The dreaded BSOD... did I do this?

[sicsicsic]

I just purchased a brand new laptop with respectable hardware.

i7, 6GB ram, GeForce video with 1.5GB ram, Windows 7 Home Premium

Not sure if I need to get more specific then that, but the computer was blazing fast and ran all my games at high settings. I haven't really installed anything outside of Firefox, Steam, Microsoft Security Essentials, Minecraft, and typical browser plugins. I never touch banners/ads, malware, or anything of the sort.

This weekend I was watching a ripped blu ray (.mkv, the laptop does not have a blu ray reader) with WMP using the codecs from K-Lite. I own the blu ray, ripped it to my external HDD to watch while on vacation, didn't want to drag the blu ray player for what it's worth.

In any event, it was a good 11GB, 1080p but ran fine. I didn't notice the laptop was over heating to any extent; it was on a flat hard surface with the vents facing open, cool air. About an hour and some into the film the machine rebooted.

After this reboot I could no longer get passed the windows login screen without a BSOD. Same went for Safe Mode.

I've had the machine for 6 days and Amazon is going to replace it within 24 hours.

Is there any possibility that playing the file caused my video card to malfunction? I'd like to avoid this but would first isolate it to a simple hardware defect. But if anything I did above sounds like it could have wrecked the video card or something I'd love to know.

Thank you greatly for any help

 

[stargazr]

Is there any possibility that playing the file caused my video card to malfunction?

No. Did you try to get into safe mode? BSOD is often a driver issue, or RAM.

 

[sicsicsic]

No. Did you try to get into safe mode? BSOD is often a driver issue, or RAM.

Yeah and I also have a bootable antivirus/recovery disc and that even blue screens when trying to access.

Also, there was one instance where I received this error on the blue screen:

Driver_IRQL_not_less_or_equal

But why would it happen in the middle of a movie? It wasn't during an update or any other sort of change not too mention, when I did boot into safe mode I was even able to perform a successful system restore to the previous day when it had been working perfectly?

 

[stargazr]

So it is a driver issue. Do you have the Windows 7 disc?

 

[sicsicsic]

So it is a driver issue. Do you have the Windows 7 disc?

I do, but I can't even boot into a simple recovery tools disc without the blue screen.

The case may be different with an OS dvd.

Upon further investigation I am able to use Safe Mode with command prompt for some reason. I was able to pull up the device manager and I was going to try and roll back some drivers to see if I can fix it some how.

In the meantime I'm moving all my documents to my external HDD. I may just let Amazon give me the brand new one and give it a go instead.

It's weird, I get the above error about the Driver_IRQL from safe mode, sometimes I get an error regarding "iastor.sys" but more often than anything it's just addresses in memory without any specific reason.

I ran a memory diagnostics tool and it didn't give me any sort of error.

 

[stargazr]

I was able to pull up the device manager and I was going to try and roll back some drivers to see if I can fix it some how. In the meantime I'm moving all my documents to my external HDD. I may just let Amazon give me the brand new one and give it a go instead.

That's a good sign that you can get into safe mode. Try to roll back the video driver after protecting your data. Like you said, you still have time to exchange it if this drags on.