Thanks for your replies, Jared.
Today I have had 4 crashes in the space of 40 minutes, after the initial startup. Three of these were 'DPC_WATCHDOG_VIOLATION', and the other one was REFERENCE_BY_POINTER.
With regards your advice to run 'Driver Verifier', I see that it needs to run for 24 hours minimum. Being a student, I need to use my computer to finish and submit an assignment by 9.00am(Friday 14th, NZ time; 9.00PM,UTC), hence I am unable to run 'Driver Verifier' until after that.
Any interim advice would be appreciated.
Regards
Neil
You don't need to run it for 24 hours minimum, it's just recommended.
It's not something that stops your computer use, it's just a change in Kernel management through hooks such as memory allocations, IRQL processing etc.
If it finds something, it'll BSOD the computer like it would crash anyway, but with the culprit in it's sights hopefully.