Crashes When Browsing The Net

For a little background info. I bought a refurbished Dell 7010 with Win10 pro for my office. Most of the time it works great but once in a while it will crash like the power went out when I'm using either Edge or Firefox. It's only happened once with Firefox but a bunch of times with Edge. I put a new 2TB WD hard drive in it and 16GB of RAM when I got it.

Since I'm self employed, I can play games at work and it's never crashed like this when playing Skyrim or other games. Skyrim still crashes to the desktop but that's pretty normal for Skyrim...

I'm not sure if this is a hardware or software problem. Any suggestions? I'm hesitant to try and return it at this point...

Tony

 

Scan for malware.
Make sure the interior is clean of heat-trapping dust and the fans are spinning properly. Then monitor your temps. I use and recommend Core Temp to monitor CPU temps in real time.
Swapping in a known good PSU to verify if power is good what be something I would do too.

 

It's clean as a whistle inside. I's acting like the power is lost then boots back up. It's connected to a UPS so the power is constant. I'm begining to think maybe the power supply is bad...

 

Great! I am a strong proponent for using a "good" UPS with AVR on all computers. That said, "good" is the key word there.

Since everything inside the case depends on good, clean, stable power, I always want to ensure I am providing it when troubleshooting potential hardware problems, and for sure, before purchasing any replacement parts. So swapping in a known good supply to see if the problem recurs is always a good idea.

Can you try the old RAM and see what happens? Or just one stick?

 

I installed a known good 430W power supply and only time will tell if it solves the problem. The OEM power supply was only 275W so I probably should have swapped it out when I was putting in more memory and a the new HDD...

 

Yeah, sadly, it is not uncommon for factory made computers to come with a power supply barely adequate to support the hardware it came with.

Let's hope it holds with this larger supply.

 

It hasn't crashed since I swapped out the power supply. So I'm calling it resolved. My only other issue with it is the screen shows a black boarder top and bottom after playing Skyrim. A reboot fixes that so I'm not going to put any effort into resolving that...

 

When you get tired of rebooting, swap in another monitor to see if it happens there too. If it does, then you know the problem is somewhere in the computer's graphics solution. If not, it is your current monitor having problems syncing with your card. In the meantime, make sure your video cables are tightly fastened.

 

Anyway right after I declared the problem solved, it crashed again and like all the previous times, I was reading Yahoo news on MS Edge. I think this machine doesn't like Yahoo because nothing else makes it crash.

My old Win7 computer didn't have this problem with this pair of 28" Asus monitors. If I run the monitors in native mode, then I don't have the problem but I have the resolution set to 1600x900 and I'm using the same setting in Skyrim. I tried leaving in native mode but the print on the screen is too small to read... Rebooting after playing a game isn't a big issue but the problem is odd to say the least...