W701 crash problems

[SharePoint_Radi]

Hey guys,

I have a W701 2500-3MM, upgraded to 16GB 1333mh RAM, everything else is OOTB.

I am getting hardware crashes during normal operation. The screen goes blank, the HDD light flashes ever 1-2 seconds for a short time (it doesn't look like it is doing anything). When this happens I can't revive it, no key combinations do anything. I have to hold the power button for 5 seconds to give it a hard reboot.

I have done the RAM, system board and CPU tests in the Lenovo recovery (F11) tool. No errors. I have not done the HDD tests yet.

I can't find any relation to temperature, it seems to be doing it completely randomly. I have noticed it occuring more often when copying a large file (60GB) from a portable HDD.

On another issue, the graphics driver crashes as well. nVidia knows how to restart itself and I get a notification in Win 7. Not sure if this is related - I have the latest drivers from the nVidia web site.

Regards,

Radi A.

[Ingvarr]

It may Intel Rapid Storage driver-related.

Try to remove it and make sure you system is using default Microsoft driver ("Standard SATA AHCI adapter"). See if it will make crashes to go away.

[SharePoint_Radi]

I reinstalled the video driver, I used the one from the Lenovo website rather than the latest from the nVidia website (I have a nVidia Quadro 3800M ) and I believe my problems have gone away. The laptop was on all night upgrading a 60GB database inside a VM. The HDDs would have worked for at least 3hrs without a break.

Will post here if I see the problem again!

[SharePoint_Radi · Accepted solution]

Just to confirm, this problem has been resolved. Updating drivers from the Lenovo website did the trick.

[hazart]

Thanks for the feedback!

I'm having similar issues on my W701 using the latest NVIDIA driver, but I'm reluctant to use the Lenovo driver as it's very outdated!

[SharePoint_Radi]

I was also reluctant about it as I was trying out some games, but I ended up settling with the latest from the Lenovo website.

Make sure you let Lenovo know about your concerns, I did and they promised to escalate it.

[Ingvarr]

No option atm really. Either use Lenovo driver or suffer random crashes. From my experience it works with latest games just fine anyway, most stuff in newer drivers is support for newer chips.

[hazart]

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SharePoint_Radi wrote:

I was also reluctant about it as I was trying out some games, but I ended up settling with the latest from the Lenovo website.

Make sure you let Lenovo know about your concerns, I did and they promised to escalate it.

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Yes, I think Lenovo should at least keep its mobile workstations' graphics drivers updated.

[nikoh]

Yeah i have the same issues with my w700ds, im running the video driver off nvidias website, the lenovos nvidia driver is much more limited.  The "nvidia website" driver does crash within windows and recovers, doesnt seem like a big deal. 

But nvidia website gives me more features, it allows me to run a custom resoulution on my secondary slideout display, its lets me run 768*1200, to match the main displays pixel height, so the windows come across smoothly between displays

[hazart]

Lenovo has released an updated video driver for W701: http://www-307.ibm.com/pc/support/site.wss/document.do?lndocid=MIGR-75176 , version 257.38. I've installed it on my W701 with FX 3800M and had two random system lock-ups within one day.

On the other hand, NVIDIA has just released version 260.89: http://www.nvidia.co.uk/object/notebook-win7-winvista-64bit-260.89-whql-driver-uk.html . I've tried it and experienced a hard system lock-up when Firefox was trying to load a flash video player on the Internet.

I've reverted back to NVIDIA's 258.96.