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laptop shuts off during gaming?

t0m

t0m

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my friend just moved back to bc with his laptop. last night we finally got together for some lan gaming. he hasnt tried much in the way of gaming on this thing yet, but he told me that bioshock just shuts down the whole unit shortly after clicking 'new game'. we encountered the same problem with ut3, but it would let him start a match (we got to 38/50 points), then shut his laptop off. we tried a few other games (enemy territory, dungeon lords, ut99) and no problems after a few hours.

his laptop is an acer ferrari 5000. anyone have any ideas on why it would completely shut the lap top down starting a game of bioshock? we are thinking its heat right now, but it seems strange that only a few games are affected by this. also, heat seems unlikely in the case of bioshock, which never even loads a game asset or renders anything other than the title screen. i checked the bios and there is no fan control or monitors (that i could find).

any ideas are much appreciated. :punk:
 
hey t0m, you're probably right about the heat. depending on how old his laptop is, there could simply be a build up of dust inside. I'd recommend he either takes it in for a cleaning or if it's off warranty, just unscrew the bottom panel(s) and use a can of compressed gas and blow it clean.

if you're gutsy enough, I'd recommend you even take the HSF off the CPU and GPU and reapply thermal paste. might want to swap the HSF down too to take the thin film of dust that doesn't come off with a can of gas.

consider getting the MX-2 thermal paste as you probably read the review HWC did on it, which showed an amazing drop in temperature compared to the other pastes available. :)
 
3.0charlie said:
Have you tried a different set of video drivers? I don't think heat is be the answer.
Click to expand...
I wouldn't expect a driver to cause failure like they're saying. my rig wont run BIOSHOCK either, and when it was on the old stock driver, it would just shut down the game, not the entire PC.

of course, if I've misunderstood the shutting down to mean just the game, then yeh, it's gonna be a driver issue and I apologize for my misunderstanding. :ph34r:
 
xentr_thread_starter
Mr.Friendly : thats kinda what i was thinking. hes had the laptop for about a year i think, and hasnt really tried gaming on it yet (so not much experience with how it acts). lots of time for the fans to build up... i have a tube of ceramique in the fridge, ill see how he feels about me 'going in'...

3.0charlie : havnt tried any different drivers or anything yet. the night we discovered the problem was 'game night' so we just moved on to a working game instead of troubleshooting...ill look into alternative drivers for next time. is there anything like omega drivers for nvidia, for ati? (i have had nv cards for the last few years).

also, the whole laptop shuts off instantly, not just the game (for your reference).

thanks for the advice so far. ill report back once i have gone in and done some maintenance.
 
Hey if you really wanted 2 be sure if it was heat you should run ATI Tool on it and heat up the GPU a bit to see if it resets. Also maybe its CPU heat or a combination of cpu/gpu heat. I would run orthos while running ATI Tool to see if it resets itself.

To me a driver issue wouldn't be the no.1 possibility but i wouldn't rule it out either. Drivers can often cause IRQ errors. Make sure his windows isn't set to automatically boot on a blue screen so that you're missing out on the stop error.
 
xentr_thread_starter
we just put it back together (inordinate amount of screws) and found that the fan was a little dusty, but not enough to slow it down. we gave it all a good cleaning and put it back together and got as far as booting it up before he had to go pick up his girlfriend :haha:

he should be back later tonight for some more thorough testing. as far as drivers and stuff, he updated them when the problem with bioshock happened, but im not sure if they are still up to date. thats going to be the next thing we check, followed by some torture testing to try to isolate the problem.

anyone have any other ideas or experiences? i dont have much experience with laptops, is there anything special i need to take into consideration (compared to desktops)?
 
Nope, nothing particular software/driver-wise; hardware-wise, just be careful of the CPU temps (and GPU temps if any) when testing it.
 
xentr_thread_starter
3.0charlie said:
Nope, nothing particular software/driver-wise; hardware-wise, just be careful of the CPU temps (and GPU temps if any) when testing it.
Click to expand...

ok cool. thanks :thumb:

looks like he didnt make it back over here tonight lol. i guess his girl had other ideas :ph34r:
 
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