Uniwill N258KA0 Sudden Death

I have a reseller version of the Uniwill n258ka0. I've had it for about a year and a half now. A couple of weeks ago, it was cheerfully parked on my coffee table on top of a cooling pad, not doing a heck of a lot (just running Trillian while I read a book on the sofa), and it just spontaneously died.

Well, that was odd.

I usually suspect heating problems in sudden death cases, but the machine was under no particular load. I play games on it all the time, so if it had heating problems, you'd think it would die then, and not when it's sitting there doing nothing.

I tried to restart it, to no avail. No lights. No fans. Nothing. Dead as a doornail.

The next morning, I took it to a shop. The guy hit the power button, and it turned right on. I grumbled. He said he'd check out the cooling systems to make sure they were all working correctly. I left it with him for a day. He didn't find anything out of the ordinary, said he ran it all day without any failures, and charged me $50 AUD. Gee, thanks.

Fast forward to Sunday.

The machine has been working fine. I play games for several hours on Sunday. Then, in the evening, my character suddenly starts frenetically running around in circles, and speaking total gibberish (random ASCII). After about thirty seconds of this, kerchunk. Dead computer.

Not again!

Well, the random gibberish definitely reminded me of old heating problems of yore, like the time we forgot to hook up the cooling fan on a desktop CPU, many years ago. Hoho. But, why did it work fine for so long before it died?

I tried to turn it back on a couple of minutes later. The lights came on, and the fans kicked up, but the screen was blank. Not good! I waited another five minutes, and tried again. Same thing. The third time, it was totally dead. No lights. No fans.

I decided to give up on it for the night.

The next morning, I turned it on, ran a disk check (since I figured all this sudden death business couldn't be good for the hard drive), and went to work while it was running. When I got home, the machine was still happily sitting on the login screen. Yay! So, I logged in, started launching programs, and KLUNK. Dead.

Oh good grief.

I let it sit for about four hours, and then started it up again. I researched something on the web, and then began working on a text document. After about twenty minutes, a bunch of random ASCII started blobbing all over my document, and dialog boxes from my word processor started popping up at random. My computer even spontaneously went into numlock mode, to make things even more confusing. I tried to save my document, but the save option was greyed out in the File Menu. Whoopee. So, I figured it was about to die, and I shut down the computer. It shut down fine. Then, I brought it back up again, and logged in. Just as I started launching programs again, KLUNK. Dead.

Okay, so, it's definitely a cumulative problem, which survives power-offs, and tends to recover (to varying degrees) after long power offs. That still sounds like a heat problem, but a machine should not still be hot enough, after four hours, to die within minutes, doing a relatively low-load task, like basic word processing.

I'm really not sure what to do, at this point. I can't figure out what's wrong with the thing, and I'm sure as hell not spending another $50 to have a repair guy tell me there's nothing wrong with my machine. (As if.) Does this behavior sound familiar to anyone, and are there any suggestions anyone can give that might help my situation any (or help me further diagnose the problem)? I'm really at the end of my rope, here. This is my only machine at home, and I can't afford another, at the moment.

Luckily, my screen has been entirely well-behaved. However, I've had to replace my AC adapter (which runs way the hell too hot on Australian 220V; I should probably get a step-down converter for it, to use when I'm at the house). I've also had to replace the hard drive, which had bad sectors coming out its ears. That was probably my bad call. Never buy the biggest hard drive in any line, because they haven't worked all the kinks out yet. (Hard drives also tend to be easily damaged by heat, but the hard drive in a 258ka0 is way off in the corner, away from the CPU and video heat bombs.)

That's a really good bet, given when I bought the machine. I seem to recall wishing I could get a 62w, but not being able to do so, for some reason.

RAM problems tend to either A.) cause your machine to not boot at all, ever, or B.) cause your machine to become increasingly screwed up until it crashes, or you reboot. I'm not seeing either of these, so I'm inclined to think it's not RAM.

Mobo would be just about the worst case scenario. Expensive, bloody hard to get my hands on, from Australia, and I'd probably want to have a professional install it, because laptops are alien territory for me.

Do you have any recommendations for determining if the CPU is overheating? Does this thing have a (useful) thermostat on it? Is there anything I can do in the meantime to keep it cool? (I run the computer on a cooling pad, but I have no air conditioning, and it's been up past 40C this summer a couple of times, so it can be really hard to keep my environment cool.)

The shop checked all the fans and vents, and whatnot. They should be fine. I'm usually using it at night, so sunlight isn't an issue. My flatmate has the study downstairs -- which is the coolest spot. I usually open a window, and turn on a fan when I get home, to blow as much hot air out of my room as I can. I'll see if the computer is behaving better tonight, because it's been an unseasonably cool day.

Ah, that sounds like a good possibility.

(Though, I'm terrified to flash my BIOS, when my computer is just randomly going haywire and shutting off. It'd be terrible for it to do that in the middle of a flash!)

I could probably get the 62w version of my current chip for a pretty decent price. I don't need the fastest chip on the block. That machine isn't CPU bound very often.

Though, I'd like to at least verify whether that's my problem before I sink the money into it.

Sadly, NewEgg doesn't ship to Australia. It's a real shame, because they sure as heck package things well enough for international shipping. I bought my last hard drive from them, and relayed it through my house in the US, and it was so well padded, you could've jumped up and down on it without hurting it.

The thread you linked to sounds like a different problem from the one I'm having. They're describing a no-post situation, and mine usually doesn't even get as far as turning on -- let alone posting.

Also, I've had this machine for a year and a half, and it has been plugged and unplugged dozens of times while it was turned on, without it frying the memory in the manner described.

It seems to be able to run for hours, if I don't touch it at all, but the moment I start using it for anything, bam, dead.

Okay, I ran SpeedFan on this guy early this morning. The CPU was reporting 75 C, and the hard drive was reporting about 24 C, but that rose into the low 40s, after about 45 minutes. What was strange was that the CPU temperature was rock solid. The reported temperature never changed, regardless of the load I put on it. That seems suspicious to me.

I next wanted to check to see if there were any emergency temperature shut-off settings in the BIOS, but couldn't figure out how to get into the damn BIOS on that machine. I rebooted a couple of times, mashing keys, trying to find the right one at the right moment, and eventually, I decided to log in and Google for the answer. (Apparently, it's F2, and not Del, on this machine. )

Then, of course, the machine died again!

Oh well. It was time to go to work, anyway.

This machine is now in the shop. I will post further information, when I have a diagnosis (in the hopes that it might help others).