Death of a Peripheral

Lately my old and trusty VIAO began to lock up during large file saves. When I say lock up, I mean total machine catatonia and nothing but a ten second finger on the power button works. And that just powers down.

So, I have a problem. First things first, go to the Event log. Nope, nothing there. Second: Run troubleshooting for suspect devices (like the controller) from Control Panel and see what it says. It says everything is A-OK.

Finally, run hardware diagnostics from BIOS on bootstrap. Nothing there either.

I strongly suspect that a peripheral, maybe controller, maybe graphics card, is eating it during one or more function calls. But I have no way on knowing because it appears that whatever mean piece of silicon is doing this doesn't have the common courtesy to exit gracefully from an error.

Grrrr.