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This is driving me crazy! Plz help!
Hello. First of all, I am not sure if this is the right place for stuff for this but I have tried in other forums and people and not responding so I was hoping my favorite community will do something different. Ok straight to the point!
I have this laptop Toshiba Satellite l655 for 3 years now, and it never showed any type of errors until recently. While watching online videos, movies or playing online games, it would randomly freeze or sometimes the screen would go black but the laptop would keep running. At first I cleaned it up from dust etc,, I updated all the drivers, cleaned registry etc and still nothing. In the end I cleaned install windows (windows 7 at the time) and the problem still existed. Then I cleaned installed windows 8.1, was fine for 2-3 days and the freeze came back. So I was 100% sure it was Hardware related.
Now that I know it is hardware related problem , I wanted to find the cause of it. So I stress test it with everything there is. Furmark, 3dmark and heaven benchmark for the gpu, memtest + windows memory diagnostics + prime95 for memory, checked hard drive for errors, bad sectors etc. As you may guessed, everything came out positive. They show my laptop is top notch. No errors, not high temperatures, no nothing. So WHY THE HELL DOES IT FREEZE???
If you can find the cause I will even pay you lol. To this point, im just curious to find what is wrong. I don't care if its fixed but this is crazy. Any ideas???
Comments
There is a thin ribbon cable that runs from the video card to the LCD, it has to run through the hinge, and often gets crimped. Availability of this particular cable, and the repairability of it vary by manufacturer.
If the laptop is still running (you can hear sounds, it still responds, etc. and the screen just goes blank) - that is a likely culprit. Odds are if you plugged it into an external monitor it would still work correctly, as you'd be bypassing that ribbon cable.
It could also be the backlight on your LCD screen. The older ones are just fluorescent lights - although with that usually once it goes dark it never comes back.
I thought of that. However, on several occasions that I was watching movies on my HD TV via HDMI cable, the laptop's screen went black and so went the TV, saying there is no signal from the source. If there was a problem with the screen, then the TV would continue playing the movie.
Thank you all for your comments though. Anyone else has any other suggestions???
You said you tested those already. If they pass a bootable memory test, there isn't much else that could be wrong with the memory. If a change in OS from Windows 7 to 8.1 didn't fix it, that eliminates a lot of drivers and software if you wiped it like you said. The hard drive could still be bad, but if it scanned without issues, the chances of it being the culprit are less likely.
This reeks of an issue with the graphics card. I had the same type of issue with an older laptop of mine. One day it was running smoothly like everything was good then, all of a sudden, performance dipped, I'd lock up unexpectededly, not even while I was doing anything substantial.
Turned out that it was an issue with the fan on the graphics card. I forget what I used to check it out. It was some sort of GPU temperature monitoring software. Anyway, it did a pretty good job picking it up. That'd be where I would start.
Crazkanuk
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Azarelos - 90 Hunter - Emerald
Durnzig - 90 Paladin - Emerald
Demonicron - 90 Death Knight - Emerald Dream - US
Tankinpain - 90 Monk - Azjol-Nerub - US
Brindell - 90 Warrior - Emerald Dream - US
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Sounds like your GPU or something GPU related is going on. The freezing up and signal going out on both the monitor and HDMI output indicate a problem with GPU.
That may or may not be something you are able to fix at all. Depending on the laptop.
After 3 years of heavy gaming on a laptop hardware will fail, sooner or later. 3 years is actually pretty good. Just the price you pay for laptop gaming.
And just because temps are reading OK does not mean hardware has not failed or is failing. A laptop in full on gaming mode for hours on end will always get hot. Chances are it got too hot one time too many sometime in the recent past and that was the life of that piece of hardware.
Good luck, hopefully it is fixable for ya.
+1 you might also be concerned if it's not getting hot at all. If my laptop is running at room temperature, there's something terribly wrong
Crazkanuk
----------------
Azarelos - 90 Hunter - Emerald
Durnzig - 90 Paladin - Emerald
Demonicron - 90 Death Knight - Emerald Dream - US
Tankinpain - 90 Monk - Azjol-Nerub - US
Brindell - 90 Warrior - Emerald Dream - US
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Exactly my thoughts. The first thing that came to my mind was a bad GPU cause of the freezing and screen turning off. Sometimes the driver would crash but that was just a bad driver since with the latest driver it has stopped doing that.
In a lot of forums they suggested furkmark, 3dmark and heaven benchmark in order to stress test the GPU and see if it is faulty or not. Any of them would do the job but I used ALL 3 of them. Non of them picked anything and the benchmark/performance was higher than other laptops with the same graphic card.
Like the poster above said, a simple video streaming would not stress the GPU, however it would still it cause the laptop to freeze. Weirdly enough, it hasn't had any issues all day long today, even though I played countless youtube videos, movies, or even played some Torchlight 2 (even though it is not hard on the GPU). So the freeze is pretty random.
What was odd is that it could last like 2-3 hours in Tera and then freeze, but it would take 20min of watching something online, or 10 min tops in the closed beta of TESO. This might be a lost cause...
I wasnt saying it had failed, but it sounds like something is failing rather. I have a laptop and have owned several other over the years. Inevitably things start to not work at all or something like your experiencing of not working properly.
You can tinker around and see if you can fix it but IMO I would not put any repair money into a 3 year old heavily used laptop.
If you haven't done so already, I would strongly recommend that you back up any data that you care about, and that you do so immediately. While your symptoms do not sound indicative of hard drive problems, you don't want to take chances with what may be a dying laptop.
Sometimes you have to just say, it had a good life, it's not working right anymore, and it's time to replace it.
If everything you are typing is true I think this one is not to hard.
With it working on your other monitor it cannot be the GPU/HD/RAM/CPU.
There is really only section it can come from. It has to be either the MB, the cable, or the monitor.
The easiest way to check is to find another laptop and run the cable from the laptop to that monitor. If it works then your monitor is the problem.
If it does not replace the cable.
If that does not work it is probably your MB.
The problem with laptop hardware is you have to have parts to troubleshoot.
If you see any lines on the monitor it is probably the cable. If there have never been any lines it is probably the monitor. I would put the MB as least likely.
--John Ruskin
He reloaded the OS twice. My guess is that he does not need to do a backup.
--John Ruskin
Sorry, I misread what you typed.
Try turning off the page file and see if it resolves the issue.
http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/change-virtual-memory-size#1TC=windows-7
--John Ruskin
As Quiz said try the ethernet port and see if the issue persists. If its only wireless then you can go buy a usb adapter and use that instead of the laptop onboard wireless.