Laptop Random Shutdown - In Game, and on cold booting..

2 issues began to manifest in the last week, both started on the same day.

1) While gaming, i can play for 10-15 mins, then pop, the laptop shuts down without warning. An educated man might say 'over-heating'. I would agree, except that i keep my laptops insides dustless and always use the laptop on a hard surface with extra clearance (propped up), powered by mains, and with a desk fan on for added dissipation of hot air.

2) To further take away from the heat issue as a culprit, I have also experienced cold-boot shutdowns... several times lately, ive gone to the laptop first thing in the morning, in a cool room, powered on, and while the boot sequence is on the oem splash screen, the laptop will shut down. It might take 4 or 5 attempts to get a successful boot. When it does boot though, it all works fine... until i load up a game, and 10-15 mins later... refer to #1. I can use the laptop without issue until i make it work.

Believe me when i say i have checked everything. Ive tried running it purely on mains, battery removed, purely on battery, mains removed, ive rolled back, restored, flipped it over, removed all hardware and reseated, checked and hotswapped ram, reapplied thermal paste to cpu. Ive performed burn in tests with sandra, ntune etc etc... All hardware appears to be functioning normally. Ive also been monitoring temps with a variety of applications, the highest temp i might see is 55c on hdd while gaming (possibly a tad high, but not crucially so). cpu & gpu never get any way hot.

After too much head scratching, i called a local tech / repair dude from a reputable firm, he spent 3 days scratching his head also. Problem is unresolved. This laptop is a peach. I havent had one issue in a year and a half, and im frankly not ready to give up on it yet.

Clevo (Rock) m570u
DualCore T7600
3gb Ram
nVidia go7950 gtx 512mb
19" screen

This MAY be a shot in the dark, but one small observation i have made may or may not be relevant. Im not savvy enough to know if this is cause or symptom.. but, since these issues have started, I notice that when windows is almost finished loading, the desktop has appeared and the final drivers are getting loaded up, I see that the colour scheme of the desktop might flicker. By flicker I mean, it loads up on the main power profile as always (the high perf, mains based one), then, for just a little second, it flicks to low power profile (duller colour, lower contrast) before jacking itself back up to high perf settings again. Couple this with the fact that I notice that (again, perhaps coincidentally), when i experience the cold boot problem in #2 above, removing the a/c mains appears to improve the chance of a successful boot.

Could this be some base/bios level issue re: power management?


If anyone has any experience or even might like to offer suggestions, I would be most appreciative.

 

positive re fans. they work fine dude. remember also, that this is an intermittent cold booting issue also. The laptop doesnt even have time to overheat before it shuts down. OEM splash screen barely gets shown before the laptop closes.

 

When the laptop boots, i can hear all fans engaging prior to the shutdown. When the laptop shuts down mid game/application, the fans are all working.
Fn+1 = fans to max speed. This also works everytime. I run fans at max when needed, ie, while gaming.

..sorry? http://forums.majorgeeks.com/images/smilies/confused.gif