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Why Does My Mini PC Keep Crashing Every Few Days? A Friendly Troubleshooting Guide

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Dealing with unexpected errors? Here’s a simple, down-to-earth approach to keeping your mini PC stable longer.

Ever set up a mini PC and thought it was smooth sailing—until it suddenly starts crashing every few days? That’s exactly what happened with a small HP ProDesk running Proxmox. If you’ve experienced similar “mini PC stability” problems, you’re not alone. Let’s chat about what might be going on and some easy ways to troubleshoot it.

What’s Going On With Mini PC Stability?

So there’s this mini PC setup: an HP ProDesk with an i7-10500 processor, 1TB NVMe storage, and 32GB of RAM (2x16GB). It was running a bunch of self-hosted services on Proxmox, including Jellyfin with GPU passthrough. Sounds pretty solid, right?

All was well for a few months until the power got cut. The NAS on the same power supply rebooted fine, but the mini PC started acting up. Now it powers up but fails after a few days, showing an “unexpected error” on Proxmox, becoming unresponsive, and needing a hard reset to get going again.

Tracking Down the Culprit: Memory Use

Keeping an eye on the system revealed something interesting: the RAM usage was slowly creeping up over time. This is called a memory leak, and it can cause a system to slow down or crash as memory gets eaten up.

To test this idea, the user removed the most resource-heavy apps, and voilà—the mini PC stayed up longer, weeks instead of days! That’s a huge clue that certain applications or services might be hogging the RAM.

What About the Hardware?

Before blaming software, it’s important to check the hardware. BIOS diagnostics showed no issues with CPU or RAM. Memtest didn’t find any RAM errors. Disk checks on that 1TB NVMe drive also came back clean. So it’s probably not a faulty component causing spontaneous crashes.

For anyone facing similar issues, running MemTest86 or using built-in BIOS memory diagnostics can be good starting points. Also, disk health can be checked with tools like CrystalDiskInfo or SMART monitoring.

What Else Can You Do to Improve Mini PC Stability?

If you’re dealing with mini PC stability problems, here are some friendly tips:

  • Monitor Resource Usage: Use monitoring tools (like Proxmox’s built-in stats or third-party apps) to watch RAM and CPU trends.
  • Update Software: Sometimes bugs in your hypervisor or applications cause memory leaks. Keep things updated.
  • Limit Services: Run only what you really need; more services = higher chance of resource leaks.
  • Scheduled Reboots: If stability can’t be achieved otherwise, a scheduled reboot might be a practical fix.
  • Check Power Stability: Make sure your mini PC has a stable power supply or consider a UPS for power fluctuations.

Final Thoughts

Mini PC stability issues can feel frustrating, especially when there’s no clear crash log. But the slow climb in RAM use is often a big hint. Start by trimming heavy apps, monitoring memory, and keeping hardware healthy. And remember, sometimes a small system just needs a little reboot TLC.

If you want to dive deeper, the Proxmox official docs are super helpful, and communities like Proxmox forums can offer tailored advice.

Got a mini PC that won’t stay up? Try these tips and share your experience—sometimes swapping stories is the best way to learn and fix these quirky issues!

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