I suppose its a way to check for bad sectors?

As Andrue says, modern disks check and remap bad sectors automatically. If there were more bad sectors than this mechanism should handle then you probably ought to throw the disk away.

I ran driver verifier this morning setting to check all non-MS ones.

I had the PC freeze this morning. This happened under my original W7 build and both then and now the mouse's optical light goes out. I wondered whether it was a USB (3) driver issue so after uninstalling it (had to remove it from verifier's monitoring else it BSOD during uninstall) I dug around and found that I was running 1.0.17.0 whereas the latest is 2.1.25.0 so I've installed that one.

I also ran memtest86 for 2 hours or so last night, no faults found.

I'll see whether changing the USB driver makes any difference over the next week or so.

In reply to a post by cheshire_man:

Another update (hope this thread is at least a little helpful to some).

Got a BSOD this morning! Some unidentifiable driver according to WhoCrashed. . Ah well.

Ouch. That has to be worth investigating. I can honestly say that I've seen any installation of Win 7 blue screen. In fact for any version from XP on to BSOD is very rare.

I'd appreciate some pointers on how to follow up (see my later post about this morning's events).

Should I attempt to go through each driver (MS or non-MS) and see if they're the latest? In turn or one at a time?

Rebuild with only the minimum/essential apps & drivers?

Thoughts please.

In reply to a post by AEP:

As Andrue says, modern disks check and remap bad sectors automatically. If there were more bad sectors than this mechanism should handle then you probably ought to throw the disk away.

only when the sector is hit, by that time you may have almost filled the drive.

At least a full format is a way to check every sector when you first get the drive.

In reply to a post by Chrysalis:

In reply to a post by AEP:

As Andrue says, modern disks check and remap bad sectors automatically. If there were more bad sectors than this mechanism should handle then you probably ought to throw the disk away.

only when the sector is hit, by that time you may have almost filled the drive.

At least a full format is a way to check every sector when you first get the drive.

That's true but it's a rather pessimistic view. That would be like buying a new car and immediately driving it to the nearest garage for a hundred-point inspection and a service

A full format on an old drive makes a bit more sense. If it's already declining then it might be enough to push it over the edge and better to find out then rather than three months down the line. I still think that statistically that's a bit of a long shot, mind.

I suppose I'm not really saying "don't do it". I'm just suggesting that MS are being quite reasonable in not bothering to offer that option in their installer. In the vast majority of cases it does nothing but waste 15 minutes of the user's time

In reply to a post by Andrue:

In the vast majority of cases it does nothing but waste 15 minutes of the user's time

Ever formatted a terabyte drive , abit more than 15 minutes.

I agree its not a big issue not havng it on the installer. As long as still in the OS itself which it is.

In terms of hdd failires, I have had many dozens fail in remote servers. I put this down to possibly poor air cirulation in DC's and more likely due to poor hardware quality control. In servers where I use my own hardware I have had 0 hdd failures and at home the only hdd's that have had issues are ones that are very old, at least 5 years old.

An update.

I decided to persevere with the existing build.

I've uninstalled the webcam software and unplugged the webcam.

I found that the USB3 driver was out of date so updated that. I also ran an Intel scanner from their web site and found the NIC driver was out of date so have updated that.

Yesterday I was thinking that as my last BSOD was Thursday 29.9 I'd cracked it. Then yesterday morning, 10-15 minutes after booting, it went to BSOD. As ever a random module. So I don't really know whether that was a 'fluke' given I'd gone almost 7 days without one.

The only other oddity I've had, and I had the occasional one ever since going W7, is that the whole PC freezes, the red mouse laser switches off. The only way out is to power down and reboot. I've not noticed whether the router looses the LAN light, remiss of me.

Anyway I'll keep at it. It's certainly more stable but I continue to be wary.