Bizarre Clevo D900F2/Sager NP9285 Behavior

Hello Folks,

I have a Clevo D900F2 (aka Sager NP9285) which has been an excellent gaming laptop for ages up until about last week.

I turned the machine on, lights would light up as always, the hard drive light would flicker on and off for about a second or two, then the machine would shut itself down.

My initial assumption was a bad hard drive, or a bad motherboard. Case closed, right?

Not as such.

A few hours went by and I decided to try again. I turned the laptop on and it started to boot normally. It got to the 4 colored globs while loading Windows 7 and shut itself down. Odd.

Trying to boot it again, it powered up and stayed on but nothing happened. After about 20 seconds, all 3 "lock" LED's started to flash. Very odd.

I shut it down again and put it away for a few days since I had other stuff to do.

Fast forward to last night, about a week or so later. I pulled the laptop out of the closet because I thought that maybe I could at least sell the memory, CPU and maybe the video card on ebay.

Just for the heck of it, I plugged it in and hit the power switch. The laptop booted normally into Windows 7 as if nothing was ever wrong with it.

You can imagine my surprise. To test, I played an hours worth of Bad Company 2, no trouble. After this, I shut the laptop down myself and walked away shaking my head.

Does anyone know what is happening here, or maybe had the same problem?

My apologies for the long post, but, any help or suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,
Mike

 

Don't know how the fans are in that system, but could one of them maybe get stuck?

If the bearings are dried-out the fan can get intermittent. I've had a fan that would not spin-up every time, or reach full speed. The laptop detects trouble and will shut itself down to prevent trouble. I would probably hear a fan sound funny before it gets that bad, but might be a good idea to check how the fans spin when everything works and compare with when you run into that issue if (you can reproduce it somewhat in short timescales).

 

I considered this actually, removed the bottom cover and checked that the fans were all spinning freely and they seemed ok. The fans have always been good, and they still appear to be working without problems. With that said though, it's a good suggestion since that is definitely something that would cause this kind of behavior I would think.