I hate problems like this, but I've had one or two odd erratic problems over the years and I've been surprised how many of them are sorted out by improving the airflow/cooling to the mobo. (CPU temperature sensors don't help tell you what the mobo components are doing.) You say you've cleared out dust bunnies, but, for example, would moving the PC by a couple of inches allow just a little more airflow in? I've even had video glitches appear in hot weather that just went away when I opened a window!

Good luck getting it sorted.

Or even better, if you have a flash drive you could load ubuntu onto a flash drive, boot from the flash media, and load some programs, do some cpu stress tests, etc and see if anything strange happens. If not, then you might be able to safely point to software and/or driver issue as the problem, and not hardware.

Can you provide any description of the blue screens other than the fact that they occur? They usually have a very specific error message and/or error code.

Hi, thanks for your posts. I'm responding here to several, approximately in the order in which they were made.

I don't think it's an airflow problem. There are five, 120mm fans in that homebuilt PC: 1 rear exhaust, 2 top exhaust, 1 bottom intake, and 1 front intake. I've also tried it with the side panel off. There is ample space around the PC itself. I've been using it since 2011, when OEM Win7 was originally installed, and got the free upgrade to Win10.

It has an Asus M5A87 mobo, AMD FX6300 processor, and 16GB memory.

The blue screens appear consistently 13 minutes (timed with a timer) after booting to the desktop - if doing nothing (meaning no tasks or running programs). If I boot and then do something, such as Windows updates, get a document, do a scan, etc., more time passes before the blue screen occurs, but eventually, it does. It could be a driver issue, but I also have alot of programs on that computer.

I've tried a clean boot, disabling startup programs through MSConfig, without success. I'm afraid it could possibly be a constellation or group of programs that's causing the blue screen, not just one or two.

I would not mind re-installing Windows clean, but that would mean having to re-install programs, and I'd like to wait to see if the major fall update might resolve the problem. I've repaired other computers (not mine, other people's) with Win10 issues with, and when, Windows 10 updates were installed.

I did restore back to April, to a spare hard drive, but after about a week, the blue screens came back. This was after I tried the clean boot, uninstalling the antivirus, and making other changes that were too numerous to undo and redo. I could do that again, but I'm thinking I'd like to try the update this fall, first.

So I'm leery of making more changes again that I can't undo, and which might make the problem worse in some way, when the fall Win 10 major update might fix it. And I am hesitant to make an Acronis backup now, before making changes, to be able to restore the state before the changes. Because if the blue screen comes on while writing to the backup hard drive, I might lose access to the backup hard drive completely. Because it takes more than 13 minutes to backup.

Safe mode works without any blue screens.

MemTest86 reveals no memory problems, as did Microsoft's memory test.

I have tried swapping out the power supply, video card, monitor, monitor cable, keyboard and mouse, with no luck. They have been Win10 compatible up to and including 1709. When I rolled back to April backup, it was 1709 that was installed, and that worked for awhile, but that, too, started giving blue screens, when it did not before.

I will try Knoppix on the PC to see if there are any hardware issues and check functionality, as well as check the temperatures with HWInfo64, which is installed. I can also check the memory dump files and try the WinDBG program. I think the WinDBG program is the one the Ten Forums BSOD forum said to use. I've got it on that PC's desktop, but haven't gotten around to running it yet. I will also copy whatever error code I see on the blue screen, although I don't see how to do the square bar code (I don't have a smartphone).

I've recently discovered mice in the house, so I'm thinking a mouse might have gotten to one of the cables, which I am going to check and inspect.

I'm not sure, but I don't think power management is involved, as I've set that PC to run all the time without powering down, sleeping, or going into hibernation in any way. I never manually put it to sleep or hibernate, and manually restarted it every 4-6 days. It has run that way without any problems for years, and I specifically set the PC like that for World Community Grid work. It's powered off now, because of the blue screen issue, and only powered on manually when I need it for a quick task or to try more troubleshooting.

As for my patience with PCs, I also work part-time for a social service agency refurbishing, repairing and troubleshooting Windows desktops and laptops for the agency's clients, and so have some experience with Windows 10 issues.