My PC has a blue/black screen

A blue screen (BSOD) or a system crash can be caused by a number of things and may need to be investigated by an NZXT support agent or Microsoft's own support staff. Listed below are some things to look out for and to try that may either resolve your issue or diagnose it further.

Windows updates 

Making sure your windows operating system is up to date is an easy first step in troubleshooting a Blue screen or crashing issue. 

Overlocking

Overclocking your computer past the system's recommended specifications can potentially cause system instability and result in BSODS or Crashes. This would potentially include setting an XMP profile for your ram. Any overclocked settings can be reset in your motherboards bios by loading the "optimized default settings" of the bios. Any third party software used to overclock like MSI Afterburner would need to be disabled within the software itself. 

Windows defender

Running a windows defender scan for any potential viruses can be very helpful at times to ensure your system is clean of any malicious software.

Running windows SFC and DISM

To run a system file check (SFC)

Go to start>Type CMD

Right-click and Run as Administrator

(called an elevated command prompt)

If you want to verify and repair the OS type sfc /scannow (note the space between sfc and "/"

You may have to run this up to 3 times to fix all the problems

When you have finished it will say one of three things

Windows did not find any integrity violations (a good thing)

Windows Resource Protection found corrupt files and repaired them (a good thing)

Windows Resource Protection found corrupt files but was unable to fix some (or all) of them (not a good thing)  If you get this message run DISM as described below

DISM

Go to start>Type CMD

Right-click and Run as Administrator

You can run Check, then Scan, but you should always run RESTORE HEALTH

To RESTORE health (recommended)

Use DISM /Online /Cleanup-Image /restorehealth to scan the image for component store corruption, perform repair operations automatically, and records that corruption to the log file.  This generally takes 15-30 minutes depending on the corruption and size of the partition

Type DISM /Online /Cleanup-Image /RestoreHealth . (please note the space after "dism", & "online" & "image")
If the repair is successful you may want to re-run SFC just to check.

After running DISM it is a good idea to re-run SFC /scannow to make sure all the issues were fixed.

Reliability monitor 

Reliability Monitor is a great tool to see if any specific software may be causing issues with your system. Any of the red X's indicate a potential failure in software, drivers, hardware, etc. It is normal to see a few issues here or there but we want to keep an eye out for consistent failures with the same error code. Dealing with the issue can depend on what the failure specifically is but if you see a consistent failure concerning a specific software you may want to uninstall it and see how the system runs without it. You may also want to contact the specific software support team. Feel free to screenshot what you are seeing and send it to an NZXT support agent or Microsoft support. 

DMP files

If you are still getting a Blue screen the team will need to gather information regarding your specific Blue screen.

All Blue screens will populate a minidump file, however, not all crashes will. If your crash is not populating a minidump file please move onto step number 7.

This is a general procedure on how to find and upload the files we need in order for us to help you repair your computer.

When your computer crashes with a Blue Screen Of Death (or BSOD) the events leading up to the crash are held in memory until you restart your computer when they are written to a file (called a DMP file).  

How to find and upload the files to us for analysis

The procedure for finding and uploading the DMP files:

Navigate to C:\Windows\Minidump and drag the contents to your desktop. If the minidump folder is not there or empty there may be a larger DMP file located at C:\WINDOWS called MEMORY.DMP which we can also use.  If you have minidumps use them FIRST, and only upload the full dump file (MEMORY.DMP) if there are no minidumps.  It is faster for you to upload and faster for us to download

Zip up the files using the built-in compression on win 10 WinZip/WinRAR on other operating systems. We prefer the 3 most recent DMP files but if you have less we can still look at them.  

Upload them to a file sharing service like dropbox or google drive and submit it to our support team by opening a ticket here https://www.nzxt.com/customer-support

Troubleshooting

If there is no "minidump" folder, or if the folder is empty make sure "minidumps" are enabled.

Under the Write Debugging Information, use "automatic memory dump"

Ensure that the Small Dump Directory is listed as %systemroot%\Minidump.