Out of Pod Experience

Okay, so I just had one of the weirdest (and ominous) issues I've ever had with a computer, and I'm both honestly stumped and nervously confused. Wall of text inbound...

Earlier this afternoon (it's 4:28 in the morning for me now) say around 6 or 7 p.m., I was browsing the web just minding my own business when both my monitors suddenly went blank. By that, I mean it looked like when your computer is not powered up, but the monitor is still on. The desktop was gone, mouse was gone, basically the system seemed to just stop showing up at all.

Bewildered, after trying to restart via ctrl+alt+del, I eventually held down on my tower's power button, forcing a shutdown. Turning it back on, I was faced with the inevitable "Windows did not shut down properly. Do you want to start up normally or in safe mode, safe w/ networking, or safe w/ command prompt. Against perhaps better judgement, I said "screw it" and selected for normal, hoping the issue would simply correct itself on its own. Logged in, got to the desktop, stuff started to boot-up and start up like normally, then about a minute or two, the same thing just happened, only something even more odd this time; one screen was a dark grey, the other was a lighter pale blue color.

Restarting in safe mode, the issue did not repeat itself...until trying to once again start in normal mode. Then I got a red screen and black screen, then one was pale blue again and the other was bright white. Going back to safe mode, I scoured the internet looking for help and to my fears, everything from hard drive failure to boot file corruption requiring a reformat was being recommended for anyone with an issue even somewhat similar to mine.

I follow several steps to try and remedy the issue, including using msconfig to restart in normal with fewest drivers starting up, to running chkdsk, to having AVG run numerous scans, even uninstalling my video driver (nvidia 352.86) and using driver sweeper and then reinstalling an older one I had before this whole thing started. I figured maybe it was a bad driver install with the video driver since I had updated it on the 30th. Nothing seemed to work.

Finally, I chance happened to look up at what restore points I have (only one from 30 May, two days ago, just before updating Nvidia drivers) and decided to give that a shot. It worked. After restarting at around 2 this morning, my system booted up nice a stable. I'm both relieved that the issue seems gone, but also kind of worried that maybe I might not be so lucky and that this is only a "calm before the storm" sort of thing.

Anyways, my comp seems fine now, so I'd imagine that would kind of rule out a hard drive dying (since I'm assuming such symptoms would not simply vanish from a restore point like that). That said, I'm regretfully not very well off knowing whether or not I'm fully out of the woods just yet. The harddrive is the stock drive that came with the computer about 6 years ago, so it's not a young hard drive. I know this is not all the information someone would or might need to know for sure, but I was wondering if anyone had any advise regarding this...does this sound like a definite hard drive problem or just a simple video driver fault like I'm hoping it is?

ASUS Desktop, Intel Core i5 CPU CG 650 @ 3.2GHz
Windows 7 Home Premium, 64bit ver. 6.1.7601 SP 1 Build 7601
Primary HDD: Generic, ST31000528AS ATA Device, 1TB
Secondary: Seagate Expansion External USB, 1TB
*Video: EVGA GeForce GTX 660 Signature 2, 3072MB GDDR5
*Power Supply: Corsair TX850 Enthusiast Series 850-Watt power supply

*The 660 and the power supply did not originally come with the comp when I bought it. The comp is about 6 years old, both the graphics card and psu I got back in 2013 to replace the old 450-Watt and GTX 550Ti I had before.

Any thoughts would be greatly appreciated. Fly safe...

Motherboard looks good...

...uh, should the power supply's fan be sitting still at all? Both CPU and GPU fans are moving at idle speeds, but the one inside my PSU isn't rolling. Never noticed that before.

Odd. Turns out that the PSU fan still works, it just wasn't under any strain. Soon as I started up something like Minecraft, the PSU fan turns on. But, after everything else idles, the PSU fan stops completely. That's not good, is it?

Corsair TX850 Enthusiast Series 850-Watt

After looking around, I think people were saying it does that. Produces no excessive noise or other odd behaviors. Link from Amazon below for convenience.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B004MYFODS?psc=1&redirect=true&ref_=oh_aui_detailpage_o01_s02

...though I didn't pay nearly that much for it.

Anyways, I really need to get some shut-eye (curse my up-side-down sleeping habits). I'll check back here later on today. Thanks for the help so far, Nilsson.

Thanks for the heads-up. The driver released, I think, before that one is what I updated to when this all happened, and that in fact maybe what caused it; me rolling back to an older driver seemed to fix this issue.

Man, lately it seems Nvidia will every once and a while release a string of **** drivers. Back in 2013 (while I still had a 550Ti), I had to stay on a old driver for months because every new "stable" release would cause my system to bug out and stutter badly if I booted up anything that used hardware accel or the GPU heavily (games, openning a browser, etc. would set it off) forcing a restart to temporarily fix the issue until you triggered it again. Ran in safe mode for a couple weeks until a friend happened to send me an obsolete driver that still worked. (Gotta love good friends, eh?)

Still not quite sure if that's what caused the instability issue, but avoiding updates for a while seemed work for that issue too.

STAP DOWNLOADING PRON VIA TORRENT!