My Laptop continues to haunt me...

[Dyno247365]

3 years ago I bought an emachines laptop, and I only did it because it was the first mainstream notebook with the athlon 64bit chip. Now I really regret it, because it was built with a weak cooling fan, the PC overheats and shuts off, basically crashes everytime too.

Recently I bought a brand new Gateway desktop with DDR2 ram and a nice NVidia GeForce card and it's served it's purpose, no crashing. Some viruses but I don't blame Gateway. I left the desktop at school and I'm home for the holidays and the best of my arsenal is this emachines laptop. So far, It's crashed while I was playing GTR2 twice and the one time I'm just reading the driving school instructions, it shuts off and suddenly my exe file is all messed up, so goodbye all gold gears and game data, plus all the mods I installed. Okay so I install the whole game again and all the mods, no big deal.

Next day, I'm working on writing a story that I really liked. I wrote it all day and saved step after step CRASH I restart the laptop and check the file, it's one huge line across of whitespace characters, day of writing GONE.

Next day, Today, PC crashes for no reason at all, i'm surfing the web, and it STILL RE-MESSES UP MY GTR2 EXE. WHY THAT FILE??? I SWEAR I WASN'T TOUCHING IT!!!!!

[doberman_52]

How much ram do you have in it? I had a similar problem with my p3 600 mhz desktom, and my parents emachines 2.5 ghz celeron, its using up to much ram was one problem, otherwise i might think possibly a virus

[Dyno247365]

1.25 Gb

...WOW while checking my properties, I noticed my processor is running at half its power, that only happens when it's unplugged, but right now it is plugged in...

[Oz]

You have a laptop that you know to be unstable.

It crashed.

Then, you trusted it with important data that YOU DID NOT BACK UP, and it crashed again.

Then your important data was corrupted.





You genius.

[doberman_52]

hmmmm... definitley not that then, I hate laptops tho, good for moving around, but when you have problems with internal parts, it can be very expensive, i know the battery on this one is severly messed up

[Dyno247365]

I shouldn't have to backup up my fles everyday, maybe once a week. This thing is really unstable, so you're right.

[Oz]

Backup your files as soon as you can't afford to re-work whatever you have done. On my work network, my critical files are backed up every 30 mins.

[ericn1300]

Originally Posted by Oz

Backup your files as soon as you can't afford to re-work whatever you have done. On my work network, my critical files are backed up every 30 mins.

Oz is right, once youve done enough work that you don't want to do it over.. save and backup.

sounds like an overheating vid chip, common. first thing to do is identify your cmos make and version and go to the web to see if there are any updates. my toshiba had a cmos update for controlling the cooling fan speed. then try to find out if there are driver updates for your video.

if it cuts power thinking it's on batteries, try removing the battery pack while using it under ac power. might be a bad battery pack trying to recharge while you're using it.

[doberman_52]

if your having overheating problems you should buy a laptop cooler, they work wonders for hot laptops, and for $20 - $30 where can you go wrong...

[gw84]

Originally Posted by doberman_52

if your having overheating problems you should buy a laptop cooler, they work wonders for hot laptops, and for $20 - $30 where can you go wrong...

are those the "pads" that you place under the laptop? I was thinking of getting one myself

[doberman_52]

Originally Posted by gw84

are those the "pads" that you place under the laptop? I was thinking of getting one myself

Yea, thats what it it, works good for me.