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Resolved Question

Is my laptop dying? (Symptoms inside)

by Nov 18, 2012 6:09PM PST

The past couple of days, my laptop has been acting strange. The most notable symptom is that many of my games which used to perform more or less flawlessly have been having trouble running. Namely, a general decrease in performance and quite a lot of intermittent stuttering.

I first noticed the problem a couple of days ago when I was using my laptop and it wasn't getting as much cooling as I'd usually like and it got very, very hot.

Does any of this sound like symptoms of hardware degradation? Is it possible the heat (~100 degrees celcius) could have damaged the internal components?

Asus A42JA model
Intel Q740 i7 Processor
Radeon HD 5730 Display
Windows 7 64 bit
Latest graphics drivers installed

Discussion is locked

urza4315 has chosen the best answer to their question. View answer
7 Posts
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Best Answer

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How old? Do you own CANNED AIR?
by Forum moderator Nov 19, 2012 2:17AM PST

We do have a trick for i7 based laptops but first, you did read this passage before you bought that i7?

"Our tests demonstrate fairly little difference between a $225 LGA 1155 Core i5-2500K and a $1000 LGA 2011 Core i7-3960X, even when three-way graphics card configurations are involved. It turns out that memory bandwidth and PCIe throughput don't hold back the performance of existing Sandy Bridge-based machines. "
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/gaming-cpu-review-overclock,3106-4.html

So to extend this i7's life, cut heat and still game well, why not reduce the number of CPU CORES used in Windows?

Here's a tutorial -> http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/66504-processors-limit-number-used-windows-7-a.html

Try 6 there.
Bob

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Thanks
by urza4315 Nov 19, 2012 7:22PM PST

Roughly two years old, and I don't have CANNED AIR, whatever that is.

I've noticed that this problem seems to arise at a critical point in temperature, roughly 99~100 degrees, and I am gaming in rooms that are a fair bit hotter than my usual room. So I might try your solution.

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You'll want CANNED AIR.
by r. proffitt Forum moderator Nov 20, 2012 12:47AM PST

You have just revealed something you are missing when it comes to owning a laptop. Well I guess you could pay for this at a service counter to have it done every few months?
Bob

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Air in a can?
by urza4315 Nov 20, 2012 8:14AM PST

By CANNED AIR you just mean compressed air in a can, right? The all-caps threw me off to what you're talking about. You're talking about using it to clean out dust, right?

Anyways I tried my laptop again yesterday and it was working alright again, so I'm chalking this up to be a heat issue.

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Yes. It's something we own if we have a laptop.
by r. proffitt Forum moderator Nov 20, 2012 8:38AM PST
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Answer
Re: laptop dying?
by Forum moderator Nov 18, 2012 6:13PM PST

Looks more like some process running that taxes the CPU. Go into Process Manager, processes tab and sort on CPU usage. Tell the what you find.

Kees

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Nothing there
by urza4315 Nov 19, 2012 7:20PM PST

Nothing there that hasn't always been running on my machine. I'm very meticulous about the processes I let run in the background.

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