Windows Vista Chrome is crashing my computer

So for the past couple days, my computer has been going down every time I open up Chrome. I'm fairly sure Chrome is the culprit, because I can run anything else, including Firefox, which is how I'm typing this up right now. The PC runs pretty much just fine, and certainly crash-free, when Chrome isn't running. I can't figure out why, and every crash is different. Sometimes it just freezes completely up. Other times I get a BSOD, but every blue screen has been different thus far. Unfortunately I don't have any screenshots of them, but they have been messages such as:

- encountered a problem, shutting down to prevent damage to the drive
- Driver IRQL not less or equal
- random hex codes that are supposed to tell me what the error is
- starting a memory dump (sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn't)

But literally every one has been unique in some way, such that I can't use them to narrow anything down.

Things I've tried:

- "chrome://conflicts" in the URL bar. No issues. Anything else I try in Chrome itself, I don't have time to do, because the computer crashes.
- Running antivirus scans. No issues.
- System restore. Unfortunately, the answer I got was there are no restore points. Why that is, I have no idea.

I understand Chrome refuses to update itself anymore because I have Vista and they don't want to support that any longer. It's been maybe four months since Chrome started alerting about being out of date. I can't help but wonder if these are related things. Anyway, what do I do to stop these crashes so I can fire up Chrome again?

 

Have you tried uninstalling it and then reinstalling it?

 

Unfortunately, Chrome's support for old Windows OS's including Windows XP and Vista ended in April 2016

Your options include:

• Change to another browser that is still supported on Windows Vista
  (Note that the number of such browsers will continue to decrease)
• Upgrade Windows Vista to Windows 7 or higher
• Change to a non-Microsoft OS that does support the Chrome browser
• Use another computer, (abandon computers running anything earlier than Windows 7)
• Keep using your old unsupported OS and Chrome (and live with the crashes)

 

Well, I don't know why it didn't occur to me to uninstall and reinstall. I tried it and it stopped the crashes. I figured I'd see if it worked for a week and consider it kosher if it did. I almost made it. Chrome crashed my computer again yesterday. This time the crash simply blacked out the screen and caused the motherboard to beep twice, so I tried shutting it off and turning it back on. It wouldn't boot. Two beeps again. I shut it off and tried moving the SATA cable to a different socket on the motherboard, as a start to see if there was some kind of hardware issue. Now it tells me "no boot device installed." Moving the SATA cable to different sockets seems to prove that the computer recognizes something is there, but doesn't recognize the hard drive as a boot device.

I do have the PC running right now. (Kind of. It's on, but it's not behaving well at all.) It seems to be a roll of the dice whether it boots from the hard drive or not. I well understand that Google has stopped supporting Chrome on Vista, since it informs me of such every time I open it. This ****** me off - to me this is like taking a six-year-old car to the tire store and being told you can't get new tires until you replace your engine. But I also don't get why that lack of support would cause computer crashes unless Google is surreptitiously inserting updates into Chrome that force you to update or die. "Live with the crashes" is not going to be an option if these crashes start damaging the hard drive to the point where the PC won't boot from it. That leaves "use a browser you don't like or fork out the money to obey the almighty Googlers ".

I'd like to figure out how to get the computer to always recognize the hard drive as a boot device, of course, and then find out if there is a way to keep using Chrome without it destroying my hard drive. If not, I'll either tell the tire store to go #$*@ themselves, or buy a new engine.

 

You're mad at the "almighty Googlers" for not wanting to waste any more of their grocery money trying to support an old, abandoned Operating System? Sorry buddy, but I'm afraid Vista, along with the floppy diskette, 8-track tapes, chrome bumpers, dial telephones, buggy whips, etc., have been relegated to history. Time to move on.

 

Thanks for the help. Might I ask why there's still a forum to offer assistance with the 8-track tapes?

 

<shrug> I give up. Why?

 

It wasn't a riddle. You're the one who helps run it. Is this your way of telling me your forum also will not be supporting Vista anymore?