7811 Shutting Down Overnight

So far this might just be a fluke, but I'm wondering if anyone else has encountered either of these issues.

I've encountered two unusual shutdowns.

1. First, the a few nights ago I left a 3D stress test program running (RTHDRIBL or Furmark...think it was RTHDRIBL) and when I woke up in the morning it had shutdown. When I restarted, it said it BSOD due to an Nvidia driver issue. I am running the most recent Vista 64bit video drivers from laptopvideo2go. I know people have reported BSOD due to GPU issues, but is there a way to differentiate whether it's due to heat or just a driver conflict?

2. I left my laptop on overnight defragging and letting iTunes do it's stupid gapless check (argh, hate itunes so much...love iphone so much...). I went to bed at 11pm and the temperature of the system and all componenents was at a reasonable temperature (well, the HD was at 63C, but it's gotten as high as 67C without crashing before).

When I woke up, the system had shut down. I reviewed the Vista event log, and the laptop tried to go to sleep at 3:50am. Since it tried to sleep at 3:50am, I'm guessing it had finished it's defrag but decided the iTunes activity didn't constitute user activity, so it tried to sleep. I can't figure out why it just shut itself off instead of sleeping though?

Any suggestions? I'm going to set up another stress test and let it stress test for four or five hours while I'm at work. I've got another week or so in the 14 day window. I think I'm also going to download the Crysis demo and loop that for a "Real world" test overnight. So far everything about this laptop is great except the hard drive temperature issues (as noted in a prior thread, and I think that's related more to the poor design of the hard drive bay and the heat generated by the stock HD). I'm hoping these random issues are software related and not hardware related, I don't want to exchange this and risk encountering all kinds of other issues!

 

Well, did you overclock your GPU? My x305 never shut down, but I did get an Nvidia display driver issue when I overclock too high. I suggest having your laptop elevated evenly with the cooling fans having space to suck up more cool air and keeping it in a room or place where the ambient temperature isn't too high. If you overclocked it, that may be the problem.

 

I have not overclocked anything, and I do have the back of the laptop elevated (using a Lapinator Plus).

The ambient temperature in the room isn't that high, so I really don't think these are thermal related issues.

 

check you power profile in vista and what its set to . mine resets itself every few reboots and turns my monitor off after 20 minutes and harddisks as well when it resets to defaults.

 

I double checked and it is set to sleep after 20 minutes (or whatever) if inactivity. And as I said, the system event log DID indicate it was trying to sleep. I left it on and updating my iTunes library when I left for work this morning. *Crosses fingers* Hopefully it'll just go to sleep as it should so when I get home I can just wake it up. I guess I'll find out...

 

is it windows auto update at 3am then go to sleep after 20 mins of inactivity?

 

First off, BSODs are almost always software/driver related. If it were heat related you should get a system shutdown.

Disable hybernation and check your power settings make sure there's nothing that will put the system to sleep.

A lot of Vista problems has to do with sleep not detecting processes and end up crashing as a result.

 

Thanks, but turned out this probably was heat related (somehow). Somehow the card was probably overheating and maybe not responding or something, hence the driver crash. I did a gateway restore and started from scratch, and it was doing the same thing. Eventually, it wouldn't display the bios screen correctly. Something was wrong with that laptop, so it was exchanged.

 

make sure you aren't covering the vents to the graphics card, that can cause that particular area of your laptop to heat up real quick if you're gaming. If you're not gaming, it will feel just cool to the touch.