cheers mudcat mates...

Yeah - realise now I left out some obvious info...

Both are presumably from same or close factory batch, running win 8.1 [Bing]

They are the LENOVO 90BX0018UK Lenovo E50-00
budget price PCs that were sold off at low clearance prices a couple years ago...

Basically, laptop components inside a tower case...


2.40 gigahertz Intel Pentium J2900
224 kilobyte primary memory cache
2048 kilobyte secondary memory cache
64-bit ready
Multi-core (4 total)
Not hyper-threaded
Main Circuit Board b
Board: LENOVO Aptio CRB SDK0F82993 WIN

Bus Clock: 83 megahertz
UEFI: LENOVO O07KT44AUS 08/29/2014
Drives
471.91 Gigabytes Usable Hard Drive Capacity
145.31 Gigabytes Hard Drive Free Space

HL-DT-ST DVD-RAM GHC0N [Optical drive]

WDC WD5000AAKX-08U6AA0 [Hard drive] (500.11 GB) -- drive 0, s/n WD-WCC2E4XDJT3E, rev 19.01H19, SMART Status: Healthy
Memory Modules c,d
3990 Megabytes Usable Installed Memory

Slot 'A1_DIMM0' has 4096 MB
Local Drive Volumes
c: (NTFS on drive 0)        471.91 GB        145.31 GB free                

Virus Protection
Windows Defender Version 4.10.0209.0
    Scan Engine Version 1.1.15300.6
    Virus Definitions Version 12/10/2018 Rev 1.277.1025.0
    Last Disk Scan on 16 October 2018 02:55:52
    Realtime File Scanning On

Now I've probably gone a bit too overboard with tech info..
But it's very easy to copy all that off Belarc Adviser...
Besides, like my mrs is nosey about neighbours houses,
Computer geeks enjoy a snoop inside other folk's PC boxes...

Your combined suggestions remind me of stuff I used to be interested in several years ago
when I was teaching myself how to be an expert PC user..
But all that has kind of drifted away as family life took up most of my time..

But I do appreciate you all jogging my memory about Win system reports...

I keep Win Defender,
and the usual malware programs like Malwarebytes and SUPERAntiSpyware updated every day..

One PC is used only for internet shopping on known websites, the other for mudcat and other dodgy web surfing...
Neither has shown any signs of virus or malware so far...

[The Belarc Adviser report snapshot is taken off the 'dodgy' PC...]

I got cheesed off with bloated Norton and Mcafee years ago, and reckon Win Defender aint much worse...

BT keep offering me free Mcafee - but I'd need serious convincing it's worth installing again...!!!

So.. my most realistic guess for crashes...
is I always have too many Chrome tabs open on both PCs, eating up limited memory...???

But why they crash in the same way within hours or days is a mystery..

or perhaps the reason bleedin obvious to a computer techie...???