It proved crucial that for a long time I didn’t have a single crash: this stability helped me to guess probable reasons why suddenly crashes started to appear almost regularly! My first thought was that perhaps some of the recent Windows Updates introduced bugs. In such a case, the only prudent way for me to react was to just be patient and wait for the next update that would fix everything. But what if the problem did not come from an update? Is there anything else changed in my PC recently?

Two important changes were made before the sudden crashes and restarts appeared. First, I changed my Kingston 120GB SSD, with Samsung 860 Evo 500GB SSD. Usually a disk won’t introduce such system problems.

The other critical change I made to my PC recently was the removal of an old graphics card; I now started to use the Intel Graphics provided by the CPU. This too shouldn’t be a cause of problem, but what if it messed somehow with system settings? I opened the power options in Windows Control Panel and saw that Intel Graphics changed my plan from “Balanced (recommended)” to “Power saver”. I thought then that perhaps Intel Graphics caused the crashes trying to turn off my Dell U2713H monitor or my disks (I have both of them always on and I turn off the monitor only when I want, using Super Sleep). Reverting to my customized Balanced plan, allowing my monitor to remain on until I decide to manually activate power save mode, proved a saver of my whole system, because I didn’t suffer crashes anymore!

Therefore, if you face a similar problem, try to recall what you have changed in your PC recently and be aware that this sort of problems may very well come from hardware related issues. Check also this post on how to resolve BSOD errors (bad pool header, kernel security check failure, etc).