For a while my PC hangs & freezes all of a sudden, about once every 2 days.

It seems most of the times when closing a hard disk folder or program by clicking the (red) X right upper corner. The lot crashes shown a frozen blue circle, appearing on a mouse click there, and nothing goes then, no reaction from mouse, keyboard, or pressing ALT-DEL-CNRTL. Needs a hardware cold-boot. Maybe i can change some settings in the (latest) BIOS of my ASUS x99 mainboard?

The BIOS is capable of a lot of tweaks for gaming, but i left all standard, only turned onboard audio and WIFI are switched off, (latter releases an extra PCIe slot that way).

Cold booting doesn't show any errors after boot-up, PC runs smoothly after a fresh boot, and nothing i can find in windows log files. Not really USB drive related but with SATA, could be SSD related maybe. 2 Samsung SSD 850 pro's, the most reliable they say. Over provisioning active, and latest firmware installed.

So far done: Windows cleanup, SFC /scannow (100% OK), reinstalled graphics (AMD Radeon) thoroughly by removing drivers & cleanup thereof. Reinstalled all needed VC basics, done memory hard ware test, Checkdisk on the used drives, Antivirus and spyware testing, CCleaner registry check. Reinstalled audio too, but i think it has to do with Windows (64bit) itself.

The only real change i made is giving up totally on Office 2016/365, bought it, but had constant (license) problems with it, and use Soffice now instead; doubt if that's the reason.

A while before these crashes started i updated my Mainboards' BIOS, checked Chipset drivers, but the PC ran smoothly for at least 2 months.

Any idea's from experts on windows 10 welcome! thnx, F

Your efforts seem very thorough.

Have you tried Blue Screen View to see what kind of message you can get? https://www.nirsoft.net/utils/blue_screen_view.html

Have you tried a utility like Speccy that will show you the temperature of all components?

Nope, but thanks for the tip. As these crashes are relatively rare, it will take some time to report back ... F

Blue Screen View will, I think, read the last crash file that's already there before it was installed. Try it anyway.

Done: alas my Windows/MiniDump folder was empty .... nothing to see. But i read somewhere that these crashes are since a windows 10 update, and MS*ck (sorry, couldn't resist) blames AMD (my RADEON R7 360 graphics card) not being able to cope with their unanounced 'update'. Q: Why? i keep windows update switched off in services, so it shouldn't be the cause. Just found a 3 days old AMD driver update, will try it out now- F

ADDED Info: the latest AMD updated drivers from early march seem to be my PC's salvation. Read somewhere that the same kind of crashes can happen with NVDIA hardware; moral, get the latest graphics drivers (and choose basic, don't use them games tweaking options). BUT ALAS: the occasional dropout stuttering of Windows 10 is back, see here: BIAB thread on audio problems in Windows 10 .