Blue screen of death with new X54C

Hi, I just bought an ASUS X54C series laptop from a local store. For the price ($289), the specs were really good (i3-2370M, 6GB DDR3 RAM, 320 gb hard drive), plus it has Windows 7 Premium installed (which I prefer to Win 8). I really want to keep it - only one problem, I am getting BSODs!

I've had it for 2 days and I have received several BSODs. All of them are irql_not_less_or_equal errors.

Here is what I've done to laptop since I opened it:

1) Uninstalled all bloatware, including ALL ASUS programs except for ASUS AI Recovery and Fast Boot.
2) Uninstalled Windows Live Essentials 2011.
3) Installed just a few standard programs I install on new systems: CCleaner, CPU-Z, CoreTemp, WinUtilities, Chrome.
4) Installed all the latest Windows 7 updates.
5) After the first BSOD, I updated the Intel graphics and audio drivers to the latest. But I still received another BSOD.
6) Ran memtest86+ to check the RAM. A-OK.
7) Ran CHKDSK, found some disk errors and fixed them. Still received another BSOD.

I don't want to return this laptop; I am hoping to stop this. I am going to try recovering it to the factory state and see if that stops the BSOD - perhaps it is due to what I uninstalled?

I had one BSOD while booting for the first time, and all the other BSODs started occurring after a few hours of use.

Anyone have any experience like this with an Asus laptop or can provide any pointers?

 

I'd personally recommend to reinstall Windows. It smells like a messed up installation and/or corrupted drivers (maybe due to previous bsod's). If you don't plan to reinstall windows at least uninstall ALL drivers and run DriverSweeper in safe mode to clean up.
What temps is your cpu running at?

 

Thanks for the advice sange. I can't reinstall Windows because I don't have an installation disc. Could I possibly get the serial from ASUS for this installation, and then use an installation disc?

My CPU is running at temperatures of about 39 oC during minimal use, and 70 oC when CPU load is maximum. The BSOD's occur either time.

I will try to uninstall all the drivers, but this is something I have no experience with, so we'll see how that goes.

 

If you don't have any of the stickers on the laptop, then you will have a difficult time getting a serial key for whatever came with the machine (or maybe that's why the laptop was so affordable in the first place). If you at least have a serial number, you can try contacting Asus support for it. But even with that, you still need the media to install Windows. I recommend trying the recovery first, as you mentioned.

You can try running HD Sentinel also to check the health of the drive, just to rule out a bad/failing hard drive: Hard Disk Sentinel - HDD health and temperature monitoring

 

Thanks Prostar. I foolishly didn't even check the bottom of the laptop (this is the first laptop I've bought that comes with an OS); there is a serial sticker there. If recovery doesn't work (via Asus AI Recovery DVDs) then I will just try to install a fresh Windows using the serial. I will post if I am able to defeat the BSOD in this otherwise awesome laptop.

 

Alright, so I tried to use AI Recovery but my discs didn't work (it got to about 5%, then said "Error -3"). So I just went ahead and re-installed Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit. Got Windows installed cleanly, installed the graphics, audio, wireless and touchpad drivers for the X54C from Asus's website. I am still getting a BSOD intermittently. It seems to happen more when on battery than when plugged in, but I have no strong evidence. I am going to try to wait for another one and try to record the memory addresses, but I am getting ready to just go back to the store with it. I hope this is not the story for all the X54C-RB93 computers, as I really like the specs and the price... Any further suggestions will be greatly appreciated, thanks!

 

Do you have a spare HDD you can try, the fact that chkdsk returned errors might be a sign that you HDD is going bad.

 

There are more robust programs than chkdsk too. Hiren's has wonderful repair tools for hard disks, and Hiren's 15.2 was released fairly recently, which has numerous utilities - both GUI and DOS programs (HDAT2 is one of my favorites).

I agree with tijo that the damaged sectors previously found are concerning, "repaired" or not.