G73JH + Windows live = GSOD? Quirky coincidence...or is it?

So, I had my first GSOD the other night and it freaked me the hell out. I know this is a long post, but considering there's probably a billion words written on the subject, I figure what's a couple thousand more. For the condensed version, skip to the last three paragraphs

First, a little history. Bare with me here, I just want to make sure that all attention to detail is represented properly.

Back in December '10 I bought a G73JHRF-RBBX05 (refurb) from Best Buy. It was in absolutely perfect shape, without a single scratch, crack, smudge, or even a fingerprint that I could see. It also came with 206 BIOS, and ran 103 Celsius on Furmark within 5 minutes... Instead of freaking out and sending for an RMA, or going through the trouble of repasting, I opted to give 211 BIOS a try and was happy to see Furmark topping out at 89 Celcius on the GPU after about 20 minutes. Made me happy, made the G73 happy enough considering I would never throw anything like furmark at it for extended periods, and all was good.
The processor side was never an issue, and has always idled at around 43c, and heavy load hovers around 60c. The absolute highest I have ever seen the CPU was 67c after running OCCT for about 20 minutes.
I did Furmark, and OCCT the first day I had it to make sure that I hadn't bought a complete lemon.
All in all, not bad for 900 bucks and some change out the door.

So after making sure that everything was good with the temps, I installed an Intel X25-M 120gb SSD, and did a fresh install of W7 Ultimate 64, minus all the Asus bloatware. I updated everything that I felt necessary from the Asus website, put the OS on the SSD, data on the stock 500gb Seagate and so on. You know, standard operating procedure. Boot times were around 20 seconds, very few running processes, stable as a rock, etc..I spent a couple days installing a few gadgets, tweaking Firefox to the way I like it, installing M$ Office, and a few of my most used applications, and finally imaging the SSD to a backup on both an external 60gb HDD, and to DVD.

Since then (December) I've run Windows updates on it regularly, blown out the fans gently with canned air every couple of weeks, kept it wiped down with a microfiber cloth, and basically just took good physical and software care of it, and it only came out every few days to play Dragon Age, DA2, or Anno 1404, for a few hours at a time. I don't even web surf on it to speak of, but instead used my EeePC 1000HE for web surfing. It never hiccuped, crashed, froze, overheated, had a virus, or anything. Just what I expect from a well taken care of and administered computer.
My previous "Flagship" laptop was a HP Pavillion ZD7000 that lasted me 7 years, and still runs fine to this day, and has been handed down to the kids as a kitchen table homework computer, for those times that they're grounded from their desktops (which seems to be a lot!)

Fast forward to March, when my daughter was Mother Superior in her High Schools production of "The Sound of Music". Being the proud dad that I am, I took video at 1080p and dragged out the trusty G73 to handle the post production editing and processing duty. Our JVC Camcorder records to a hard drive in AVCHD format, and after some researching I decided that Windows Live Movie Maker was sufficient to convert the file, for uploading to Facebook.

I surfed to the Windows Live website and begrudgingly "installed the installer", for Windows Live Essentials or whatever they called it, and read every single page word for word, and ONLY checked the box to install what I originally came for, and that was Movie Maker. I made extra sure that none of the other crap was going to be included, and went about installing. Upon completion of the install, I made sure that everything had quieted down, and the installer was finished with it's spewing of crapware into my baby. As I always do, and out of habit whether it asks or not I rebooted my computer. I don't even remember if it actually asked me to reboot, but it doesn't matter since it's a habit I got into with Windows 95 that I'll probably never be broken of.

The G73 booted back up as normal, and as usual for the first minute or so I watched the temps, hard drive activity, and network activity through various W7 gadgets on my desktop that, I'm sure that I really don't need, but frankly I wouldn't drive a car without a temperature and oil pressure gauge, so if I want to know if something is going on in the background of my computer I like to have something to tell me. I hooked up the camcorder to the USB as I have many times before to archive video files, and proceeded to unload the 2.7gb file that I was after. I chose to copy the file to the SSD to take advantage of the transfer speeds once it came time to start the processing procedure.


Finally, here's where things started to get weird. While the file was being imported into WLMM, I noticed that the screen flickered all white a couple of times. Barely even noticeable, and so fast that I though I had just been seeing things. So I stared at the screen intently to make sure that I was seeing what I thought I was seeing, or if I was just getting tired. Sure enough, several times the screen flickered during the 4 or so minutes that it took to import the video. I didn't think too much about it and just chalked it up as part of the thumbnail creation process.

So I went about some minor cutting of the video, added a simple title to the beginning, and did a nice little fade to black for the end. Nothing major at all, but just enough to clean it up a little bit. The odd flickering hadn't come back at all while I worked, and when I was satisfied with my daughters little masterpiece, I decided on a preset video processing setting that would be an easy upload to Facebook, and it estimated that the finished product would be about 110mb. I felt that this was the best compromise in quality and compression, and knew that Facebook would be applying there own compression to it anyway.

Now for the part that I was waiting anxiously for, I clicked on "Make Movie" and watched in wonderment as the i720 made minced meat of the conversion process. What would have taken 2+ hours on my P4 3.0ghz HP Pavilion took about 20 minutes on the G73. I intently kept one eye on the CPU temperatures throughout the process and the maximum temp I saw was 59c, it may have bumped 60c once or twice, but it averaged about 57c. I reached behind in order to feel the heat coming out of the left exhaust vent and it was warm for sure, and the fan was definitely kicked into a higher gear, but I don't believe that it was at 100% speed. Out of curiosity, I felt the right side exhaust to see if the GPU was working hard at all, and the temperature seemed to be about what it is when at full idle. I concluded that the whole procedure was completely CPU centric, as I suspected that it would be.

Satisfied with the video, and with the file ready to be uploaded, I closed out of WLMM, and got ready to settle into a nice little marathon of Dragons Age 2. Before I could even launch DA2, the screen freaked out on me several times in a row. Like my whole desktop turned 45 degrees for a split second and flashed black. Rather disgusted with what I figured was buggy Microsofts Movie Maker, I re-booted, and clicked on the DA2 shortcut. The game loaded fine, and I was up and running within 30 seconds. (Love that SSD)

I'm about 15 hours into DA2 without as much as a stutter in the gameplay. It's been absolutely a great experience having the power of the G73 to play one of my favorite series in gaming. All that changed when all of the sudden the screen went all gray, and I had absolutely no control over anything. No esc., no Ctrl,Alt,Del, no windows key. Basically completely locked up. I was so shocked that I didn't even realize that I had the famous GSOD right there in front of me. I thought the game had crashed. Now keep in mind, I've NEVER to this point had to hard kill my G73, and I absolutely dreaded the thought of holding down the power button.

I sat there for probably 5 minutes waiting for the screen to do something. (To this point I still hadn't realized what I actually was looking at.) So while waiting I grabbed my iPhone and searched Google for the term "DA2 crashing Chantry" since I was in the big Chantry battle with about 14 characters on the screen. Nothing really relevant came up, and I thought it odd that I was the only one having this problem. So I had to do it...the dreaded hard shut down with the power button. Again, this was the first time I've ever had to do this to this laptop.

After restarting, I tried again, and again it crashed immediately in the very beginning of my battle. So now I was starting to get worried that I would damage the file system with all these stupid hard shut downs, and I gave up on DA2 for the night. I only restarted the computer to check for Windows updates, then had a normal shut down, and went to bed figuring I would take the G73 to work with me and patch DA2 or whatever. While I laid in bed, stewing about DA2 forcing me to do a hard shut down not once, but twice, it dawned on me what I may have been seeing. All this time reading the forums, and seeing GSOD this, and GSOD that, the whole time I thought it stood for "GreenSOD"...My heart sunk when I realized that I probably was mistaken in my acronym assumption...

So, the next day I brought the G73 to work, and before doing anything even remotely constructive, I loaded up Furmark to see what my temperature would be under heavy load. 10 seconds into the run, not even in extreme burn in mode, and I was staring at a GRAY screen, only this time it was adorned with dozens of black vertical lines too. Yep, I had it, but why all of the sudden?

What was suddenly different about this rock solid G73JH that made it GSOD? What had I installed, or done to it to bring on such drama, to a completely un-dramatic laptop? Two things were different, just two things. I had installed Windows Live Essentials Installer, and Windows Live Movie Maker. That is ALL that was different. The only thing I had installed prior was DA2 on March 8 (It's release date - I REALLY like the series).That was two weeks ago I had played it for 15 hours flawlessly.

Yes I got it fixed, thanks to this board, and the G73 runs better than ever now thanks to Chastity's informative and inspiring posts. And sure enough, I was able to go back to the Chantry in DA2 and defeat the enemy without even a stutter (I did hold my breath though - right at that point!)
But this post isn't about how to fix it. We all know how to do that. Instead this is just a...why?

Quirky coincidence? Probably is, and I'm sure that not everyone who's experienced this issue has used these particular products. In fact I'd like to say that besides the stupid installer, WLMM is a fine application for being free. I didn't mind using it at all, and I didn't have to spend a dime. But take a minute and think about what caused me to have to update my BIOS and VBIOS overnight?

That's all I ask.

m00n

PS.
Since I don't have a signature, here's the obligatory specs...
G73JHRF-RBBX05 (refurb) 213 BIOS now.
6gb DDR3
Intel 120gb SSD x25-M (OS)
Seagate SATA 500gb (Data)
AUO139e display...meh

 

Simple question: Did you ever update your BIOS and video BIOS? You should be running BIOS 213 + video BIOS 012.020.000.032.0383.G730 (as reported in BIOS) 012.020.000.032.038352 (as reported by HW apps). If not, then you should do this pronto. The vBIOS was updated to fix this crashing/GSOD issue. You'll need a bootable USB drive formatted to FAT32. Tools are in the package, see links below.

This combo will allow you to use the latest AMD driver releases.

 

Yeah Chastity, in the second to last paragraph, even gave you props for the solution. Thanks again!

I spent the entire day (at work) going through your post at ROG... G73 Series Driver and Application Reference
And I updated what I felt was necessary including BIOS, VBIOS, Catalyst, and the Seagate firmware. I skipped the trackpad drivers because I'm happy with W7's native drivers, the audio drivers because when I did a fresh install I skipped the Creative drivers and used the current Realtek which have been fine. I also skipped the core drivers because I feel that they're working fine for now, but will probably update when CCC 11.4 becomes official.

I've gotta say, had it not been for you keeping that post updated, it would have been a lot more work! And for that, I'm gonna throw ya some rep.