Windows 10: Computer suddenly freezing soon after startup, accompanied by audio crackling and graphical...

Hi. Completely out of the blue, after leaving my computer idle to go eat dinner I came back to a frozen computer, no response to input or anything Ctrl-Alt-Delete, no response on any LEDs or anything. I restart it thinking it's no big deal random issues like this tend to happen occasionally. When I start it back up, I try to boot up a game. The game begins stuttering a lot, along with crackly audio which obviously doesn't normally happen. Worried, I shut off the game and right after I do, my PC freezes again. I start it up again and decide to just kinda sit there for a bit after it has a chance to start up and maybe see if I can fiddle with some things to find a solution. Again, not too long after everything's started up and apropos of nothing it freezes. Tried a few more times and it froze up before anything had a chance to open, and also froze a few times on the Acer boot screen. Since then I've tried a few things like defaulting BIOS settings, booting into safe mode which it ran fine in but I'm not sure how to further isolate the problem from there, and letting Windows attempt to resolve disk issues and nothing has worked. Before I resort to a system restore or opening it up and playing with the wires I'm hoping I'm missing some easy quick fix?

:)

 

Audio Crackling

Hi,

Lastly, my audio in some games started to crackle.

I can start a game, play for a while, and then the audio starts to crackle.

What also happens is that I can play for like 5 minutes and then my game freezes and the audio is crackling.

Another problem is that after the freeze, my network connection is lost.

I have an external sound card (Focusrite Scarlett Solo 2nd Gen) which I thought was the issue - but it also happens from the audio output of the motherboard.

I tried reinstalling the motherboard drivers, the GPU drivers, and my network card drivers, none of these helped.

I am really frustrated with this situation and I am really at a loss.

Hope someone could help me with this...

 

Audio Crackling

Recently, I've noticed that the audio with my speakers and headphones is "crackling". It doesn't seem to matter what the volume is set at, nor what program I'm running. If I'm playing a game, the audio crackles. If I'm listening to music, the audio crackles.
I've tried downloading/updating my audio drivers, but nothing seems to help.

 

Crackling audio. Skyrim + other games

USB headphones have never been kind to me. They always hiss, pop and crackle. The fact that you can hear it when no audio is being played suggests it's a power /connection issue.

Do you have any 3.5mm or RCA based headphones you can try?