OT: Diagnose PC BSOD?

deliberately shutting out newer CPUs from receiving all Win7 (and 8.1) updates including security updates."

Maybe you should try it without the updates with your original processor and see what happens. Then just get third party security.

That's really going to be interesting. I just got a Dell Precision

5510 at work and IT is going to come unglued if Win-7 is no longer supported. I don't mind Win-10 at all (came with my Thinkpad X1 Yoga) but it'll be a hoot watching our incompetent IT organization melt down like they did when XP went away.

Hi, Win:-

Yes, thanks. It's no fun when tools don't work.

I did try that, and fiddling with all the voltages as modern BIOS settings allow you to do. Making the settings extra conservative. Nothing seemed to help or even to hurt much.

I ran a stress tests such as Furmark (GPU) and memory tests and despite running the chip temperatures way up from all the cycles the machine worked flawlessly for many hours. Then it BSOD'd when left alone for a day.

My theory is that there is a flaw in the internal power-down circuitry of the CPU and it doesn't always come back up fully alive again.

--sp

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Best regards,  
Spehro Pefhany

Follow up part deux:

Intel is being amazingly (suspiciously?) good about replacing the CPU.

--sp

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Best regards,  
Spehro Pefhany

There is a bug in the Skylake cpu i7 6700. I wonder if you have that stepping?

It can crash under heavy calculatioins like prime numbers and such. They did a microcode update, but I don't think that fixed the problem.

Cheers

It seemed solid under heavy calculations, less under idle conditions, but maybe that's it. Thanks.

Only other time (other than embedded & IOT stuff) I dealt directly with Intel I remember being one of the first to ask for warranty replacement on the Pentium FDIV bug-- it took them a long time internally to figure out what (if anything) they were going to do about it.

--sp

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Best regards,  
Spehro Pefhany