Acer 3680 problems?

I set my laptop beside my bed and came back to it a few minutes later. The screen was black and it was completely locked. I had to do a hard reboot. At that time, the screen came up "windows was shut down incorrectly...blah blah". I hit "start windows normally".

It restarted and loaded windows but about halfway through loading my desktop, it came up with the BSOD. Said there was an illegal exception.. etc.

Another hard boot. After that, you'd press the power button and the lights would blink but screen would stay black and HD light was not blinking at all.

It took about 10 attempts and it finally booted. I had to start windows "to my last known configuration". Here I sit typing on it now, I have ad-aware scanning and McAfee scanning.

I have a Hitachi 7k200 HD and Im hoping this isnt a sign its on its way out. Its not even a year old! I dont see what else could cause that. I havent dropped the machine, havent loaded any new software/added any hardware or anything. Does this sound like a HD going bad?

 

i'd try running DEFRAG and see what happens...

it could just be that the machine got overheated sitting on the bed,, and when it did an emergency shut-down there may have been a few files open that got corrupted...

HDD diag tools should help you figure out if you have an issue with the HDD
there is even a WD TOOL that will scan the entire drive for surface errors.

just try to run some tests,, and keep a close eye on it,,, and now may be a good time to backup that critical data

 

Its time to start monitor the CPU temp .

If its high , you CPU cooler needs cleaning.

 

You could run the drive fitness test to determine the health of the HDD.
Also downlad HD Tune, and check the SMART data (Health Page) to see if everything is OK.
Also, is there a Minidump folder in the Windows directory ?

Running Memtest would be a good idea as well, but it is hard to determine the cause of the problem without debugging.