A couple months ago my Valorant started crashing, sometimes immediately on launch and other times in the middle of the game. A few weeks after, this problem transferred to my other games, where Genshin (which has in the 3 years I've played, only ever crashed once) would crash suddenly. My PC also started bluescreening, which it hadn't done for months after I fixed it. I had some trouble getting my PC to be available to upgrade to Windows 11, as I thought that might solve the problem, but after I updated another problem soon appeared. As my drivers had crashed many times, I thought my GPU was the problem. And after updating, my PC no longer detected my GPU (it did, but there was a yellow triangle with an exclamation mark). I was not able to install my drivers, as they were "incompatible." I sent my GPU to get fixed, never heard back and just got a new GPU (RTX 3060ti).
After putting in the new GPU, my PC was giving me trouble. It would blue screen, give a black screen with my cursor, and in short it would not let me reach my home screen. I opted for completely wiping my PC, as it had no important files in the first place. Windows did not want to install properly, where I waited 6h as it was "resetting this PC", only to be met with "Automatic Repair, PC did not start correctly." I was finally able to solve the issue by following the second part of this tutorial:
. Immediately installed my Nvidia drivers, restarted only to blue screen with PAGE_FAULT_IN_NONPAGED_AREA (or something like that). I didn't touch anything after it restarted again, and my second monitor (which was previously not detected as I did not have the drivers installed) was finally detected and lit up. My device manager also found my GPU and drivers, which it had not previously done with my old GPU. This made me believe the issue being the GPUs fault was solved.
Scared of restarting my PC in case it crashes, I left it to sleep and the next day decided to update my BIOS. Before doing that, I did a CPU/GPU stress test, and my temperature was 70, so everything seemed fine. Updating my motherboard (ROG strix B450-F gaming) went fine too, and an RGB light which previously wasn't on started shining (idk if that matters but in my head that looked like something that previously didn't work started working.)
My screen will randomly freeze, make me unable to open anything even as I "open" something, and I am unable to install any games. My Genshin download ends in "Game files download error. Check your network settings and try again." I'm connected to the WiFi with my Ethernet cable, and retrying the download prompts the same error note and the 3h installation restarts. My StarRail tells me "Game files verification error" and tells me to try again. My Valorant installation sends me into a loop of restarting my PC, and restarting my PC sometimes causes a BSOD, other times tells me (again) that it needs a restart, despite the fact that I just restarted. It will also tell me a Secure Boot is needed, even as I've set it as such in my BIOS. It will sometimes also send me to the blue Recovery page, where it tells me my "Windows didn't load correctly."
My blue screens in general say either CRITICAL_PROCESS_DIED or the KERNEL one. I've done the CHKDSK and other scans in my Command Prompt.
I don't know what the problem could be or what else to try. My hardware should be all good, is this a Windows problem? Please help me :c
