MSI GS65 Stealth - Odd Blue Screen of Death at random, perhaps caused by Windows Defender updates?

[zaijensantos]

I've had this laptop for a few months now. I love it, works like a dream when it works. However, it has a tendency to crash. There does not seem to be much rhyme or reason surrounding the crashes. They occur at any time, regardless of it running Monster Hunter World or Google Chrome.... Further, crashes have occurred within hours of eachother, but there've also been a couple 1 or 2 week long crash free stretches...

Here are a few things I've noticed:

• 
  ■ There always seems to be an update needed every time there's a crash. I changed from norton security to windows defender. Before defender, this update would be from "A-Volute Software Component" and "Rivet Networks LLC Software Component". After Defender, however, these updates changed to just being the Windows Defender definition updates. Either way, there ALWAYS seems to be some update needed post-crash.
  ■ Occasionally, if I'm in a game before the update, there may be glitches in-game just before a crash. For example, in Overwatch, there have been times where the pause menu wouldn't work properly, blurring the screen without bringing up the menu.
  ■ Crashing produces no error dump files. And I've used programs to force crashes that have produced these files. But the actual crashes don't have dumps.
  ■ There have been multiple different error messages for crashing, Unexpected Store Exception, Critical Process Died, System Service Exception... seems to be random, though I think the Store Exception is the most frequent.

And here are a few of the things I've tried:

• 
  ■ Clean wipe of computer, through windows
  ■ Another clean wipe, through MSI's application
  ■ Full factory reset
  ■ Installing every single driver on MSI's GS65 webpage
  ■ Checking every single driver through windows
  ■ Updating the bios
  ■ Praying, waiting, crying lol
  ■ I've honestly forgotten everything. I've been fighting this problem for months

I've run out of ideas. If anyone has any ideas about what's going on, please let me know! Thank you for your time!

 

[helpstar]

update the BIOS within BIOS

If this doesn´t help, RMA it -> warranty

 

[johnbl]

after you update the bios, make sure you update the motherboard sound drivers. there was a bug fixed around sept of 2017 where the motherboard sound driver would respond and corrupt the buffer of the GPU sound driver causing the GPU driver to crash.

if you don't use your motherboard sound driver (ie don't have speakers connected to it) you can disable it in bios. if you don't have speakers in your monitor that get the sound signal from the video card hdmi or display port you can disable the GPU sound support in control panel device manager.

it is normal for windows defender to get updates every few days, these are virus signatures that are being updated all of the time.

often if your system does produce a bugcheck but does not store a crash dump there are several causes.
- bugs in the storage driver (most common) be sure to update the sata driver from your vendors website
- problems in firmware of the storage device (ssd)
- errors in the drive of the storage device
- pagefile.sys turned off or the size is too small
- no file space left on the drive c:
- certain cases where a drive cable disconnect but the bios is set to not allow reconnection of the drive
(hotswap turn off) general, just a bad connection to the drive or the drive gets confused and takes over 30 seconds to respond then windows issues a reset. if hotswap is disabled the drive can not reconnect and some time later (can be hours later depending on how much free memory your system has) the system bugchecks when a critical process can not be loaded from disk.


if your system does not bugcheck and just reboots.
this is often a power or overheating issue. you would blow out the dust, and remove any CPU and GPU overclock software and see if your problem goes away. if a gpu uses too much power from the pci/e slot then the motherboard logics protection circuits kick in and reset the CPU to prevent your motherboard graphics slot from catching on fire. cheap motherboard will just let them burn up in smoke.

most bugchecks in virus scanners that I see are caused by old network drivers that have bugs or
by malware hacking the virus scanners. be sure to update your network drivers if your virus scanner or any streaming software bugchecks or hangs.

 

[g.paul_ionut]

Yo.

I have the same problem with the same laptop.
I disabled C state from bios and i didn`t have any problems after.

 

[johnbl]

hopefully any bios bug that effected c state of individual cores would be fixed with a bios update.
This assumes you don't have duplicate copies of msi overclocking software installed.
I have seen systems with up to 6 versions of overclock software running at the same time.
the msi software has a problem because they changed where the files were installed over the years so you get duplicates running out of different directories.( people don't uninstall before they install the new version) Each taking a turn on tweaking voltages to the cpu pins.

some problems are easy to detect in a windows debugger if you provide access to the minidump file.

Yo.

I have the same problem with the same laptop.
I disabled C state from bios and i didn`t have any problems after.

 

[zaijensantos]

Thank you all for your suggestions,
Like I mentioned, the bios and all of the drivers are up to date.
I don't overclock my laptop, and haven't installed any software to do so.
I'll try disabling the c state and see if that works!
Unfortunately, there's no real way to test this (since the crashes are infrequent).
Thanks again

UPDATE
2:28 PM Actually had another crash an hour after posting this. Sadly, disabling c states was not the solution.
For this crash, I was only using google chrome, with one page open for reading, and one page open to google docs for taking notes.
The crash was as follows: refreshing a page, the page wouldn't refresh, tried to go to a different window, the window wouldn't switch, and the mouse cursor changed to a blue loading circle when hovered over the taskbar. After about a minute, the screen went black, with the cursor changed to a white scroll symbol. Then the blue screen appeared with "Critical_Process_Died" message. Still no dump files.

Any thoughts?

 

[helpstar]

update the firmware of the hard drives/SSD

check the drives for errors with manufacturer´s tools

check RAM with memtest.org usb autoinstaller

uninstall any tuning software like ccleaner or similar. MSI utilities and tools as well.
uninstall and use a different anti virus application

which windows build (command prompt: winver) are you using?

 

[zaijensantos]

update the firmware of the hard drives/SSD

check the drives for errors with manufacturer´s tools

check RAM with memtest.org usb autoinstaller

uninstall any tuning software like ccleaner or similar. MSI utilities and tools as well.
uninstall and use a different anti virus application

which windows build (command prompt: winver) are you using?

Windows 10 Version 1803 (OS Build 17134.345)
My ssd is fully up to date (uninstalled and reinstalled the driver too)
Unfortunately, I don't have a spare usb drive for memtest.org
johnbl was right about defender: I was just really unlucky in that there just happened to be a definition update during my crashes. My most recent crash did not have one.

 

[zaijensantos]

update the firmware of the hard drives/SSD

check the drives for errors with manufacturer´s tools

check RAM with memtest.org usb autoinstaller

uninstall any tuning software like ccleaner or similar. MSI utilities and tools as well.
uninstall and use a different anti virus application

which windows build (command prompt: winver) are you using?

I ran the memtest, which came up with zero errors. At this rate, it looks like I'll have to just send it to msi and see if they can do anything about it. I still have a month or so before I'll be able to do that, though, so if anyone has any last suggestions, I'd love to hear them.

Thank you all again for the suggestions!

 

[Mkarmelk]

I have the same laptop but I do not know the problem.
Go through everything step by step:

1. bios update (released in December 2018)
2. Firmware update (also released in December 2018)
3. Update your windows
4. https/www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/support/intel-driver-support-assistant.html
try this utility of intel. I also use and updated everything from intel to the latest and latest version.
5. Switch off all energy-efficient options in the bios.
6. in energy settings ensure that everything is on performance.

If this does not solve it, I do not know. Did you happen to have bad SSDs in it? or replace RAM with the bad quality?

I hope you find a solution.