Advent Laptop Troubleshooting

-Chris-

I have a 3-ish year old Advent laptop. It's been shutting down for no reason while running, I've been unable to work out what's wrong with it and when I tried to reinstall the OS it blue screens after about 5 mins of installation.

I brought it to someone to get it fixed, and when I rang up to see how it was, their work experience guy said "the system notes say we cleaned the fan, but the laptop wasn't started up".

When I went to collect the laptop I told them I didn't think they had addressed the problem, as I don't see how you can resolve a "shutting down while running" problem without having the laptop actually running.

The tech I was speaking to told me it's possible to run diagnostics on a laptop via the USB port while the laptop is powered down.

To my mind, that doesn't make sense, but I'd like a more technically-expert poster to give me their thoughts before I throw the toys out of the pram and accuse the tech of lying to me...

Alanstrainor

He's talking out of his arse. He realised it wasn't properly looked at and came up with a piss poor excuse.

If it's periodically shutting down, it could be a number of things really.
It could be:
* an overheating issue.
* a corrupt stick of RAM.
* Failing Hard disk.

They're the first couple of things i would check anyway.

What OS are you installing? I'm pretty sure Vista, and 7, have on board memory testers that will test the RAM on the machine for errors.

-Chris-

Alanstrainor wrote: »

He's talking out of his arse. He realised it wasn't properly looked at and came up with a piss poor excuse.

If it's periodically shutting down, it could be a number of things really.
It could be:
* an overheating issue.
* a corrupt stick of RAM.
* Failing Hard disk.

They're the first couple of things i would check anyway.

I don't think it's overheating based, as I've never noticed an issue with the fan (running constantly or not running at all) and it's never "felt hot", but it's not something I tested for.

I did all the chkdsk-ing and virus scanning I could think of. I haven't looked at the RAM.

Alanstrainor wrote: »

What OS are you installing? I'm pretty sure Vista, and 7, have on board memory testers that will test the RAM on the machine for errors.

It's currently running W7 Ultimate. I've tried re-installing W7 as well as XP Pro (both retail versions).

partyatmygaff

One simple way to rule out overheating or hard drive failure is to open the BIOS and go to "Hardware monitor" or "Device monitor" or "Temperature monitor" or something similar. What you need to do is to find the CPU temperature.

Start up the laptop, enter the BIOS and observe the CPU temperature and see how high it reaches. If it is rises over 50C, it's probably an overheating issue. If it remains relatively low and stable, we can rule out overheating. If it shuts down in BIOS, it's almost certainly a motherboard or RAM issue.

-Chris-

Cheers, I'll give that a go when I get it back.

Really, at the moment I'm just trying to make sure they're not trying to make me pay for diagnostics that aren't actually possible (i.e. to stop them lying to me or ripping me off)

Gareth2011

This is what happened to the wife's laptop. Would be working away and then it would shut down. If we tried to start up again blue screen, shut down. Worked few times but got blue screen quite a bit. Brought it to a guy who said hard drive was gone in it. Got a 2nd hand hard drive and it worked fine, laptop is up and running again witrh vista installed on new drive.