The last couple of days my Gateway desktop has been acting up. The screen freezes and then the fan starts getting noisier. So when I managed to reboot it I went to the Event Manager, just type that in the search bar, and the clicked on Administrative Events. And behold the long list of DCOM Errors.
So I searched online for the error message listed at the bottom in the General area: DCOM got error "1084" ... (you don't have to type the entire thing in search).
The error seemed to indicate a graphics card error. Then I got a BSOD with the error message - SYSTEM_THREAD_EXCEPTION_NOT_HANDLED. Online search also indicated that this error was usually caused by a driver error.
So I just decided to try to get into Safe Mode on my Gateway and use the DDU – Display Driver Uninstaller from:
www.guru3d.com/files-details/display-driver-uninstaller-download.html
To strip out the video drivers, restart the system and see if Windows sets up the video card properly again, otherwise I'll have to go online and hunt down the drivers to install manually.
So first into Safe mode, read here: https://davescomputertips.com/windows-10-quick-tips-2-ways-to-safe-mode
I always choose Enable Safe Mode with Networking. I already had the DDU on my system so it was just a matter of opening the program. First I got an update notification, I decided to bypass it at this time.
On the right hand side I had to choose my device, so I clicked on GPU. Then at the top I just clicked On Clean and restart. This started the process of removing the old drivers. And then the computer just restarted. No surprise, Windows restarted and set up it's own Basic Display Adapter, so online to search for a driver. In this Gateway I'm using the built in video which identifies as an AMD Radeon HD 8570D.
Found the drivers here: www.amd.com/en/support/previous-drivers/graphics/amd-radeon-hd/amd-radeon-hd-8000-series-oem/amd-radeon-hd-8570
Downloaded and ran the installer. Didn't work. It claimed my system wasn't supported or something like that.
So I have a graphics card that originally came from that system and decided to use this as an excuse to motivate me to put it back in.
The name on the card Is Club 3D. First I had to see if I had any adapters because this video card has only HDMI and DVI but my monitor only has VGA. The only one I could find was a VGA to DVI, good enough, if it works. It doesn't. To the Dollar Store I go. Sadly, not my day, no suitable adapters this time.
Luckily, I discovered that I had a monitor tucked away here with a DVI connection and a cable still attached. It's my old HP w1707. I gave this one to my nephew when his monitor conked out and he recently returned it. So I hooked it up, no adapters required. Windows still only installed the basic driver so I ran the driver software I previously downloaded from AMD and this time I had no problem getting the drivers to install.
You don't have to go to the extremes of replacing your video card, like I did. But you could just update your drivers, or roll them back if you already updated them and they don't work.
Read: How To Roll Back A Driver
I started writing this yesterday and left my computer running over night. Originally, when the problems started, It froze up three times in one day. Everything seems OK again now.
By the way the Club 3D card turns out to be a AMD Radeon R9 200 Series.
