Tech help - BSOD/not wow related

Yes, it can. Part of an image involves drivers, which can break with an install. When you run DISM scans, it is also testing the integrity of those as well.

See your entire post of unnecessary stuff…

Hit the nail on the head.

Recommending people run custom scripts, that usually require elevated permissions, is not a good idea and is a great way to brick someone’s installation; just because you think they should work and feel falsely confidently about them.

Very few people are going to care here, this is a WoW tech support forum, not a bragging competition… I could rant and rant about what I make and code as a double majored grad that works in robotics engineering, but it’s irrelevant to this actual discussion and nobody cares.

https://www.amazon.com/s?k=power+supply+500w
Pretty much any of those highly reviewed ones will do the job for you. With your current hardware, 500w should be more than fine and you won’t really save much money by going lower wattage.

Did you manage to check your ram sticks? Just take them out, blow the slots clean with some duster and seat them back in making sure both clips on the sides fully clip down. Also make sure you have the stick pointing the right direction because they are slightly asymmetric and you don’t want to break anything.

It does not in any way verify the integrity of 3rd party drivers.

Summary

If a 3rd party driver that is required to bootstrap the processor via the secondary bootloader fails, it will hang the machine / computer (BSOD / it will throw an exception,) and you have to manually remove it yourself.

You could use DISM to REMOVE or ADD a driver to an OFFLINE image, but you would have to use PNPUtil on the running operating system itself / ONLINE image itself (the operating system on your computer that you’re currently using.)

The ELAM drivers are part of Windows Defender Antivirus (DISM and SFC will also replace missing files given, this is part of the operating system itself.) If an ELAM driver fails or is missing, it will throw an exception and you get a BSOD / the computer hangs on startup (you have to disable early launch anti-malware via F8 to bypass this.) It won’t do anything else, won’t repair them if it’s a 3rd party driver btw. It will just throw an exception, and you have to remove / disable the dysfunctional driver yourself (or edit the entry.) The ELAM driver is just a part of process protection (for the firewall and anti-virus.) It has nothing to do with any other driver you’re talking about. It’s not an nVidia graphics card driver like the OP has, or similar in any way, aside from it residing within a similar hierarchy within the driver store itself.

Search for this if you want a more in depth explanation: “Overview of Early Launch AntiMalware ms docs”

I can confirm that scripts like these are ubiquitous, and they are just basic systems administration tasks anyone with their A+, Security+, Network+, MCSE would have a firm grasp of.

Summary

DISM was available on Windows Vista with the Windows AIK’s WinPE addon (version 3.x or so.) Successive revisions came later in Windows 7, etc, which package manager / pkgmgr was superseded by DISM (the servicing stack, and in turn the associated Powershell cmdlets.) So it’s been around for awhile. You could achieve the same outcomes in XP and Vista with pkgmgr, although the syntax for PnPUtil and PowerShell 2.x is quite a bit different, not necessarily worth relearning (at least from my perspective.) The only thing comparable to this on nix is the Solaris 11.x feature known as Unified Archives (golden images.) Linux does not have this type of capability or functionality, due to fragmentation issues that vary based on the distribution itself (lack of standardization in general.)

(All the documentation is freely available from Microsoft, if you want to go and verify it yourself.) You could read the study manuals also, complete the labs, and you would know this (I do not work for any of these companies or have any affiliation with them, neither am I paid to write this.) All I did, was I decided I wanted to learn about this. So I became good at it as I put more effort into the learning process. You’ll learn it when you get it (as in grasp the topic firmly, as in understand it.) You can’t put a time limit on learning anyways.

Search for this for a more in depth explanation on this topic: “Spiceworks Community How Do I Learn Powershell”

OP stated the error they got in the first post “status: memory management issue.” They also said they did a scannow and that it found corrupted files, which again, points to things DISM would check. Given OP’s level of testing already, I’d assume they know to run Windows updates to make sure they are on the latest build of Windows and that they would know to update their Nvidia drivers to the latest versions.

Based on those assumptions, the memory management issue is likely NOT due to a bad 3rd party Nvidia driver and therefore, again, DISM would be checking for the correct drivers in this situation. They also stated they aren’t running overclock software and whatnot. This, again, leads to the core Windows installation or a hardware issue. So yes, DISM does check the necessary drivers within the scope of what might be responsible for the problem.

That’s great but the OP is not likely certified in any of those and as far as we know, neither are you. Again, it’s not wise for anyone to trust admin level commands given by strangers on the internet, when it’s full of megalomaniacs and harmful trolls. Just as it’s not wise to give admin level commands to a stranger, when you don’t know their level of tech literacy.

But I’m done here, not going to argue with you anymore because you’re just going to keep trying to get the last word and will keep trying to spin the conversation to make it look like you’re right, while cluttering up the conversation of people actually trying to walk the OP through the various steps of trying to fix their problem.

These types of comments are inappropriate and do not adhere to forum guidelines.

You have spammed this thread with exhaustive information that is too convoluted to be useful to most people perusing the forum. You have multiple people asking you to save this approach for a more appropriate occasion, like a Reddit discussion. What will bring an end to it? A third nudge from the staff?

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What I had wrote, had been translated into an insult by his app, which was NOT my intent in any way (I can speak some Korean btw, but I’m NOT good at it.) So I tried to apologize for the confusion.

Summary

What I did at that point was reword a lot of my answers to avoid looking like an idiot, simply because English is atonal and the app made me look like a jerk (there are certain words in English you can select that actually do better in cross-translations, that merge the ideogram system so to speak, with English. It’s like a hybrid of Korean and English grammar, which is looked down upon gravely / negatively. I could probably do both regardless of perceptions, and I should BE mindful of that.) I read A LOT of Korean news also. Some of the questions are strangely worded, but I will give direct answers if they are relevant, though I’m wondering what it’s translating it into if they are that mad (probably some of the consonants that I’m using have a hard sound, so they don’t create the soft approach that you want. I mean that’s the limitation of ugly Romanized language systems.)

I focus mainly on giving assurances that the commands work, and there are immediate results. He feels I am hiding something from him in a condescending way or tone, so I basically just showed him the comparison of what it would be like if you had to use a repair-shop technique that is common in these countries (basically how I tried very hard to make it easy, even though I showed him that every option was available to him, not just this, and I would not try to hide something and make him look stupid or inferior. I mean I would have a ton of upgrading to do to match his level of Korean, so it’s not like I’m going to do that overnight.)

I just had refuted his assertion that I was not sincerely working in his interest… I was sleeping so I just didn’t have any way to respond, and I came back and it was just INTENSE (so I tried to formulate a helpful, well-worded response, without acknowledging anything negative or inflammatory, so we could move past this, straight to the technical content, and nobody would seem like a fool any more.)

I really have to streamline this stuff obviously, especially when they pepper you with a million questions, which I would answer and be totally accountable as far as any particular end-result or use-case scenario for any of these commands or the associated command line parameters. If I could, I would share a ton of material to help anyone involved, but I just don’t have that available and formatted the way they want. I thought it was smart to hide that so it just looked super simple and cookie cutter (really fast if you want to get things done.) It’s smarter to create an external website and just link a post there, and have them use that. The forum is greatly limiting. I deleted tons of stuff just to create that walkthrough / guide, which is like a sticky post almost (but not that level of quality.) When I had copy pasted it also, it destroyed the formatting, so I’m not going to post a walkthrough again, until I start over from scratch. I did answer the billion or so questions they had about these commands, as soon as I woke up (when I have time I will.) Sort of being hyperbolic, because these are useful but the formatting only works on websites and other things, not on this forum.

Like I said, not going to post something like that until I can properly annotate it on a website external to the forums (even though everything in here works perfectly and is in fact in sequential order.)

I also answered every question they had about powershell and these commands.

Summary

Note: My Korean is in fact better than my Japanese or Chinese (Mandarin / Cantonese,) but I’m not confident enough to use it for this, as I haven’t spoken that dialect in years, I would have to spend a lot of time on it (I understand the grammar, so it’s VERY easy for me to notice stuff like this, which is why I had apologized for some sort of issue that didn’t seem obvious.)

By any chance, do you have Everia blocked? Or you can’t see that they are asking me personal questions about powershell now. That’s the only thing I have responded to (I edited the posts as required by the Blizzard staff.)

I have not replied to any of the inflammatory material in the comments.

EDIT: I Had to delete my other post as I tried to contain it all in one reply.

Please avoid fearmongering or personal attacks. I will only answer questions relating to original post.

(1.) They are not cmdlets, neither do they enable the remotesigned policy

(2.) These are default commands, not a malicious script.

(3.) Everything is safe to use, this has been verified already based on official documentation from Microsoft.

So are commands to unmount the active Windows partition and format it, which results in a bricked OS install.

I’m not personally attacking anyone, I’m stating facts. As for fearmongering, it’s absolutely justified because of what I just explained above. Seriously though, just stop doing this. It’s over, you’re just digging yourself in deeper and deeper.

I’m positive the OP just wants to solve their problem through normal means of troubleshooting.

That workflow involves:

  • Is it plugged in?
  • Is it turned on?
  • Is it overheating?
  • Are all overclocking softwares disabled and/or set back to stock values?
  • Is Windows up to date on the latest build?
  • Are drivers up to date?
  • Have the Nvidia drivers been clean installed with DDU uninstaller?
  • Have you tested disabling all startup items for 3rd party apps like RBG softwares?
  • Did a memtest report errors?
  • Do DISM/SFC scans show corruption?

After doing those things, if the problem still persists, you go into the realm of testing hardware:

  • Verify all fans are working
  • Cleaned out case and power supply with duster (take care of static electricity or wear a ground strap)
  • Physically remove+replace all PCIE cards and blow out the sockets with duster
  • Physically remove+replace all ram sticks, taking careful note of which slots they were in, clean sockets
  • Possibly redoing the thermal paste on the CPU
  • Unplugging and replugging all power cables leading to the motherboard/GPU/HDDs
  • Using software like HWInfo to poll the 3.3v 5v and 12v values to make sure they are within +/- 5% of what they should be while idle and while under load such as heavy gaming(3.14-3.67v, 4.75-5.25v, 11.4-12.6v are the typical ranges)

If all of that has been done and cleared, and the problem still persists, you start looking into either reinstalling Windows and/or replacing hardware components like the power supply. Troubleshooting is all about working from the simple things to the complicated things.

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There are no instructions to format anything, or to partition the drives.

Summary

Once again, I assure you that none of these commands that I posted on this thread, in any way shape or form, could ever do something like that. That chart I showed you just shows you how to select a swap file size (it does not partition anything.) You asked me where I had gotten it from? You had said I got it off of reddit, or I had not written it myself? I had explained that it came from a chart that I repurposed solely to change the swap file (which is a type of virtual memory.)

Virtual memory is in fact used in computer games like World of Warcraft. My guide / walkthrough does cover most aspects of the post-install configuration. This error below is an addressing error, which is indirectly related to to the swapfile / pagefile. My swapfile example is almost the same as what I use for my computers (which is based on the exact same ruleset you can find in the Microsoft documentation.) I only posted the ruleset I use for Windows, as the OP has a computer that runs Windows 10…

You brought up official instructions and commands being “safe,” and so I was just giving an example of commands you can find on the official Microsoft documentation that are “safe” but will totally brick your installation…

Microsoft does not give you EXPLICIT instructions, or any instructions to format the system drive on a running operating system.

Here’s why this is statement above is problematic, though I fully understand what you are trying to achieve with this (In general I will explain this for other people too, not just yourself.)

Summary

If you want to get into the specifics of designing a digital power supply for an MCU or CPU (any type of general purpose processor,) you have to start with the technical reference manual to get the actual supply characteristics (whether it be single or dual supply.) You cannot specify just generic ranges for ALL processors. Most of these also have on-chip voltage regulators, internal frequency reference, etc, so the ranges are determined entirely based on the input characteristics (power integrity of the entire signal chain, it’s not just the ATX power supply, every motherboard has it’s own digital SMPS / switch-mode power supply.) You can’t draw too many conclusions about one voltage range, given it’s dynamically scaled based on the processor load. To actually throttle or undervolt / overvolt, in a generic way for all processors would not work (given you have to use values from Intel’s technical reference manuals, which can be found on the Intel ARK site / app.) One thing you want to avoid is trying to undervolt or overvolt, given the processor largely manages / schedules the workload by itself (it will throttle itself based on the workload, and this is also an aspect of DYNAMIC power management.)

If you throttle it based on a voltage setting, because you think that’s a problem, it’s going to have to work really hard to get the same thing done, which in turn will just make it max out all the time, and also waste power. It has to be able to finish the workload on an acceptable timeframe to be able to switch power modes effectively (so the workload is associated with the processor type itself.) In some situations you would actually just be creating underlying issues, which actually work against your goals. There are a number of variables that determine the supply characteristics (I would check NOT ONLY the datasheets but ALSO the technical reference manuals.) The stability of the input source, depends more on the motherboard, than it does the processor itself. You would need pages upon pages of text to get into this, it’s very specific to the OEM that produces the motherboard, not so much Intel. In general, don’t do this, only use the official errata / documentation on this processor (from Intel,) which is publicly available. If you throttle it heavily, it will increase the processor workload, it will take longer to get the same job done, and it will be inefficient, just because it’s unable to scale the frequency dynamically and allocate resources accordingly (then scale back down into an intermediate or low power state.) Voltage stability and temperature stability in some ways have a lot of parallels, to change the input supply characteristics, aside from what is set by the OEM is a very dangerous. I mean you can go into every single factor which relates to trace impedance, process node, the overall die size, even just the power architecture itself and supply characteristics, one set voltage does not inform you that there is a problem by itself (it’s a digital system.)

I mean to think about this more, no two devices will be exactly the same, some might even be rebadged versions of other SKUs (which have features or cores disabled, so the supply characteristics might not tell the whole story.) You would have to have a simulator to achieve the results you want (IBIS / full wave EMF simulator.) That could take you 2 weeks easily with several 8-core processors and massive memory banks, working 24/7 (I mean for most 8-16 layer multi-layer PCBs like this. It has a lot of transceivers too just for the PCIe network, which is of course packet-switched, and in most cases uses the same encoding scheme on the PHY, as the USB / SATA channels.)

I would look at testing reactive components on the board first, like capacitors, to see if they have failed (If you’re worried about that, given they have lower temperature stability than the other components.) If you really seriously want to explore this topic, you would have to look at the technical reference manual to find acceptable voltage ranges / values for this SKU, but also the fully supply requirements (in most cases 1/3rd, or even half of the lands on the PCB could be devoted SOLELY to supply requirements. You would need a PMIC with an array of multi-channel supply sequencers, just to bootstrap the processor. For processors with a large interposer, high ball count, easily a few hundred lands could be devoted JUST to the power supply. It’s hard to say, because this is OEM-specific (and they all choose different layouts, have different target markets, most being embedded devices, maybe 2% being applications processors like this.) Changing a static input value, such as voltage, on any one of the rails, doesn’t translate directly into results, and will most likely hamper any of your efforts.) Trying to debug this based on a single reading would be ridiculous (there would be visual indicators that would be present in most cases on older motherboards. Newer ones utilize what are known as “Conductive Polymer Hybrid Aluminum Electrolytic Capacitors,” for the digital power supply, which have far greater temperature stability and in turn the lifespan of the component is greatly extended, due to the dielectric material and housing being comprised of different materials more suited to the operating environment. You would need a good ESR or LCR meter to test these, and it’s not worth getting into unless there are massive variances which would interfere with the operation of the digital power supply itself. In some cases it could result in flipped bits maybe, but it would be able to recognize this on its own.) There are too many problems with this approach, at least for it to be reliable in the short term. The datasheets and accompanying technical reference material (processor errata in general,) will list all the acceptable tolerances and ranges, based on revision / stepping / model / etc. There is no one set perfect range for everything, and that’s probably the short answer (The answer is to read a lot, make sure your decisions are informed based on the reference material, make informed decisions based on actionable information contained within the reference material.) Also recognize that the components drift in value with age, it doesn’t always matter to look at it purely based on a static value in a datasheet.

Real world values depend entirely on characterizing the device itself (there is some margin of error in these numbers stated in the reference material / datasheets.) You would have to factor in all aspects of this before proceeding or taking any steps. This is entirely outside the realm of IT work (more getting into electrical engineering, electronics technology, etc.) You couldn’t do this with some amount of intermediate design data from the OEM, some of which is proprietary, so of course you would have to go off of IBIS models (which legally you are allowed to do that, but you will still come up short because you don’t have a netlist with trace impedance values, various dimensions of the copper pours, any type of via stitching or characteristics relating to the dimensions and layouts of lands buried beneath certain layers which are not visible to the naked eye. The entire PCB stack itself follows a pattern also, could be any variation on power, ground, and signal planes, you don’t know which areas have analog and digital grounds, if it’s hidden somewhere, or what features of the processor are left unused, whether it’s routed to a ground and terminated with a bypass cap / pull up / pull down resistor, in what order you are specified to do this based on the reference documentation. You don’t know what features the OEM has enabled on the motherboard for this specific iteration.) So you’re basically done, it won’t work without a monumental amount of resources and effort, if you are after quick results that is. It’s way smarter to just look for more obvious indicators on the board itself, or try to find another indirect way of influencing the behavior of the processor (like changing the maximum frequency in the power profile on the operating system itself.)

My god, what a dumpster fire. @OP, I’m sorry your rather basic and simple request for help got turned into this uber-mess.

Can someone please, pretty please, mark this as resolved, 'cause OP already said they’re all good. More advice about advanced operating system troubleshooting isn’t needed. If this thread is going to do anything for posterity, it’s already been done, and done, and complicated more than necessary, and convoluted, then simplified, remixed, and finally blown all the hell out of proportion.

“My breaks squeak.”
“Rebuild your carburetor! Here’s a sixty-four-step process on that. While you’re at it, here’s another hundred steps on how to replace your car’s ECU!”

32 freakin’ replies and like twenty-five thousand words on this? When dude only needed to re-seat his video card and blow out some dust? Maybe upgrade their PSU?

For pete’s sake. I mean, seriously.

Done, done and done. That’s /thread unless someone wants to recommend a good PSU, per the OP’s request.

My two cents: Corsair makes great PSUs. Always trusted their brand. I currently use an 850-watt, the erm… 850X.

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You do realize I have an actual master’s in electrical engineering and have personally built things like CC/CV power supplies from scratch, right…? So please don’t try to googlesplain this topic to me.

The easiest test on a power supply supply going bad is when you max load it to whatever max conditions you need: 100% usage of CPU and GPU is good enough. If the voltage tolerances go out of that ~+/-5% range, under that load, the PS is toast for sensitive digital logic. If any of the lines are sagging at all, there’s risks of spikes/ripple/noise, but you don’t need to bother going as far as probing them with an oscilloscope. Power supplies are cheap, throw it away, buy a new one. End. Of. Story…

I tried to get them to back off, but they wouldn’t stop. Didn’t want the convoluted mess to be the last thing future people see when they use the search tool to find similar threads. It’s best to close a thread on the solution.

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Alright. Closing this down. OP has already resolved their issue on their own.

Lovebunny: Again, I appreciate your wanting to help others but it’s just too much. Many people are going to understand maybe 1/4 of what you’re talking about and then get lost in the technical terms and walls of text of information. It ends up being counterproductive many of the times and it’s definitely not the approach we would prefer on these forums.

I’d also leave an advisory when dealing anything outside of the ‘normal’ OS UI that a user sees. It’s real simple for someone to type something in wrong, or do steps out of order, and severely cause issues to the system. This ends up in the OP having more issues than they started with. Seen it one too many times. If you feel that something like that is needed it’s best to refer them to a local tech. At least that way if something goes wrong then there is liability somewhere.

In short: Keep things simple.

As for the debate of technicalities leave that out of the forums. There are plenty of other sites where that can be debated. I’m all for reading these types of debates as it fills me in on stuff I wouldn’t have time to normally look up at times, but these forums are not the place for it.

Also note that what may seem fine for one person can be offensive to another. I don’t think you have any ill-intent (or at least I’d hope so), but the manner of going about it isn’t ideal and just leads to conflict of some level.

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