Help troubleshoot my W500 please!

[outofstepper]

Greets all.

I have a w500 (4058CTO) that's acting up.. was hoping someone could help me 

troubleshoot it.  This is my personal work machine and rely on it every day.

A few weeks ago I started getting system freezes.  Everything would lock up.  Only way

to get it back was a hard reboot.

Someone told me it was RAM going bad so I replaced it.

Still happens.

I also did a clean reinstall of the OS (wanted to switch to Win7 anyway )

I got the feeling it was overheating.  Would only happen end of day or during CPU intensive

work.  Sometimes I could just hard reboot and it would be fine again.

Lately, boot-up times have been getting longer and longer.  It "acts dead" -- but if I leave

it alone, sooner or later (20 minutes?) it'll come to life.  Once that happens boot time (for OS)

is very fast.

Machine runs great when its running.

When it "does its thing" all the right lights come on.. but the only thing I can do is open and close

the CD tray.  I don't even hear the fan or HDD spin.

I know this is vague.. but maybe sounds familiar to someone?

There has to be a log somewhere of whats going on right?  Event Viewer only shows "Unexpected

Shutdowns" errors -- PC Doctor reports all is good.

Thoughts?

Thanks!

[buddinggeek]

Have you seen the performance and reliability history?Does that show anything abnormal?

[outofstepper]

What is performance and reliability history?

It just happened again.  I have performance turned down.. hoping that pushing so hard

would help.  no dice.  I think my fan isn't running.  Or maybe my fan gives out?  Upper left

hand corner seems hot.  Is there any way to test the fan?  I usually use this thing on a dock,

so I can't gage the fan/sound/air level by "hand".

My CPU temp, right now, is 53C.  I've just started monitoring it.. its gone up to 61C max,

but didnt stay there long.

This is really starting to get scarey.

-Tony

[outofstepper]

Ok so I'm writing this from a different computer

I kept the CPU temp montior up and ran the Lenovo Stress Test...

as the graphics were building I watched my CPU temp rise.  It hit

74C and then everything locked up.

Coincidence?

Fan?

[outofstepper]

If anyone's watching this.. I took my W500 in for service.  This is no longer under warranty 

but theres a local shop that "specializes" in lenovos.

They charged me $110 to tell me everything checks out fine.  ?

They cleaned everything out -- said there was some dust but not enough to have caused

a problem.

For $100 they could try to pull the CPU and GPU and reapply some more thermal compound?

I've been using it as-is (after they blew it out) -- and so far at max performance and spinning

CAD models (and a bogus FEA ) -- I don't seem to be breaking the 66C-67C mark.

I'm going to try the PC Doctor stress test see what happens.

Thanks.

[don820]

For what it's worth...

76 is not that hot -- should be able to get up to the high 90's without too much worry.  At the very least, it shouldn't be locking up at 76.  I run about 50 "cool" (basic apps) and about 75 "hot" (intense gaming).

You may just be experiencing a random system board failure.  The problem with that is that's it's pretty much a diagnosis of omission -- you have to rule out everything else first, and it's tedious because of the high degree of randomness.

If you've ruled out RAM, Fan and software, you're getting close to needing to try a system board replacement to see if that does the trick.

[lead_org Microsoft MVP Contributor]

76 degrees is not that hot, and it should NOT be locking up.

What is the GPU temperature?

Also, if you switched the GPU to intel integrated model does the same lock up occur?

Use the Prime95 test instead, you can download it off the net. 

[outofstepper]

Well.. just when I thought I was clear..

I've been running PC Doctor stress test and monitoring temps..

they never really seem to get above 78-79 .. but I get consistent lock-ups.

With stress test I mean.

I'll try the integrated graphics, thats a good idea.  Thanks.

-Tony

[outofstepper]

Had a good run there.. the stress test ran longer.. but in the end, it still locked up.

And I learned you can't run the lenovo stress test in safe mode.  Learn something

new every day.

Are there any real good hardware level diagnostic apps?  Its frustrating to have

the Lenovo system health and diagnostic run for an hour.. give me a thumbs up

on pretty much everything excpet the screws holding the casework together.. and

then have the machine lock up on me when I try to click the "OK" button. 

-Tony

[lead_org Microsoft MVP Contributor]

do a hdd health check from the bios menu.

Also, what bios version are you running, have you tried updating or downgrading the bios?