Hi everyone,
I’m having a frustrating issue with my PC’s RAM, and I’m hoping someone can help me figure out what’s causing it.
My PC has 16 GB of DDR4 RAM installed, but Windows shows that 8.1 GB is reserved for hardware, leaving only around 7.9 GB usable. This is a huge problem when gaming, since 8 GB of usable RAM isn’t enough for some games, especially when Windows and other background applications are running at the same time.
As a result, my games sometimes freeze or become unresponsive, and overall performance is worse than I would expect from my hardware.
My PC specifications:
CPU: AMD Ryzen 7 2700X
GPU: AMD Radeon RX 580 8 GB
RAM: 16 GB DDR4 (2 x 8 GB)
Motherboard: ASRock B450 Steel Legend
OS: Windows 11
Windows recognizes the full 16 GB of installed RAM, but approximately half of it is marked as hardware reserved in Task Manager. My memory is installed in slots A2 and B2 (the second and fourth slots), which should be the recommended configuration for dual-channel memory.
I’ve also checked the Windows power plan and some BIOS settings, but I haven’t been able to solve the problem. I couldn’t find an obvious BIOS option to reduce the hardware-reserved memory.
My questions are:
What could cause 8.1 GB of RAM to be hardware reserved on this system?
Is this more likely to be a BIOS setting, a memory-mapping issue, a faulty RAM stick, or a motherboard/CPU problem?
Are there any specific BIOS settings I should check on the ASRock B450 Steel Legend?
How can I troubleshoot this without unnecessarily replacing components?
I’d really appreciate any suggestions. I’d prefer to fix the problem myself if possible rather than take the PC to a repair shop.

I have 8gb ram total on my windows 11 laptop and its running 64 bit but I only have 3gb available with literally nothing open except task manager, I barely have anything downloaded and have no startup apps on so I have no idea why its like this

My laptop was working perfectly fine, but out of nowhere it stopped connecting to Wi-Fi. I went to my college library and couldn’t connect to either my phone’s hotspot or the school’s free Wi-Fi. I haven’t gotten home yet, so I don’t know if my home Wi-Fi will work.

Troubleshooting I’ve tried:
Reset my network settings in Windows.
Restarted my laptop. The Wi-Fi option disappeared after the network reset but came back after restarting.
Looked into possible DNS issues and tried troubleshooting with Command Prompt (ipconfig /flushdns and ipconfig /registerdns).
Checked the eero app my mom uses. My laptop shows as offline but isn’t blocked.

Everything was working fine before this happened, and I have no idea what caused it. Has anyone experienced this or knows what else I should try?

My 6 year old laptop is running slow when multiple widows are opened or when downloading docs. I need multiple windows open and I download and save docs on my PC all the time for my job. Is there something I can do to help this or should I be looking into getting a new lap top, I have already added more ram. Specs below

Lap Top Aspire A515-55

Processor Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-1035G1 CPU @ 1.00GHz (1.19 GHz)

Installed RAM 36.0 GB (35.8 GB usable)

Graphics card Intel(R) UHD Graphics (128 MB)

Storage 132 GB of 238 GB used

Device ID 89649533-71BF-4395-8B8F-7494DA355DD9

Product ID 00325-81686-59841-AAOEM

System type 64-bit operating system, x64-based processor

Pen and touch No pen or touch input is available for this display

Hello all,

I have a Kingston KDK8NX-HYC 16g stick with hynix chips and I was wondering if it would work if I placed it in an HP Pavilion x360 m Convertible 14m-dw1023dx.

Looks like the stick and laptop both are ddr4 based on Amazon, and this laptop should have a 2nd slot for a ram upgrade. Just dont know if im wrong anywhere

I am very new to all of this pc stuff so please excuse me if this is not the place for this question

So at 1 in the morning I git hit by a massive nasty virus attack. 100% Trojans, possibly Spyware but im not sure.

I secured all my accounts, ran a deep scan and bitdefender several times before hard resetting and formatting the pc. Re installing windows and all. I have now changed all passwords and enabled all possible mfa's.

Do it still need to watch out for a possible second attempt or can I go to sleep being secured?

Hey everyone,
Hoping someone here can help me diagnose an ongoing issue with my PC because it’s getting to the point where it’s seriously affecting my work.
I’m a full-time photographer/videographer and primarily use Adobe Premiere Pro, Photoshop and Lightroom.
Earlier this year, I upgraded from a much older PC to a brand new custom built system. I purchased it in March 2026 from a reputable PC builder here in Australia.

PC SPECS:
CPU: AMD Ryzen 7 7800X3D
CPU Cooler: Thermalright 240 ARGB Liquid Cooler
GPU: NVIDIA RTX 5070 12GB
RAM: 32GB DDR5 6000MHz
Motherboard: MSI B650M Gaming WiFi
PSU: 750W Cooler Master ATX 3.1
Storage: 2TB Biwin M350 NVMe SSD
OS: Windows 11 Home
Case: Cataclysm Voyager Black Tower with 6 case fans

Initial Problems
Pretty much ever since I purchased the PC, I’ve experienced occasional crashes, predominantly when using Adobe Premiere Pro.
Initially, the crashes would happen when doing things like:
- Importing or transferring files in and out of Premiere Pro.
- Scrubbing through timelines.
- Working with larger video projects.
- General editing and playback.

When I say crashing, I mean the entire PC instantly shuts off. No blue screen, no error message, no warning. Everything immediately loses power, including the fans and RGB lighting.

I contacted the PC manufacturer, and after some troubleshooting, they remotely disabled the CPU’s integrated graphics.

This actually seemed to improve things significantly. The crashes became much less frequent, although they would still happen occasionally.

For a while, I just dealt with it because it wasn’t happening often enough to seriously interrupt my workflow.

Recent Problems — Much Worse
Over the last month or two, the problem has progressively gotten worse, particularly over the last couple of weeks.
It’s now happening almost daily, sometimes multiple times in a single editing session.
One of the strangest things I’ve noticed is that closing an Adobe application and then reopening it seems to trigger a complete system shutdown.

For example:
- I’ll be working in Premiere Pro.
- I’ll close the application normally.
- I’ll try to reopen Premiere Pro.
- The entire PC instantly switches off.
- I’ll turn the PC back on.
- If I immediately try opening Premiere again, the PC will often shut off again.
- However, if I leave the PC sitting idle for a few minutes after restarting, I can usually open Premiere without it immediately crashing.

This behaviour is extremely consistent.

It’s No Longer Just Premiere Pro
Initially, the problem was almost exclusively happening in Premiere Pro.
However, recently I’ve experienced the same complete shutdowns when:
- Exporting photographs in Adobe Lightroom (regular Lightroom, not Classic).
- Opening Adobe Photoshop.
- Opening or reopening Premiere Pro.
- Editing and scrubbing through timelines.
- I’ve also experienced occasional crashes outside Adobe applications, although I’d estimate that around 95% of them occur while using Adobe software.

Most Recent Incident
Today, I was doing some relatively intensive editing in Premiere Pro when the entire application appeared to freeze.
My screen then went completely black, but interestingly, the PC itself remained powered on.
After a short period, the display returned, but Premiere Pro was no longer functioning properly. I couldn’t get video playback working.
This was different from my usual crashes, where the entire system instantly loses power.
I’ve also experienced instances where the computer completely freezes, including the mouse becoming unresponsive.
During one of these freezes, I held the physical power button to force a shutdown, but it took approximately 35 seconds for the PC to actually turn off.

Troubleshooting So Far
I’ve contacted the PC manufacturer about the issue previously.
They initially disabled integrated graphics, which significantly reduced the frequency of crashes but never completely eliminated them.
We’ve also performed stress testing on the PC, and everything appeared to run normally without crashing.
Unfortunately, I don’t remember exactly which stress-testing software was used.
What confuses me is that the PC can apparently handle stress tests without any problems, yet something as simple as reopening Photoshop or Premiere can cause it to instantly lose power.

My Questions
I’m trying to work out whether this is potentially:
- A faulty or unstable power supply.
- A GPU or graphics driver issue.
- Improperly seated or unstable DDR5 RAM.
- A motherboard issue.
- Something specifically related to Adobe applications and hardware acceleration.

The instant loss of power makes me wonder about the PSU,

The fact that the system often needs to sit idle for a few minutes after restarting before I can successfully launch Adobe applications is also really confusing.

Has anyone experienced anything similar?

Are there any specific diagnostic tests, Windows logs or hardware checks you’d recommend to help narrow down the actual cause?

The PC is still under warranty, but I’d ideally like to identify the issue before having to ship the entire computer interstate for repairs.

Any advice would be massively appreciated. I’m relying on this computer for my full-time work, and the constant crashes are becoming a serious problem.

In 10/27/2026, facebook opened for me randomly out of nowhere, i dont know what is the cause, why its there, and when i checked task manager, it was in microsoft edge, and even when i restarted my laptop, its still there.. My laptop is an acer laptop, and it only just started happening now.. I'm not sure if this is a virus or something else, but it would also be better if some people had same experiences telling me what to do. It started when i was playing SKlauncher's minecraft, then facebook opened once, and i thought that it was a simple missclick, but it opened again, and 4 more times.. please help me, my family cant afford to get me a new laptop, ive scanned it with microsoft defender, and it says theres nothing wrong with my laptop,

i am actually so stressed out i dont know what to do. im panicking send help please

Same as title. I was running the offline scan after I found and removed two threats (hack32 or something in the windows system files) during the quick scan.

It started to restart for the scan (it said it’ll take about 15 minutes and I’ll need to be logged out) and in about less than thirty seconds it showed me a completely blue screen and it said that I need to repair my PC so I tried all the options available to me (trying to launch it again, F1 F8 etc I don’t remember what to else was available) and finally my computer turned off and then I pressed the power button and it’s switched on normally.

I don’t think the defender offline scan was complete, since I can only see the last scan being the full scan I did a day before. So I don’t know if there’s still malware files. Can someone guide me through this?

Hello! So I just updated my graphics driver a night or two ago and started facing that issue going around of the screen going black suddenly on 621.01. Since then I decided to roll back to the former driver I had that was actually performing decently well, but, now I'm noticing slight freezes every once in a while during gaming as well as a consistent error in event viewer. To give a quick rundown of my specs before I get to the error they are as follows

W11 KB5127648

GeForce 5060 ti

Intel I7-14700f

32gb of ram

WD Green SN3000 2TB SSD

As for the error in question in task manager when I notice these little hitches it says the following

Fault bucket , type 0
Event Name: LiveKernelEvent
Response: Not available
Cab Id: 0

Problem signature:
P1: 141
P2: aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa
P3: aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa
P4: aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa
P5: aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa
P6: 10_0_26300
P7: 0_0
P8: 768_1
P9: 
P10: 

I apologize if this isn't enough to really help solve it right away but any and all help on figuring out what's going wrong on this would be appreciated! Or potential troubleshooting steps to solve it a little better

So, when I play basically any video game, every minute or so a frame from a few moments ago very briefly appears. The weirdest part about it is it's usually a frame from a menu, loading screen etc. and very rarely, if ever, a frame from the actual gameplay. It happens in almost every game and play and completely ruins the experience. Please help.

I'm using Linux mint, 5070, and have updated graphic drivers.

So for over a year now my computer doesn't show my previously connected Bluetooth devices it shows new devices but not previous not anywhere they still connect but I can't forget them, I can't try to connect to them, and I can't disconnect them. I've searched everywhere for help but I've found nothing on this problem. I've tried restarting, I've tried scanning. the cmd SFC/scannow gets to 6% and then fails. The cmd DISM/online/cleanup-image/restorehealth doesn't work and I can't reset my computer because my storage is too high to redownload windows from the cloud and trying to do it locally always fails I have nothing downloaded on my computer either I don't know what's taking up all the storage.

I don't own a wifi card.

* The cable is well connected.

* both light on.

* I've restarted the computer a couple times and I've been having this issue for a few days.

* It's a recent windows install, all drivers are updated

* It works normally on my other OS.

Please help

So as my post states I've been having bluetooth audio issues for a while now. That seem to come and go at random. The steps I have taken are, fresh install of windows 11, windows 11 repair install, fresh driver for the gpu, I did notice that during the reinstall I had to redownload wifi and bluetooth drivers which I got directly from the mobo's support page and ran the asus-setup exe in both. Those instantly popped up after doing so. Now as for the headphones, Im using my sony 1000xm3's and I have disabled the mic on them as some games like helldivers 2 will activate and then the audio quality tanks when it switched to "headset/telephone mode". I then checked the headphones with other devices like my steam deck and phone and don't have the crackle on either. Does anyone have any suggestions I could try? Even connected a bluetooth speaker to my pc and it doesn't suffer from the audio crackle so I think its how the pc is reading the headphones maybe like a communication device when I don't need it do that.

PC Specs:
Ryzen 5 9600x
Asus Tuf x670e wifi
9070XT
32GB ddr5 corsair ram for amd

For my class our group came up with an idea for a laptop case that can charge your laptop. Think of it as a portable charger, but it’s still a case, so it still offers some protection while also being able to charge. Now this is only hypothetical and difficult to make, but my only question is, IF it was a real possibility, where it was safe, effective and affordable would it be worth buying in your opinion.

Hey everyone,
My PC randomly wakes up from sleep mode a few minutes after I put it down. I've completely hit a wall trying to fix it.
When it happens, running powercfg /lastwake returns Wake History Count - 1, Wake Source Count - 0. It shows absolutely nothing anymore—just a completely blank footprint.
My Setup:
Motherboard: ASRock B850 LiveMixer WiFi
Direct to Motherboard: Razer BlackWidow V3 Pro keyboard, XLR Audio Mixer
On a USB Switcher: Razer Basilisk V2 mouse, USB Headset
front panel: powered USB hub with on off button(it’s off)
Everything I have already disabled:
Peripherals: Disabled wake permissions for my DisplayPad in Device Manager. Before anyone says anything mouse and keyboard have been tried and it didn’t fix anything so I enabled them again bc I want to have them to wake up pc . Generic USB hub checkboxes are greyed out ("stone").
Network: Disabled "Wake on Pattern Match" and completely unchecked "Allow this device to wake" on my Realtek 2.5GbE network adapter.
Windows Settings: Turned off Scheduled Maintenance wake timers.

Could this be a hardware grounding issue with my XLR mixer/front hub, or a hidden Windows Update task bypassing my settings? Any advice appreciated!

Hi I have asus tuf gaming b850 plus wifi mobo. Wondering if anyone had any problems with this Version 1804 bios update. Currently runnin release from July 16?? With no issues but thinking should I flash it? Cpu 9850x3d and corsair vengeance 6000mhz ddr5

I set an alarm with alarmy at 3 am last night at 1 and i didn't wake up to it, instead i woke up at 8, and my Iphone was dead (it was charging throughout the entire night), I think the alarm went off and i didnt wake up to it, and kept going and killed my phone faster than it charged, and the phone wont turn on if i charge it anymore just gives the low battery signal what do i do? I genuinely think the phone is dying faster than it charges

js tryna play terreria for the first time how do i remove this weird bar? Its been here for 4-5 months and it says my fps, my gpu% its hear, how many mhz, how many volts, my fan rotations watts and mhz, my cpu usage and my lat (it stays on anything not js this it js really affects me now tho)

Title: Wireless mouse left click gets stuck or stops working (on PC and iPad). Any way to fix it?

Hi everyone,

I bought a wireless keyboard + mouse combo The mouse had problems right out of the box:

- The left click gets stuck (as if it's being held down,but its not) or doesn't register at all
- When it's stuck, the whole PC acts weird: menus don't highlight on hover, some apps won't open, and the touchpad stops clicking too
- Sometimes the right click fails as well
- Ctrl+Alt+Del releases it temporarily, but it comes back

What I've already tried:
- Fully charged the battery
- Different USB ports for the receiver
- Turned the mouse off and on, re-paired it
- Uninstalled/reinstalled the HID drivers and updated everything through Dell's support tool (Windows 11, Dell G15)
- Checked ClickLock and primary button settings
- Tested it over Bluetooth on an iPad, and the same problem happens there

Thanks in advance!

Hi all,

Has anyone seen a recent Windows update cause issues with users connecting to internal WPA2-Enterprise / AD-authenticated Wi-Fi networks?

We are seeing affected devices connect successfully after applying a registry-based workaround related to Windows authentication settings.

We are also seeing Microsoft Teams require reinstallation on first login after the update.

Has anyone experienced similar issues this week, and if so was there an identified root cause or Microsoft advisory?

A while back my old user file got corrupted so I had to make a whole new user profile and shift all my files there. Since the old user file took alot of space, I deleted everything in it but since then my bluetooth and graphic card has not been working at all. I tried uninstalling bluetooth from the device manager, restarted my pc but nothing appeared. And I have no idea what to do with my graphic card situation. I am not a tech person at all, nor I do know the terms. What should I do?

Update: fixed!

So I just booted up my computer, and found that AVG had 'kindly' reinstalled its browser. I uninstalled it without any issues, thankfully, but I know that I've uninstalled it before, and I can't find any option to get AVG to not automatically reinstall it (and it also doesn't ALWAYS reinstall it on startup, so I'm not sure if it just happens when something updates or something). Either way, I don't want to have to uninstall that waste of drive space each time it decides I need it, so is there any way to permanently stop it from getting reinstalled without removing AVG (it's the only good free antivirus I know and semi-trust)

Windows System: 11, Mind you I live in a small town in the middle of a desert basically. GPU: AMD i forget the rest.

I dont think ive ever seen this before on my pc, can someone identify it for me? I am running windows 11