Why does my PC keep crashing when I play games?

I would first make sure that the CPU and graphics card aren't overheating.

It's not the ideal solution, but consider doing a clean install of Windows. Sometimes, OS upgrades leave behind a bunch of useless files that could cause problems later on.

Crashing when running games suggests to me an overheating or power supply problem. In normal use a multi-core CPU and GPU like that will be idling most of the time. When you load a game all the CPU and GPU cores can go to near 100% use. This makes more heat, and draws more power from the PSU. If your heat sink is clogged up with dust, fan isn't working, or the thermal paste has dried out then things overheat and randomly crash. Or if the PSU is getting old and can no longer provide it's full power, the voltage dips, and again, random crashes. You don't get consistent error messages because the crashes are random.

But note how these things are occurring when the machine is under full load. I'm assuming it will sit there web surfing all day?

Check the cooling system, reseat the heat sink with new paste, and reseat the CPU, RAM and power connectors in their sockets and see if it's better. If not, see if you can borrow a known good power supply and see if that makes a difference.

If you have a hardware fault, it wont matter what OS you are running, it's going to go flaky. And those machine specs should be fine on Win 10, I have it running here on machines with much lower power than yours, and you can buy new budget laptops with lower specs and WIN10, which also work fine for simple tasks.

Don't go buying anything and wasting money right away. If you taken a picture of the crash message, that would help otherwise the specs do nothing. Btw what game is it? Or better question would be what GAMES are they?

Instead of buying new parts to "fix" the problem, you can try to factory restore the computer. This will erase everything and hopefully the problem goes away. That would be the first time I do. Then you can go ahead and buy parts to fix the issue if it still exists. (I really don't know the parts are an issue at all)


Yeah, but first if you take a picture of the crash message and the BSOD message, that will help a ton.