Asus G73 Lockup Issue

Hi All -

Long time reader, first time posting.

About two months ago, I purchased the Best Buy G73 model, and things have been working well. No lockups, or anything else. I've been pretty much running "stock", no overclocking, and not a lot of gaming at all to be honest. I really haven't given this thing too much of a test drive yet.

I normally use the laptop plugged in at my desk, but last night I used the battery for an extensive amount of time while watching TV on my couch. The battery got down to about 15%, so I plugged it back in, shut the case, and went to bed.

This morning, I opened the screen and the laptop was frozen. I had to do a hard reboot, and when I rebooted, it froze again almost immediately upon entering windows 7. Hard rebooted again, and this time made it to Firefox, but after surfing for a few minutes, it froze again. At that point I just shut down the entire machine as I was running late for work.

Any ideas what I should try when I get home? I'm hoping not to have to do a format/re-install, but will have to if it comes to it.

As mentioned, this is my first issue with this machine, it's been great so far. I have read some things about some issues when the battery drops below 25%. Do you think this applies here?

Thanks in advance for your help guys..

 

Quick question, did you uninstall the creative software?

 

I did uninstall the creative software, I thought of that too. I used one of the software guides on this forum when I cleaned up the "bloatware" when I first got the machine.

I did install Steam recently, but haven't used it in over a week. It could be a complete coincidence but I just find it odd that my lockups just started when my I took my battery level to such a low level.

I can't verify when my first lockup last night happened (as I just closed the screen and went to bed - woke up and it was locked up). Regardless of when the lockup happened, my machine would be fully charged right? I'm assuming that the machine will continue to charge even if it's locked up.

 

Besides removing all traces of Creative, the Ex-Lax of software, I've noticed that Windows or something related to the G73JH, doesn't like to run after a hard crash. I can't put my finger on it, but it's as if Windows crashes less as long as the previous shutdown was successful. Does that make any sense?

In other words, you use your G73JH. For whatever reason it locks up. You hold the power down, reboot and now it's less stable. Doesn't matter if you boot into Safe Mode and check the drives, you rebooted. Only after you have had a successful shutdown, does the laptop become more stable.

I can't say this will help, but when you get home, make sure that Windows has completely shutdown, wait a moment and then restart. See if that makes it better.

Can only speak to pre-209, but when the battery gets that low and the CPU has throttled down, it's not enough to plug the AC back in. In order to restore the CPU multipliers you need to reboot.

 

Was just going to chime in on the low-power issue as well. There's a thread about Throttlestop, or you can try the 209 BIOS that corrects the issue.

Speaking on less-stable after a bad reboot, mine has not done that, but occasionally on shutdown I get a window or application that looks like it tries to start-up and hangs and locks up the shutdown. I'm not sure if it's connected to ASUS' quickboot/shutdown apps or not, and it's intermittent.

 

Thanks Kalim (and others). I'll give the "clean reboot" method a try when I get home (I did do a safe mode, and that worked just fine - for the few minutes I ran it anyway).

 

The two things I hate to diagnose, intermittent and shutdown issues. Those are a real pain in the butt.

I haven't heard of QuickBoot, unless you mean FastBoot. I had problems with FastBoot and have since taken it off my suggested install list. Not only did it not save any significant booting time, but when you went into the UI there was a great potential for hard lockup when closing off the UI.

As to the bad reboot, this is happened about three times for different reasons. The last time was when I was playing around with OC'ing the GPU. I ran the HD5870m at 800/1100 for about three days straight. No problems. I was going to reboot anyway, so I closed down everything I had running and before rebooting I set the HD5870m back to the default 700/1000 values. Then the system locked up.

After holding down the power button, and doing a Safe Mode error check on the drive, I rebooted it back into Windows. Checked the GPU clock and that was normal, but about 3 minutes later it locked up again. Rebooted/Safe Mode twice more and each of these times it didn't take long for it to lockup.

The next time I rebooted back into Windows, I immediately shut it down, waited a moment and then powered it back up and the stability returned. Uptime now is about 48 hours and no issues.

It was at this point that a pattern started to emerge. That, like previous lockups, a reboot wasn't enough, that a reboot and then an immediate shutdown and reboot was needed before things worked right.

Oh, and what was the previous lockup? Yep, you guessed it, FastBoot. Did the same thing. It wasn't until I shut'er down and rebooted did the stability returned back to normal.

Will this help Philliesfan980? Well, it can't hurt and if it doesn't help, at least it can be eliminated from the list.

 

Err, Fastboot. Sorry. I might try uninstalling it and seeing if I still get the error, but it'll be hard to tell since it doesn't occur very often. It's hard for me to tell what the cause is as I can see some blank app drop into the taskbar but then it locks up.

 

Another good thing to try Kalim, I'll check out the Fastboot when I get home from the office tonight.

 

In the event I do have to do a full - reinstall, do I just use the DVD's I created when I initially bought the machine? I'm guessing it will prompt me with an option if I want to do a full format?

 

Just wanted to circle back and let you guys know the clean reboot must have helped things, because everything seems to be back to normal now.

Thanks again for your help.

 

Thanks for getting back to us. Yeah, it's the strangest thing that a reboot isn't enough after a crash. Glad to hear you got it sorted out.