Clevo Repair Woes

Well I hoped to not have to go on to forums to fix a $2300 laptop but here I am with my Clevo P170HM or Sager NP8170 (bought it from Sager). I now have a pretty strange issue with everything in windows explorer crashing except for my desktop background. I get a message that Disk 0 has been unplugged, all my programs crash, all of my icons disappear, and I'm left with whatever my background was last. Now whats very strange is that this only seems to happen when the charger is plugged into the laptop. While running off the battery everything seems to run fine although my HD6990M seems to be running very slow for what it is only scoring 2200 points in 3DMark 11 (although at least it doesn't crash) when it used to score 3300-4000 points.

Anyone here have any clue as to fix this?

 

Sounds like a connector some-where some-place is loose. Have you tried looking at your hard drive bay and seeing everything is connected properly?
I would also check over everything else is properly connected just to be sure.

 

Just double check your HDDs are seated properly.

 

I've already swapped the drives twice and the PC still crashes only when I plug the charger in for a minute or two. I doubt its the hard drive at this point but its most likely the charger or how the charger powers the components in the PC. It could also be the motherboard but it does the same thing with the hard drive connected to either port

 

I assume you are out of warranty, but if not, RMA.

If it's not the hdd, maybe it's the powerbrick gone bad?

 

It does appear to be some sort of electrical trip or short. I think the safest course of action to take first is to try a new power supply. If a new supply/AC adapter, then you're looking potentially faulty electrical components on the board, or the PCB itself.

 

Certainly worth testing the adapter by trying a new one, it seems likely if the machine is running at all.