- Aug 26, 2014
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So my girlfriend's nearly three-year old Yoga 2 Pro (13", Core i7-4500U, 8GB soldered RAM) has been acting up even more than usual recently: quite frequent BSODs (perhaps not daily, but close to it), rashes of tabs crashing repeatedly regardless which web browser is in use, and general weird instability. We've been planning on RMAing it for quite a while as the screen has a very odd issue where it starts flickering intensely at random times when running off battery power. However, as she needs it every day, we've been holding off until an opportune moment. Now, things have become dire enough that we pretty much need to get it serviced ASAP.
To figure out what's wrong (I've had a few bad run-ins with difficult technicians desperately wanting to blame end users for difficult-to-diagnose hardware faults) I've been running some tests on it:
Could you please tell me to stop being paranoid and just RMA the PC?
Oh, and before the shouts of "it's three years old, repairing it won't be worth the money!": Norway has great consumer protection laws, granting what roughly translates to "claim rights" for any products sold to consumers, giving mandatory coverage of hardware faults (and similar non-user or non-wear-related) for a period up to five years (regardless of manufacturer warranties, but somewhat dependent on the type of product). So if it's repaired, it'll be free. It's either that, a new PC, or the money back (without any devaluation due to age).
To figure out what's wrong (I've had a few bad run-ins with difficult technicians desperately wanting to blame end users for difficult-to-diagnose hardware faults) I've been running some tests on it:
- AIDA64 stress test with CPU + FPU + cache + RAM selected crashed (hard, full shutdown, probably a BSOD I didn't see) after ~55 minutes. Windows Event Viewer shows some odd stuff, but no critical errors or anything like that until after it restarted. Error codes in Event Viewer seem to point to "Microsoft ACPI-compliant system" in device manager (ACPI_HAL\PNP0C08\0), which seems to mean something like "the power shut off suddenly". Not really helpful. Temperatures were reasonable for the part of the testing I was paying attention (first ~20 minutes).
- AIDA64 stress test with just CPU + FPU was stable for ~45 minutes until I had to stop it to go and do something else.
- Prime95 Small FFTs ran fine for 53 minutes. Hot as hell (100 degrees max, against ~88 under AIDA64), clock speed swinging between 798MHz and 2600, but stable.
- Prime95 Blend crashed 3/4 threads almost immediately, with the error message "FATAL ERROR: Rounding was 0.5, expected less than 0.4" The 4th thread kept going for the few minutes I could keep running it.
- Now I'm running Memtest86+, and currently it looks like this:
Could you please tell me to stop being paranoid and just RMA the PC?
Oh, and before the shouts of "it's three years old, repairing it won't be worth the money!": Norway has great consumer protection laws, granting what roughly translates to "claim rights" for any products sold to consumers, giving mandatory coverage of hardware faults (and similar non-user or non-wear-related) for a period up to five years (regardless of manufacturer warranties, but somewhat dependent on the type of product). So if it's repaired, it'll be free. It's either that, a new PC, or the money back (without any devaluation due to age).
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