Laptop freeze when idle or when lid closed or play BF3

[orangpelupa]

Hello B3D people

my laptop is about 2.5 years old.
nowadays its getting more and more annoying because the freeze happen more often.

randomly Happend when:
1 idle
2 lid closed at night
3 playing BF3
4 typing

100% fine with 3 hours of Prime 95 and Furmark running.

This problem number 3 already occurring since age 1.5 year. ASUS service center wont fix it, they say its fine. They just cleaned up the HSF. They blame the game.

any idea what can i do to narrow down where is the problem?

Thanks

 

[UniversalTruth]

I would guess it may be a driver related problem.

My laptop crashes too and I suspect it's the wireless card driver.
The thing is that it is the newest and with older versions crashes are more often. But, of course, it can be something else.

 

[Otto Dafe]

I would run chkdsk and memtest86 first, and then go on from there.

 

[orangpelupa]

thanks. nice.

ill try the memtest first. if that say no error, ill try to move all my works to (free from university, yay) Windows 8 to see if it works fine.

Currently im on windows 7 that never reinstalled since got the laptop first time.

EDIT:
hmm. memtest need to be run on boot. any app that can be run under windows? my Google-fu failes me

EDIT
got it http://hcidesign.com/memtest/

 

[Arwin]

I've had something similar - my PC would die if I left it on during the night. This went on for quite a while, until this weekend, the thing didn't boot up anymore at all, giving me four beeps instead. Google told me that except for a few patterns, all other beep patterns are basically memory errors, and that the quickest way to test was to leave one bank out first, and then the other. And sure enough, the other was the problem, PC booted up much faster than it ever did before, and leaving it on overnight was no problem at all.

 

[PieterPot]

You could also try a CPUburn, normally the pc will give a blue screen or shutdown, but you could always try if you still doesn't have a solution

 

[Grall]

EDIT:
hmm. memtest need to be run on boot. any app that can be run under windows? my Google-fu failes me

Any serious memory tester needs exclusive access to memory, as otherwise you can't test RAM which has been allocated by the OS or other apps, which pretty much makes the test a pointless waste of time. Just restart your system and run memtest86, AFAIK, it's the best there is.

 

[Blazkowicz]

I would guess it may be a driver related problem.

My laptop crashes too and I suspect it's the wireless card driver.
The thing is that it is the newest and with older versions crashes are more often. But, of course, it can be something else.

The wireless card itself can be bad, worst case.
Whichever it is, if it's on a mini-PCI slot you can easily get one from a broken or abandoned laptop, else you need a mini PCIe one. It can be fun to say good bye to your wireless driver this way (and hello to the new one, which may be or not be better)

 

[Blazkowicz]

You could also try a CPUburn, normally the pc will give a blue screen or shutdown, but you could always try if you still doesn't have a solution

Some CPU burning programs may run happily, and not crash as long as the PC doesn't suffer from a thermal or power supply problem. I think mersenne primes did that for me (that must have been a version of Prime 95).
Super Pi on the other hand diverged instantly when I had some slight stability problem.

Memtest86 really is the first thing to do (at all times actually, I run it if I get a new PC or memory stick), you can find it on most linux isos or from the boot menu of an installation, and on the Ultimate Boot CD. Else it's a diskette image. memtest86/memtest86+ is some useless confusion, get either of them.

Hard to debug problems are then usually linked to the hard disk (or sata/IDE cable, or maybe the controller) and on the worst case I've attributed the problem - with no proof but reasonable suspicion - on some motherboard or CPU bus (fsb, hypertransport, pci etc.)