Regular, inconsistent crashes with occasional BSOD

My PC regularly crashes. Usually with no notice it just freezes and never recovers, but occasionally it results in a Dpc_Watchdog_violation BSOD which in some cases it even manages to successfully reboot from.

The only pattern I can note is that the more stress the system is under, the more likely it is to crash. The fan speed usually correlates with the likelihood of a crash, but there have also been numerous occasions where it crashes with no warning or pattern.

It used to happen a lot back when I had Windows 7 on this machine, but after a fresh install of 8.1 it became a very rare thing to happen. However, since I upgraded to Windows 10 a few weeks ago, it happens multiple times a day.

Other than an SSD for the O/S and replacement HDDs, the machine is as it was when bought, an Acer Aspire M3300.

Because of that brief period where it worked fine with Windows 8.1, I suspect it's driver related, but I'm not going to pretend I'm an expert. The graphics drivers for the graphics card aren't supported on Windows 10 (ATI Mobility Radeon HD 4350), but other searches suggest it works fine regardless.

Any help or advice hugely appreciated. My apologies if I've gotten anything wrong, I've tried to follow the rules for these posts as closely as possible.

axe0 said:

Hi ma0sm,

Welcome to the 10forums.

Please update your BIOS from Acer to start with.
The 0x133(DPC_WATCHDOG_VIOLATION) is caused a lot by BIOS problems.

Let me know how it goes :)

Thanks for that, I'll give it a try and let you know how it goes!

ma0sm said:

Thanks for that, I'll give it a try and let you know how it goes!

I think you might have solved it. Been running like a dream all day since I upgraded the BIOS. Such a simple thing, but just needed a prompt to get it done. Thanks so much for your help!