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View Full Version : Tech Help Laptop Serial Suicide


Nightgaun7
2014-04-02, 01:20 PM
My laptop keeps crashing. It does so for no apparent reason; it's not overheating that I can tell (have heat monitoring software and I've taken it apart and cleaned it out, wasn't that much dust but still), it doesn't seem to have any viruses etc. and so on. It's gone through Startup Repair a couple of times. Nothing is horribly fragmented. and so forth

Just wondering if anyone has any ideas about what might be causing it. Day before last it crashed twice, yesterday it crashed once, today it died three times in the space of an hour.
Winter_Wolf
2014-04-02, 01:31 PM
Could be bad RAM. Maybe hard disk failure, but I gather there's a bit of death noise involved in that. In any case I'd suspect hardware failure (because in my experience hardware failure is what kills my laptops).
Durgok
2014-04-02, 03:39 PM
Bad RAM will cause the laptop to just up and power off for no reason. I had this issue once and I had to test each and every piece of RAM separately until I found the culprit.
Nightgaun7
2014-04-02, 05:38 PM
Bad RAM will cause the laptop to just up and power off for no reason. I had this issue once and I had to test each and every piece of RAM separately until I found the culprit.

Seems like that will be an extreme pain in the ass with a laptop. Ugh.
Excession
2014-04-02, 08:37 PM
MemTest86 (http://www.memtest86.com/) can check your RAM for errors. It can, of course, miss intermittent errors.

You can check for hard disk errors using smartmontools (http://sourceforge.net/projects/smartmontools/files/), which can find previously logged errors and run a test on the drive. That link is for Windows, just install the package of the same name for Linux, dunno about Mac. Not that most user friendly interface on that tool though.
FLHerne
2014-04-03, 05:01 AM
Seems like that will be an extreme pain in the ass with a laptop. Ugh.Might even be easier than a desktop, as most laptops have their RAM under a nice easy-to-remove panel.

Unless you have one of these newfangled Ultrabooks with everything glued together and the RAM soldered down. Those do deserve the use of 'Ugh'. :smallfurious:
Nightgaun7
2014-04-03, 08:53 AM
Might even be easier than a desktop, as most laptops have their RAM under a nice easy-to-remove panel.

Unless you have one of these newfangled Ultrabooks with everything glued together and the RAM soldered down. Those do deserve the use of 'Ugh'. :smallfurious:

No, removing and replacing the RAM is easy enough on this one.

Here's the result of the RAM test from MemTest86


http://i940.photobucket.com/albums/ad243/psykikpowaz/ramtest1_zpsce326e46.jpg


Couple of other things:
It died once in the middle of testing RAM
Sometimes it dies and tries to restart immediately, other times it just dies.
Sometimes it dies before even getting to the startup screen
Durgok
2014-04-03, 03:39 PM
Yep, that is what my laptop did. And it was the ram. I even had a MEMTest come back saying it was okay. But someone told me that MemTest only tests the RAM in slot 1.
Gralamin
2014-04-03, 07:55 PM
Yep, that is what my laptop did. And it was the ram. I even had a MEMTest come back saying it was okay. But someone told me that MemTest only tests the RAM in slot 1.

That doesn't make sense, unless you have 4 GB sticks and are using x86 version of memtest, where its possible it could only allocate ~3.5 GB of memory. Even then you have no way of knowing which slot is actually being run on - it depends on how the board is physically wired.

A test for the behavior Durgok indicates though would be to rotate your RAM through the slots and try rerunning.


It died once in the middle of testing RAM
So If we know we are only using some subset of RAM, and that RAM got a pass, then this sounds like it might not be a RAM issue.

It sounds like a RAM problem, but it could also be a flaky power supply. Does this only happen when plugged in or on battery, or does it occur on either?
Nightgaun7
2014-04-04, 11:13 AM
That doesn't make sense, unless you have 4 GB sticks and are using x86 version of memtest, where its possible it could only allocate ~3.5 GB of memory. Even then you have no way of knowing which slot is actually being run on - it depends on how the board is physically wired.

A test for the behavior Durgok indicates though would be to rotate your RAM through the slots and try rerunning.

So If we know we are only using some subset of RAM, and that RAM got a pass, then this sounds like it might not be a RAM issue.

It sounds like a RAM problem, but it could also be a flaky power supply. Does this only happen when plugged in or on battery, or does it occur on either?

It happens both when plugged in and on battery.

I think I was using the 86 version there - what should I use instead?

It's an inspiron 5520. The base model comes with 6 GB RAM but mine may have 8, I can check when I get home.

Pic potentially related

http://i940.photobucket.com/albums/ad243/psykikpowaz/underdustcover_zpsa41cb238.jpg


EDIT: It just started making an intermittent beeping noise
Nightgaun7
2014-04-04, 04:38 PM
Update: I got MemTest86+, and it fails to start. I try booting from the USB like I did with MemTest86, and the screen flashes black with some brief text for a fraction of a second before trying to start normally. I'm trying to figure out why that's not working.

EDIT: The beeping noise that happened earlier is repeating. 7 short beeps, brief pause, repeat. According to the DELL website this is a CPU cache test failure