Serious error, Blue screen, problems booting, and overheating!

Hello folks,

I got myself in quite a pickle here. It all started last night. I put my laptop on hibernate and took it downstairs. When I attempted to power it on, the BIOS wouldn't start (by that, I mean the Asus logo didn't flash and the HDD pass didn't prompt).

Sometimes this happens so I just manually powered off and on. After two tries it still wasn't working. I also noticed I didn't hear the right amount of clicks and sounds I usually hear when I power on the computer so I started getting worried. I tried again and the laptop powered and I got it loading straight to desktop. Once the desktop completely loaded, a blue screen flashed my screen and the laptop rebooted. I ran scandisk and loaded to desktop...only to have the blue screen appear again!

After a few restarts and scan disks, the laptop was running. I noticed the fan was low and the temp was in the mid 60's. I got one of those MS prompts saying I experienced a critical error and that it was a hardware failure.

I powered off my laptop and went to sleep. This morning, I had to go through the same exact process to get the laptop running. I left the laptop running for a bit while I took a shower and stuff and when I came back I saw it was powered off completely. I felt a lot of heat coming off of the keyboard. I put a fan near the computer. After 5mins I tried powering and it wouldn't come on at all. I fanned for another 20 mins and miraculously, it worked. I powered off right away now I don't know what to do.

In short, these are my problems:

- Laptop won't come on properly
- BSoD occurs frequently but stops after some time
- overheating (possibly due to fan stopping or not running properly). I use NHC and it never gave me a problem so far
- BSod even occurs during scan disk

This is what I figured out:

- Not a LCD problem
- Not a RAM problem
- I opened the vent and the fans were clean, and nothing there looked fried from that panel
- Nothing was attached other than power

I haven't done any updates recently and its been a long time since I formated. My laptop is about 1.5 years old.

Much help would be appreciated!!

 

I am thinking it could be a video card driver corrupting. Has anyone heard of a virus or a trojan causing anything like this? I never had a "real" virus before and I had Avast running.

I want to do a system restore and see if that would help, but I am afraid of getting the BSoD during the restore....

Any suggestions? I want to take it to the RMA center in Markham but I might not get a chance for a week or so and I need the laptop now. Also I bought my laptop during the whole "bonus year warranty time frame on new laptops" but my model says "1 year on it". I didn't receive any writing or paper specifying I had the extra year, just the word of my reseller.

 

So theres nothing I can do eh?

I guess off to service center it goes.

EDIT: Also to add to my problems, now the computer won't load at all. It starts and I get to the HDD password prompt, an the computer would just randomly freeze. In the middle of the pass, in the XP loading screen, when i try to boot in safe mode, etc.

I wonder if the computer short circuited or just burned out somewhere...

 

If your computer shorted or burned, it will not be booting.

Did you check your fan like you mentioned in your initial post? Sounds like an overheating issue, it could be the graphic card or your processor that's overheating.

Check the stickies on the hardware forum.

 

Thanks for the response.

I checked the fan and it was running fine. I realized that that the laptop could not have shorted or be fried since it was booting.

Well right now, my laptop is running fine! I called Asus and they told me a reformat should straighten out the issues. I haven't formated yet (I need the CD which i left in another city).

This is one strange issue. I hope to god its just a Windows issue and nothing hardware related.

 

Well if it's running fine, I suggest to run some stability tests and benchmarks to see if you can duplicate the problem. I don't think it's a very serious hardware issue if it is, so once you detect something is up (like temps shooting way up etc) then abort and by then you'll start figuring out the exact problem. You should download either Speedfan or NHC to monitor your system.

Personally I think it's the graphics card that is giving you problems, and the card may need to be inspected and perhaps the thermal compound/heatpad may have deteriorated causing GPU core overheating. But that's just speculation given from your descriptions.

 

Hi Persuasion. One thing I would recommend before sending it off for repair is to try reseating the RAM to see if it changes anything. Also if you have more than one stick of RAM I'd suggest trying each stick separately and if the errors happen on one of them then you've obviously got a bad stick of RAM. Furthermore you could try running MemTest86 for a while to see if anything turns up. Beyond that I'd suggest contacting your warranty service center for a repair.