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On why you should troubleshoot everything. Part 3

 Hello everyone.

Man, 23rd entry already. Time flies fast, eh? Hope you keep reading for this last stretch.

Today marks the the third part of this small retelling of mine, and I'm the most surprised it took this long to get to the point.

Anyway, I mentioned all of these entries emerged thanks to what happened two days ago. Imagine the scene for a bit. There is me, sitting comfortably in front of my computer, getting to enjoy a couple of games. And suddenly, everything went to hell.

Screen froze, keyboard irresponsive. "Fuck" I think. I restart, POST does not reach again. A couple of reboots after it works again.

My first thought was that I had kicked something out of place. 20 minutes of reseating components and I try again. I do a couple of tests in a high end game, everything seems fine. I switch to the game that crashed, and lo and behold, it crashes again.

At that moment, I was quick to place the blame to the game. It was notorious for having bugs, not only that one, buit all the PC ports, so I figured it was a localized issue. Of course it wasn't, I mean, I'm using it as a basis for a story, but I didn't know at that moment.

Hours later, I login in an MMO to do the dailies, and surprise. It crashes. Just to make sure, I try again, and again. Not only it crashed every time, it seemed to need less time to crash each time.

I panic. I tried each of the three PCI-e slots for the card, not change. I reseat the RAM. I try to lower the graphics to a minimum. I readjust the cables, change PSU. Nothing.

I start cursing everything, as I had imported the card and I had o idea of how the refund policy worked.

I stay mad for a couple more of hours, browsing internet as fortunately everything else besides gaming was working, when the scales fall from my eyes.

"It can't be that simple." I start while doing what I should have tried from the very beginning. Those of you with more experience would already identify what essential step I omitted from my troubleshooting, seeing how it had never in my life been an issue. And of course that one step was the one to solve everything.

Two words. Fucking. Drivers.

Yeah, between my first boot and that day, there were a couple of driver updates. As I said above, I never in my life got a problem where the drivers were at fault, so it was easy for me to ignore them.

One small download of a NVIDIA studio driver, and I no longer had problems. I even downloaded a couple benchmarks, put everything in ultra for hours, and like magic it was still stable.

And there you have it. I hope this cautionary tale helps someone in the future. Don't be like me folks. Or you'll waste hours of your life.

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