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Laptop completely freezes while playing games.

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0___________0

Senior member
I own a Gateway P-7805u that randomly freezes while playing games. it completely locks up, Windows is entirely unresponsive, and it just emits a high pitched repeating noise. Sometimes it locks up after 2 minutes into a game, sometimes I can play for hours without any problems. And I've only ever had it happen while playing games. Here's what I know:

Its not overheating. After playing BF3 for an hour the hottest component is the GPU at 69* C, CPU cores are in the 50's, TZS0 and TZS1 in HWMonitor are in the low 60's, the HDD does run a little hot at 63* C, but it doesn't get much cooling.

This particular laptop is known for problems with nVidia's PowerMizer, but I've already tried the fix for any PowerMizer issues, disable it completely, but that didn't resolve my problems.

I have no indications of any driver crashes, Windows doesn't log anything. I've tried completely removing the GPU drivers, went into safe mode, used Driver Sweeper, didn't help.

There isn't any malware on the system, its been scanned with Avast, Kaspersky, and Malware Bytes.

I'm going to run MemTest86+ tomorrow and check my RAM, but I'm not getting any BSODs or errors, would bad RAM manifest itself in this way?

Could this be caused by a faulty motherboard?

Thanks.
 
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If it only freezes during certain games, my sense is that you have a GPU/memory problem. In most cases, freezes are the result of collisions in memory. See if reducing the resolution lets the game run more w/o freezing. IOW, whatever game you are using may be exceeding the laptop's capability in the GPU area.
 
Could be a power problem, try removing the battery and running directly off the mains and see if the problem still occurs.
 
corkyg said:
IOW, whatever game you are using may be exceeding the laptop's capability in the GPU area.
Click to expand...

I don't mean I have pauses, its completely frozen, I let it sit for five minutes once, I have to do a hard shutdown and turn it back on. And it can happen in any game, how taxing they are seems to be irrelevant. Even games that my friends run fluently with an integrated HD 3000 lock up the system for me, and my GPU is far superior to the HD 3000.

Puppies04 said:
Could be a power problem, try removing the battery and running directly off the mains and see if the problem still occurs.
Click to expand...

I'll run it without the battery for a while and see what happens.
 
You missed my main point, . . ."In most cases, freezes are the result of collisions in memory" The rest of your story suggests that certain games are trying to use the same memory as something else running in background. Diagnosing that is a step-by-step process turning off processes until you find the guilty one. And, yes, bad RAM can be at fault.
 
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corkyg said:
You missed my main point, . . ."In most cases, freezes are the result of collisions in memory" The rest of your story suggests that certain games are trying to use the same memory as something else running in background. Diagnosing that is a step-by-step process turning off processes until you find the guilty one. And, yes, bad RAM can be at fault.
Click to expand...

Sorry, didn't understand. Can it be any process, such as Windows' processes, or would it most likely be something I've installed? Besides the game that happens to be running, the only things I'd have are Skype, Steam, Chrome, Rainmeter, and my AV. I changed AV a while ago so that isn't the problem. I'll disable Rainmeter.

I ran memtest86+ and it ran several passes without any errors.
 
Well, neither running it without the battery nor killing 3rd party programs fixed the problem, its still happening. One thing I've noticed is when I reboot it after it freezes, my system tray is messed up sometimes, occasionally icons aren't there, such as networking and volume, I can get them back by restarting explorer.exe, but once my network icon said I had no internet access for 8 hours until I shut the laptop off, but I was surfing the web the whole time. I've had other strange issues with programs not displaying their GUI components, my AV and iTunes have had this problem. When you start them their processes show up in the task manager, but no matter how long I wait the GUI never appears. Killing the process and restarting it solves the problem.
 
Any updates here? I'm having the same problem with my P7805u. I have changed a few of the specs though...I've added an Intel T9900 3.1 GHz processor replacing the old one, and I've added 2 4 GB RAM sticks. I'm wondering if it's a RAM thing...have you replaced your RAM at all?
 
0___________0 said:
Well, neither running it without the battery nor killing 3rd party programs fixed the problem, its still happening. One thing I've noticed is when I reboot it after it freezes, my system tray is messed up sometimes, occasionally icons aren't there, such as networking and volume, I can get them back by restarting explorer.exe, but once my network icon said I had no internet access for 8 hours until I shut the laptop off, but I was surfing the web the whole time. I've had other strange issues with programs not displaying their GUI components, my AV and iTunes have had this problem. When you start them their processes show up in the task manager, but no matter how long I wait the GUI never appears. Killing the process and restarting it solves the problem.
Click to expand...

Might be worth running a CHKDSK check, followed by System File Checker (SFC) to check for file and disk corruption.
 
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