7811 fx turns off without warning. please help!

Hi I have a 7811 FX. It was refurbished when bought and is not under warranty anymore. Just yesterday i started getting an odd issue where the laptop would turn off without warning. Almost as if it was over heating and just losing power. I have been checking the temps with cpuid and the temps seem just fine so this leads me to believe it is not an over heating issue although I am definitely keeping my eye on it as it most resembles an over-heating issue.

Just to clarify what happened before this first started. I wanted to hook my 7811 up to my 32" Sharp LCD HDTV so I did. I hooked it up with an HDMI cable. I bought a cheap keyboard and a decent mouse so I could use it from my couch. After getting everything hooked up and working on the TV is when I think it first happened as far as I can remember. I do not know if this is what caused this to happen, but i figured I should add it.

I am an IT technician and work with computers everyday and this problem is just stumping me right now so I am seeking some help. Some other things I have tried are the following:

1. Taking out one chip of RAM to see if it was a RAM issue, but no difference. I didn't have a spare chip so only tried the original chips separately.

2. It's not software most likely since it would do this during Windows Install also. I ended up re-installing Windows to make sure.

3. I have took the laptop apart to check all the components and as far as I can see, nothing seems to be broken or anything.

4. I have cleaned out all the dust (very minimal) and put Arctic Silver 5 on the CPU.

5. I have taken the HD out to look at it, but have not switched it with a diff. one yet. (This is one of my next steps.)

6. Both Fans seem to be working fine as far as I can tell.

I am using the laptop right now writing this message. Its looking great, but at any moment it will just turn off just as if it completely lost power. No warning or anything.

What do you guys think? Any help is much appreciated and since I am a Tech myself you can ask me to try some things others might not be able to. I have no problem taking the laptop completely apart if needed.

Here are my temps as of right now with CPUID

CPU: Core 0 = 30 degrees , Core 1 = 27 degrees

GPU = 47 degrees

HDD = 49 degrees

(All Temps in Celcius)

 

What are the temps on your TZS0 and TZS1?

The 7811 has a pretty annoying habit of shutting down due to a glitch in the TZ readings

 

check that and CPU temps as well, run Orthos(google it) and run a temperature monitoring program to see what your maxes are. I recommend HWmonitor.

 

Thanks for the replies. All help is very well appreciated. I have been using HWMonitor to monitor the temps and they all seem OK. the TZS0 and TZS1 read about 47 degrees Celsius right now. A glitch in the TZ readings sounds like something that could be happening since it occurs at random times as far as I can tell. I am gonna run some stress tests while watching the temps to see if anything weird happens.

If you have anymore information on the TZ glitch or if anyone has any other suggestions please feel free to share. Ill keep in touch. Thanks

Also I wanted to add this seems like a great forum and plan to stick around for a while. You all seem very helpful here and the 7811 is a sick laptop. Me and my ex-girlfriend bought an older model in the FX series like a year ago or more and after we broke up I had to get myself one. My other laptop is the Asus N10J-A1. Its a perfect 10" laptop with an intel atom cpu, 2gb ram, geforce 9300m GPU (can be switched between dedicated and integrated to save power). It can play some games decently, but still wanted the power of the 7811.

 

k I got a little update here. I ran burnintest 6 on it while hwmonitor was running to watch the temps and none of the temps go over 55 degrees Celsius. So this leads me to think that its not overheating unless there is some glitch like was mention above. Everytime I ran burnintest 6 it would just turn off after maybe 5-10 minutes of the test.

One thing i did notice is that it seems like its just losing power completely. It doesn't matter if its running off just the battery, battery and charger, or just the charger as it does it in any of these situations. I will keep testing it out to see if there is anything else, but hopefully this info can help someone help me. Let me know. Thanks

 

did you check windows' event logs?

 

I have looked around but not exactly sure what to look for. Its not giving me any warning or anything. Its like it loses power or something.

I took the whole laptop apart to see if there was anything out of the ordinary. I didnt see anything that looked like was broken or burnt. I did end up losing some screws and forgot to put back in the card reader lol. I put everything back together and gave it another shot running burnintest and it still turned off after about 15 minutes or a little less. The temps are still fine and nothing is getting too hot. This is leading me to believe that there is an issue with the motherboard or that there is some glitch.

Any suggestions or things to try? Thanks

 

If your thermal zones arent spiking and there isnt anything showing in your logs... then it might be a bad piece of hardware.

Usually it would be the thermal zone or the GPU. If not that... you might just have bad hardware.

I hope not though unless the refurb place is willing to take it back

 

YA its arealdy passed warranty so im probably gonna have to find a way to fix it myself. Now I got a new problem. I tried to update the bios through windows version in the forum sticky and the computer shut off during the middle of it and now my screen will not show anything and just stays off. Sounds like things are running in the background, but its hard to say. It's really frustrating. I don't want my money to go down the drain.

 

What can do about the TZS 0 glitch causing my labtop to throttle down?

 

Blind shutdowns without anything to suggest it's hardware related makes me think you've got a faulty AC adapter. A short is happening *somewhere*, that's for sure. Try running on battery (as long as possible - do a full discharge) and see if it still does it. If it doesn't, you've narrowed it down to either your AC adapter or the power handling circuitry at the point of attachment to the laptop itself.

 

Hmm, I wonder if he just gave up cuz he had a failed BIOS update? Is there a way to recover from a bad bios write?