to collect log data.

I'm getting about one sudden crash per day. The last one, yesterday evening, didn't execute a restart.

It goes without saying that they happen at the most inconvenient of times although this could be that the machine is being used for something at these times. I do need to switch off my Bitdefender firewall and suspicious activity checker otherwise the exe file is stopped from running.

This log collection must work with some form of firewall and AV/security software.

It is also not impossible that a recent Bitdefender update (as opposed to virus definition updates which happen hourly) might be the source of the problem. They do happen quite frequently.

Any observations as to how to remain secure while waiting for a crash to happen will be much appreciated.

The hardware is the same as it was six months ago. There is only one piece of redundant hardware, a duplicate data drive. The operating system and data are on separate drives.

Thank you for reminding me. I will try running with only one data drive.

I will also try unloading a couple of programs I have loaded since the problem started. Maybe there are two sources of the problem. I did locate one that caused frequent crashes. I'm now getting very much more infrequent problems.