Shutdowns, Standby (RAM issue ?) on m9750

Hey! Thanks in advance for your help and your time. I'm happy to provide any additional tech info that might be useful to you, but here's the gist of what's going on:

My m9750 is running only on an AC Adapter (recently replaced, I doubt anything is wrong with it), I removed the battery after it stopped being able to hold a charge.

A few months ago, recently after the battery quit, my computer began to have an issue which I assumed at first was power related: it began randomly shutting down after running fine for hours, and would occasionally have periods where, for a stretch of several minutes at a time, it would shut down immediately after startup (I'd usually make it to the first screen, with the large black-and-white alien face, but no farther).

After plenty of troubleshooting with the AW Tech Support guys, I became confident that this is a hardware issue and that it is NOT a heat issue. One helpful tech suggested that it might be a RAM problem. Unfortunately, when I tried to power the computer up to run the Microsoft memory diagnostic program, it refused to stay on for more than a few seconds at a time. This persisted for a day, whereas previously it had never gone on for more than a handful of minutes at a time.

I decided to try and deal with this by opening up the computer and reseating my RAM; I have two one gig sticks, so I removed one and tried starting the PC with each stick in each slot in all the possible configurations. Initially this just didn't work, but soon, I encountered a new issue. Now, whenever I would reinsert the AC adapter, the computer would power up into something resembling standby mode. The power light would blink, as would the CD tray light, but neither the keys, nor the power button, nor the mouse or mousepad had any effect. No beep code, no nothing- the screen just remained off.

This persisted whenever I reconnected the power, even when I put both sticks in, rearranged them, removed both of them, removed the hard drive, disconnected the video cards, and removed the CD tray. AW Tech had no further advice.

Upon reassembling the PC a few hours later, I was able to power up with one stick (1 gig) of RAM mounted in the primary slot. The first time I started the PC, it froze after a few minutes, but it has been working fine (although sans a gig of RAM) for the past two hours, after several restarts. I ran a checkup on the hardrive, which went fine, and am going to do a memdiag first thing tomorrow. I'll post those results when I have them.

Does anyone have any idea what may be going on?

Thanks again, I hope someone can help me out!

 

Try a bootable CD program called Memtest 3.4. It is a bit easier to get going than the MS version and will be more descriptive in its findings.

 

Sorry to hear you are having problems with your system, it does sound like a memory issue but it can also be the memory slot. If you are able to run the ram test and reports any error, post back or contact our technical support with your findings. We will send you new sticks or suggest to send the system in just incase the motherboard is bad.

Please let us know.