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#1
Computer stutters, single beep, freezes -- Meltdown or dying hardware?
Just in the past month or so, I've been experiencing pretty frequent computer freezes requiring hard resets (I disabled the option to Automatically restart on system failure).
I always play certain games in windowed mode so I can multitask (already a bad idea I know), but only recently in the past month, I've had my entire system stutter, a single beep come from the motherboard, then it freezes up, with what ever game sound playing also freezing up to make an ugly static buzzing sound.
Usually after a hard reset, this problem doesn't occur again until the next day or so when I get back on.
I'm wondering if this is a result of the performance slow-down from the Spectre/Meltdown patch, or just old, failing hardware. If it is hardware, I strongly suspect it to be the RAM or CPU, which are the oldest pieces of my system. These are my current specs
intel i7 - 3770, 3.40GHz
Corsair Vengeance 16 GB RAM 1600mhz ddr3
Nvidia GTX 780 gpu
ASRock ddr3 lga-1155 z77 extreme4-M motherboard
Corsair hx 750 watt PSU
I don't know what the symptoms of "performance slowdowns" are of the Meltdown patch, and I read that Haswell cpus (mine is apparently just before Haswell) see "higher reboots" but I'm not sure if that's what I'm seeing (as I disabled the Automatic reboot on system failure) or something different.
Some months earlier I'd been experiencing similar system reboot due to what I thought was overheating. Then I cleaned out my computer tower and the problem went away until this year, where it's become fairly regular once-a-day.