Me too; it’s BECAUSE I’m so old that I appreciate a general rooting what this is all about.

Thanks for the unappreciated ELI2

I came to a very similar conclusion recently: https://lemmy.world/comment/11880279

Let’s hope that Brazil creates a mass-movement that makes it easier to follow. Aren’t they even like the world majority in Portuguese?

Everything here points to a hardware problem, yet I had a similar issue that also was “fixed” by keeping a game running in background, and it turned to be out 100 % software. (Not fixed by putting the SSD into an entirely different system, but fixed by complete reinstall.)

Also found this in my bookmarks, but it didn’t help back then, and OP never got it solved either: https://forums.tomshardware.com/threads/pc-freezes-when-not-playing-games.3731029/

My freeze did not have your odd reset problems. Its own oddity was that often it was a semi-zombie-freeze, in that I could sometimes even type text into an open editor and open menus, but nothing ever happened, saved or executed.

By the way, I also made a program that keeps one CPU core only busy at 100 % in a lowest priority thread. IIRC, it worked. public class Busy { public static void main(String... args) { int i = 0; Thread.currentThread().setPriority(Thread.MIN_PRIORITY); while (true) { i = (i << 3) ^ i; } } } (With a JDK installed: javac Busy.java && java Busy)

I used to have a very similar problem also with freezers that do not occur when a game is running even in the background. I also followed dead ends such as CPU state issues and so on.

The biggest breakthrough came after several years when I took the entire SSD out of the laptop and put it into a desktop PC with entirely different hardware and booted the same Windows there. The problem still occurred!

A complete Windows reinstall fixed it for good.