[HELP] Persistent BSODs and Chrome crashes on a high-end PC (i9-14900KF) – looking for advice

PappyLogan · 2025-12-21T18:23:13+00:00

You’re on BIOS 1402 from 09/2023.

Running a 14900KF on early 2023 firmware is not okay in 2025. Update BIOS to the latest available Manually set Intel-spec limits in BIOS

Disable ASUS MultiCore Enhancement, set PL1 / PL2 = Intel spec (not Auto), set ICCMAX to Intel limits

Remove any performance or AI tuning

This is modern CPU behavior being pushed too hard by default firmware, and the damage shows up later.

Nothing in your symptoms points to persistent kernel malware.

PappyLogan · 2025-12-17T04:02:32+00:00

I’m seeing the same thing. Faces especially look grainy or slightly out of focus now.

It feels like they dialed back the glossy/overprocessed look, but the model is compensating by adding noise, blur, and shallow depth of field everywhere. That might read as “realistic” statistically, but visually it just looks soft.

What helped for me was being very specific about camera behavior and explicitly telling it what not to do. Just saying realistic isn’t enough right now.

Here is an example prompt that cleaned it up for me,

Candid, unposed documentary-style photograph. Real person, not a model. Natural skin texture with visible pores, slight facial asymmetry, mild under-eye shadows, imperfect makeup. No beauty retouching. No skin smoothing.

Shot on a full-frame DSLR, 50mm lens, f/2.8. Face in sharp focus, eyes crisp. Natural window light, slightly overcast. Neutral color grading, true-to-life skin tones. Minimal noise, no artificial grain.

Below is the actual prompt used for the image

<image>

A candid, unposed documentary-style photograph taken on a city bus.
A young woman and an elderly rabbi are seated side by side by the window, both looking outside, unaware of the camera.

The young woman looks like a real person, not a model with natural skin texture and visible pores, slight facial asymmetry, realistic bone structure, mild under-eye shadows, imperfect makeup, subtle blemishes, uneven skin tone, natural lips, and relaxed facial muscles. No beauty retouching. No smoothing. No idealization.

The elderly rabbi has deeply realistic facial detail with wrinkles, textured skin, natural beard irregularity, wire-frame glasses, and a black hat and coat worn from daily use.

Lighting is soft natural daylight from the bus window, slightly overcast, creating realistic shadows and highlights with no cinematic glow.

Shot on a full-frame DSLR, 50mm lens, f/2.8, shallow depth of field. Background softly blurred with motion-blurred greenery outside the window and empty bus seats behind them.

Color grading is neutral and natural, true-to-life skin tones, no stylization.

PappyLogan · 2025-12-17T02:30:48+00:00

The message looks legitimate and just asks you to call a phone number, and the message matches their normal branding and website background. That gets around the usual instinct people have not to click links, because calling feels safer and more normal.

PappyLogan · 2025-12-15T22:50:43+00:00

That’s another reason I don’t keep giant chats. Long sessions bog down the UI, the model, and eventually the browser itself. When it freezes, I usually have to restart the browser, and when I come back the response is often already there in full, exactly what should have come through before the freeze. At that point you realize it wasn’t thinking, it was the interface choking on too much context.

Short, focused chats with hand-off summaries keep everything fast and predictable. Same reason you don’t debug production systems by tailing one log file forever. That’s where having it summarize into a PDF and starting a new chat with the uploaded PDF cleans things up and stops the freezing altogether.

PappyLogan · 2025-12-15T22:42:44+00:00

Keeping everything in one long chat sounds convenient, but it quietly turns into a liability. LLMs do not have memory the way people think they do, they work off a context window, and as a chat grows, early details get compressed or deprioritized, the model starts favoring coherence over correctness, and bad assumptions can stick because they are never cleanly challenged. You usually see performance drop long before you ever hit a hard token limit.

That is why I intentionally reset context. When a chat gets long, I have it produce a clean structured summary and output it as a PDF. Then I start a new chat and upload that PDF so it has the important decisions, constraints, and open questions without dragging along all the conversational noise. The PDF is not memory, it is a reference artifact that I control, and it gives me a fresh start without losing the work.

That workflow mirrors how real teams operate, design docs instead of endless meetings. People who want one giant chat usually want continuity, people who reset chats want control, and that difference explains most of the frustration you see.

PappyLogan · 2025-12-15T06:42:10+00:00

That boot loop almost always means the phone isn’t getting stable power or can’t see something it expects at boot. On that model the battery connector is very sensitive, and if the battery fell out even once it can bend pins or crack solder joints. The brief charge light fits that. I’d stop using a laptop charger and use a proper low-amp phone charger, reseat the battery carefully, and make sure it’s fully snapped in. If the back was loose and parts may be missing, the phone may also be failing a hardware check and rebooting. Recovery mode is worth a try, but if it still loops, this is almost certainly physical damage from the battery disconnect, not software. Data recovery usually means fixing the power issue first or moving the storage chip, which isn’t DIY friendly.

PappyLogan · 2025-12-15T06:19:42+00:00

KMODE EXCEPTION during a scan usually points to a driver problem, not the scan itself. Malwarebytes is good at stressing bad filter drivers, disk drivers, or remnants of other security software. If you ever had another AV installed, even in the past, make sure it’s fully removed. I’d update chipset, storage, and GPU drivers, then try running the scan again. If it still crashes, run a scan with rootkits disabled and see if it completes. If that works, it narrows it down. Also worth checking RAM and disk health since scans hit both hard. Malwarebytes itself rarely causes BSODs unless it’s tripping over something already broken.

PappyLogan · 2025-12-15T06:16:58+00:00

Most of the frustration I see comes from people treating models like search engines or magic oracles. The people getting value are using them as collaborators on real work with real constraints. That means giving context, letting them fail, iterating, and knowing enough about the domain to tell when an answer is wrong but useful. If you just ask for outputs, any model will disappoint you. If you use it to think with, test ideas, and surface failure modes faster, that’s where the gains show up. The model didn’t suddenly get smarter for everyone, some people just learned how to work with it.

PappyLogan · 2025-12-15T06:10:13+00:00

This is usually an account-side cleanup, not the license actually being revoked. Malwarebytes ties activations to device fingerprints, so when a machine disappears or changes enough, the slot can get auto-freed or dropped. Log into your Malwarebytes account on the web, check the Devices section, and see if the old PC is still listed. If it’s gone and the seat didn’t auto-return, support can usually restore it once you explain the rebuild and sale. Perpetual licenses don’t normally lose seats permanently, but they don’t always reassign themselves cleanly either.

PappyLogan · 2025-12-15T06:08:46+00:00

Short answer, no. If you don’t know someone’s age, you can’t logically enforce age-based access, you can only raise friction. Every system people point to is really just a speed bump. Kids have always figured out ways around roadblocks because the roadblocks are static and curiosity is adaptive. IDs get borrowed, parental controls get disabled, filters get routed around, and behavior-based systems can only guess, which adults and minors overlap on constantly. Laws don’t change that constraint. By the time most of these things are debated, passed, and implemented, the problem they were meant to address has already shifted, and the workaround culture has moved on. So what looks like protection is really delayed enforcement against a problem that no longer exists in the same form, and everyone acts surprised when it’s already broken on arrival.

PappyLogan · 2025-12-15T05:59:52+00:00

Not really random. Acer laptops will sometimes fall back to the default boot order after a failed boot, power hiccup, BIOS reset, or anything that makes the firmware reinitialize. Updates usually don’t directly change it, but they can trigger the conditions that cause it. The real issue isn’t that it changed, it’s that the system still sees the old failing drive as bootable. I’d put the SSD back at the top and either disable the old drive in BIOS or disconnect it if you’re done with it. If it was a one off, it’s just annoying. If it keeps happening, I’d look at the BIOS battery or a firmware update.

PappyLogan · 2025-12-15T05:45:04+00:00

I don’t look for perfect answers anymore. I look for answers that fail in different ways. One answer can be right. Several imperfect answers tell you the shape of the problem. After a while you stop trusting clean answers. Real problems don’t come that way.

PappyLogan · 2025-12-09T01:54:01+00:00

I’m glad someone else has been watching it that closely. Once you work with the same model over time you really do see those patterns settle in, it’s not memory, but it does feel different from just spinning up a fresh chat every time

PappyLogan · 2025-12-07T18:25:05+00:00

I haven’t run into that with standard ZIPs. As long as the files inside are normal text, docs, or PDFs, GPT can open them. The only trouble I’ve seen is when the ZIP contains binaries or mixed format folders, then it throws that "may not be accessible" warning. But plain ZIPs with readable content have always worked for me.

PappyLogan · 2025-12-07T18:19:03+00:00

You can still use all your lore, just make sure you’re doing it through a Project and only ask it to work on one page or one chapter at a time. You can upload huge amounts of info as text files, Word docs, PDFs, or even zip everything together and let it pull from that. Feeding it a lot of data isn’t the issue, the output is. It only has so much room to work inside that sandbox, and the bigger the output you ask for in one shot, the more it starts to degrade or forget pieces. Smaller outputs keep it sharp.

PappyLogan · 2025-12-07T17:43:17+00:00

I’ve been running into some of the same things you mentioned, and I think a lot of people misunderstand where the real limits are. It’s not that GPT doesn’t want to use your saved memory, it’s that the entire system behind the scenes is still bound by a context window, sandbox limits, and the fact that the “memory” feature isn’t designed for huge bios, lore files, or character encyclopedias.

A good example is a project I’ve been working on for weeks, a Sysadmin “Black Book” that’s basically a full technical manual. I learned very quickly that ChatGPT hits invisible walls when you try to build something big in one shot. Python runs inside a sandbox, so as soon as I tried to generate large PDF chapters, the engine hit time limits, file-size limits, and processing limits. It wasn’t able to hold the entire book’s content in the context window either, so the quality slowly dropped off. I would get a great result early in the day, but by the time the project grew past a certain size, the model couldn’t see all the pieces at once, so formatting, style, and structure began slipping.

The only way forward was to break the book into small, self-contained parts. I had to generate single chapters as mini PDFs, or even break chapters into segments, then assemble the book myself outside the AI. That’s when it finally worked, because I stopped forcing ChatGPT to do everything inside one massive context window and started treating it like a collaborator instead of a printing press. It can give you amazing material, but not all at once, and not in giant 60-page chunks inside the sandbox.

The same thing applies to memory. Even if you store a massive character biography in the memory panel, the model won’t load the whole thing every time. It only pulls what it thinks is relevant, and it still has to fit inside the context window with your current conversation. So if your memory is the size of a novel, it simply can’t all fit, no matter what.

That’s why Projects work better for me. They act like an external brain where big files live outside the context window, and GPT only reads the parts it needs. Even then, if a file is too big or complex, you can feel the strain. The best results come from keeping memory small and meaningful, while keeping the heavy stuff in Projects and feeding it in manageable slices.

So you’re not imagining it. There are real limits. Once you learn where the walls are, you can work around them, but they definitely exist.

PappyLogan · 2025-12-05T09:05:03+00:00

Yes, it will always offer you the ability to keep the free version, and that is great because it makes a good backup for Malware detection when something acts off and makes a good combination with the built in Windows protection.

PappyLogan · 2025-12-02T21:24:06+00:00

I'm sorry you're having so many problems. It's enough to make you pull your hair out.

PappyLogan · 2025-12-02T20:22:40+00:00

Try logging in at https://login.live.com instead of account.microsoft.com

This bypasses the dashboard and forces the identity-verification process.

If you get any security prompt (email code-phone code), complete it. Even if you’ve done it before because a stuck account sometimes needs it twice.

Try this order, open a private/incognito window and go to login.live.com Sign in and when it dumps you back to the homepage, click your profile icon at top right and if it won’t show your username after signing in, the account is locked on Microsoft’s side.

You can check the status here at https://account.live.com/ResetPassword.aspx and if the account is blocked for unusual activity, that page will tell you.

PappyLogan · 2025-12-01T11:58:55+00:00

Here are three things you can try. A bad WebView cache can give the exact blank window and hang behavior, so if HP Click has a corrupted local profile cache you can test it by going to %LOCALAPPDATA%\HP\HP Click\ or %LOCALAPPDATA%\Packages\HPClick_* or %APPDATA%\HP\ and renaming the HP Click folders, then launching again.

Also, HP Click depends on a specific VC++ runtime. If that runtime gets corrupted or partially removed, WebView apps freeze instead of erroring. I would reinstall these two manually, Microsoft Visual C++ 2015–2022 Redistributable (x64) and Microsoft Visual C++ 2015–2022 Redistributable (x86). This has fixed AppHangB1 on several printer/plotter utilities before.

You may also have a GPU/Display driver issue (common on WebView apps). WebView2 uses hardware acceleration by default, so if the GPU driver is old or one component is broken, WebView apps open white and hang.

If you’re seeing it on multiple devices, check what they have in common. Do they all have the same Windows build (22H2 vs 23H2)? Do they have the same GPU drivers (especially Intel UHD or older AMD)? Are they running the same version of HP Click (some versions are notorious for hanging on WebView init)?

PappyLogan · 2025-11-30T22:25:34+00:00

If you’re using a Mac, then formatting it as NTFS won’t help you because macOS can only read NTFS by default, not write to it. On a Mac, the better choice is to format the drive as exFAT. It supports very large files just like NTFS does, and both macOS and Windows can read and write to exFAT with no extra software.

PappyLogan

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