When trying to figure out how to fix game crashes, the usual advice is to update drivers, but sometimes the culprit is an overlay from Discord, Steam, or even a recording software running in the background. What's a less obvious background program that's caused crashes for you?
Antivirus real time protection was the culprit It scanned game files during load and that extra check caused a crash on startup Disabling it for gaming fixed the issue
Cloud storage syncing was the sneaky one OneDrive or Dropbox kept the game folder in constant sync during play and that led to disk thrash and a crash I learned to pause syncing when I game
Windows indexing service around the drive used by games can spike disk usage and trigger a crash I turned off indexing for the gaming drive and the crashes stopped This kind of fix shows up in how to fix game crashes 2025 guide
Background overlays from recording or streaming apps can crash games if they hook in at the wrong moment I removed them during testing and the game ran smoother
A background driver updater firing in the middle of a session can reboot or reconfigure the GPU and wreck the run I schedule updates for after gaming or disable auto update during play