Laptop help - Constant crashing and other problems.

[byker]

Hello tech support!  )

Just kidding, but I have a question for the more experienced tech people on GH. I have a 2.5 year old laptop that has decent specs for its time, an i7 2670QM, 6gb of ram, gt540 graphics. I have a desktop computer at home now, so this laptop is only used at school really, but recently it has been getting blue screens twice a day or so. I always get one if I put it in sleep (closing the lid), and frequently when generally using the laptop. It started getting blue screens about once a month or so around a year ago, and I had an extra copy of windows 8.1, so I upgraded it from Windows 7 -> Win 8.1. The blue screens stopped for a few months and are back again.

My questions to you are:
- Do you think the laptop is at the end of its life?
- Should I reinstall windows yet again?
- Should I move to a different OS like linux? I have a raspberry pi with raspbian on it, and I dabble with python, so I could probably get away with linux just fine. I just need the laptop for word processing, spreadsheets, protein viewers (chimera) and internet browsing.
- Do you think a new harddrive would work? I was thinking of putting in a small ssd, but I don't really want to spend the money if it won't help too much.

When it originally started getting blue screens, they were linked to a bad driver I believe. However now the blue screens come up with multiple different errors.

Thanks for any help, and please let me know if I need to clarify anything.

[tp4tissue]

well.... check temperatures first..

Cpu using coretemp

GPU using Gpuz


Then run a benchmark, and see if it causes crashing or overheating..

Older version of Prime95 for CPU (without AVX),   Do not use Intelburntest, that uses AVX, and for laptops, avx enabled CPU can well exceed the designed Thermal dissipation.

Heaven benchmark for GPU

[byker]

Temps are pretty decent I think. It sits around 40-50 deg Celsius with basic use (like typing this right now). I ran benchmarks last week and temps were hitting 80-90, but I no longer use this for anything too intensive, so the gpu is basically disabled as I have intel 3000 graphics for basic programs. The weird thing is all of the crashing usually happens when the computer is turning on or off, going into or out of sleep, or when not being used.

[suicidal_orange]

That sounds quite warm for not doing much, but it's a big cpu for a laptop so maybe if it's doing it to be quiet...  Have you got the powersaving options turned on?  No point leaving it at full speed (max heat) if you're not doing much whether it's causing a problem or not.

Anyway, is there anything remotely useful on the bluescreen?  There usually isn't but can be if it's a driver issue, which could have been caused twice by Windows updates.

If the laptop has an optical drive you could also try running a Linux live CD for a while, if everything (hardware) works and it doesn't crash it's probably the hard drive or Windows issue. 

If it is sleep related (probably isn't if it happens when booting normally) it could be an issue in the area of hard drive where the resume file is saved so you could try disabling sleep, renaming hiberfile.sys (a hidden file in c:\) and re-enable sleep and you might get lucky at the expense of wasting 6gb of hard drive space.

Dying hard drives often make bad electronic noises, have you heard any?

[byker]

Thanks for the advice. I haven't heard any bad electronic noises, so its probably not the hard drive. I think I will try booting linux from a CD or USB drive and see how that goes. I will report back with my results!

[tp4tissue]

That sounds quite warm for not doing much, but it's a big cpu for a laptop so maybe if it's doing it to be quiet...  Have you got the powersaving options turned on?  No point leaving it at full speed (max heat) if you're not doing much whether it's causing a problem or not.

Anyway, is there anything remotely useful on the bluescreen?  There usually isn't but can be if it's a driver issue, which could have been caused twice by Windows updates.

If the laptop has an optical drive you could also try running a Linux live CD for a while, if everything (hardware) works and it doesn't crash it's probably the hard drive or Windows issue. 

If it is sleep related (probably isn't if it happens when booting normally) it could be an issue in the area of hard drive where the resume file is saved so you could try disabling sleep, renaming hiberfile.sys (a hidden file in c:\) and re-enable sleep and you might get lucky at the expense of wasting 6gb of hard drive space.

Dying hard drives often make bad electronic noises, have you heard any?

Naw dude.. that's normal idle temp for i7 laptop.. if it's got other apps loaded, and it's in a higher voltage step, it could be even hotter..


Run the benches if it doesn't instant crash, then it shouldn't be heat..



Chances are you probably just got too much pr0n... reformat will probably fix that.

[evolveS]

Check your hardware drivers (especially your chipset driver) for the laptop, they might have updated it to better handle Sleep/Hibernate modes.

Worst comes to worst, go into your power options, disable hibernate, turn off the display instead of sleeping, and shut down every time you're done for the day.

[byker]

Thanks for the help folks, I did that evolveS, but it still kept crashing. I have been running it on mint for the past few hours, and so far so good.