Greetings!
So recently I've come across two issues that I just cannot seem to solve.. My wife's laptop recently has been randomly shutting down whenever she goes to boot any games up. Mostly happens with World of Warcraft which is odd. So we had it taken to a computer shop and the dude said it was overheating so he added more thermal paste for it and we got it a cooling pad and the same issue is occuring..
After getting fed up with it I grabbed my shelved desktop and booted it up last night and behold it's doing the exact same thing. I thought it was maybe a Windows 11 issue but it has Win10 on it so that's not the problem.. So right now I'm at a loss and looking for any help or suggestions before taking it back to the shop and dropping more money on it.
Thanks!
The laptop model if it helps is:
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07CTHLX8C/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_search_asin_title?ie=UTF8&th=1
Comments
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2024: 47 years on the Net.
I've checked for dust and cleaned both of them out good.
@Sovrath - I've ran checks on it and Windows Firewall either hasn't popped up with anything I should be looking into.
@k@keinersonerster - I've only used the same charger that it came with originally. It does feel really hot after awhile. She can browse the internet sometimes for awhile before it shuts down. I'll try to do some stress tests on it and see what I can come up with.
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2024: 47 years on the Net.
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2024: 47 years on the Net.
I'd recommend charging the laptop battery full. Then disconnecting it from power grid, net, all external devices, and turning it to airplane mode. Then check if it still keeps crashing.
A quick search showed that the 300 series has that issue and it may be hardware related. I would suspect any local repair shop wouldn't know about any defect history and would likely just take a few shots in the dark at it.
"Unexpected Shut Down Acer Predator Helios 300 — Acer Community" https://community.acer.com/en/discussion/586437/unexpected-shut-down-acer-predator-helios-300
I would definitely try the troubleshooting steps but there are a lot of posts about helios 300s having problems.
If you do plan on taking it back to a shop make sure it's an authorized Acer dealer that is aware of the issue.
As for the other pc with the problem, how long has it been since use? I would say clean the desktop out from any dust, check Temps in the bios first, then download something like speedfan or open hardware monitor to check Temps when in windows. See what kind of increase you get on low load. Then higher. You can also check the system logs to see if it's blue screening and you can get the error off of that if there is one.
Could point to the desktop problem.
Since both machines look like they have same problem, you should disconnect the laptop from everything external. Then see if it still keeps crashing to verify that it's not your power/network/external devices that's causing trouble to both of the computers.
Plus the laptop should be able to work on battery, which, if the battery isn't working at all, that would be an indicator that it could be the plug, or electricity supply issue. Trying other outlets may help, BUT if the laptop works on battery and it still happens, it would be unlikely that would be the culprit.
Plus laptops and desktops have very different power requirements. Even a high end laptop would be less than half the power consumption of even a moderate desktop.
It is strange that they both have the same issue, but it could also be a complete coincidence in this case with two different issues. Still good to do troubleshooting in every case.
I also can't imagine it being network related. A faulty wired network might kill a NIC (which would end up being a hardware problem - and even then, they usually just pop up as "disconnected hardware"), but I've never seen a bad network crash a computer in modern days. Especially WiFi. You just have a case of can't connect to the internet.
I would have guessed over temp at first as well - you ruled out GPU overtemp, but haven't really ruled out CPU overtemp, or just other components not directly monitored getting hot. The laptop cooling pad would help, but if there's a heatsink crammed with cat hair or dust it can only help so much -- I would hope when it got repasted all the sinks got blown out and everything inspected. A more robust monitoring program, like HWMonitor, can show readouts of all the temp sensors your computer has.
That said, even though you haven't necessarily ruled out the other temps, I would think it's most likely failed hardware now. Laptops run hot, and they tend to have shorter lives because of it. You could have failing VRMs on the motherboard, a failing battery, failing RAM, or any number of things which heat helps to accelerate wear on. Having everything crammed into a tiny space doesn't do it any favors; it's just something you have to accept as fact when gaming on a laptop.
Stress testing (I like Prime95 and Furmark for ease of use and free) - a computer should be able to run those two programs indefinitely (even at the same time). If a computer is having hardware issues, it'll often crash almost immediately after starting either, if it's heat related it might be after 3-10 minutes. If a computer can make it 30 minutes I generally will declare it fit for full duty - although you need to look at the output for Prime95, it can throw faults that indicate problems without necessarily BSODing or crashing out, but it will say as such in the logs that results didn't match what was expected. Depending on the results of this I may have other steps to recommend, but this is where I usually start.
The older computer not working - not sure how much stock I'd put into that as being related. It's old, it's been sitting around, and you don't know for absolute certain that it would be 100% working anyway. It could easily have faulty hardware or a bad BIOS battery or any number of things that could also be causing it to crash but entirely unrelated to the laptop. Troubleshooting that thing is an entirely separate affair I think. First place I would start with the Desktop is a full format and clean installation of Windows from the latest Microsoft ISO - nuke it and start over, that eliminates it being a bad Windows patch or virus or anything software related.
Also, try running Malwarebytes on the laptop -- it can often catch things that MS Defender will miss. You don't need to pay for it or run it full time, just get the free edition and run a manual scan and see what it comes up with. There is a chance it's malware related, and this is a free and relatively painless step that helps with peace of mind.