Laptop dilema. About to throw it through a wall.

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  • Sheepdog Gear

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    ***FREE SHEEPDOG GEAR T-SHIRT MADE BY NINELINE APPAREL TO ANYBODY THAT CAN FIGURE THIS OUT!

    Hey guys! Looking for some guidance here from the computer nerds. I'm pretty computer savvy myself, so feel free to speak in techy lingo. I'll understand. Ha ha!

    Ok. So I have a maxed out HP Pavilion 17t Laptop. I also run a secondary 4K LG monitor. About a year ago, the laptop monitor itself was failing. In the beginning, it would shut off, but I could push on the connection point behind the screen bezel, and I could get it to come back on. It progressively got worse, so I had the monitor replaced with a brand new one.

    Current Problem: The monitor will randomly fail, and then everything will push over to the secondary monitor. (So Windows knows it's failing.) The only way to get it to come back on is to shut the laptop, wait usually at least a minute, and then open it back up. For what it's worth, if I don't wait the minute, the problem won't be resolved for some reason.

    My Failed Attempt at Fixing It: In my mind, I figured it was a software issue this time around. Updated all drivers, no dice. Started getting really annoying, so I bought a new Samsung 860 EVO SSD started from scratch. Fresh Windows install. Fresh drivers. Everything was working beautifully!... for about 3 days. Now it's back to doing the same thing. Talk about a downer.

    Other Things You May Need to Know: So now it's obviously hardware related. But I don't think it's a "connection" issue. Moving the monitor back and forth has ZERO effect on anything. Pressing on the monitor bezel has ZERO effect. I'm at a loss.

    Thanks in advance for any help!

    EDIT: Don't know what I was thinking. The programs DO NOT jump over to the secondary monitor. I was wrong on that. Long night. Sorry!
     
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    rosejm

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    Yeah, might be worth looking at the Windows Event viewer to see if there's something being logged about the failures, now that the OS seems aware of them.
     

    radar8756

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    When you replaced the Hard Drive with a SSD ... did alot of Dirt/Dust fall out of the laptop ?

    Whenever I take a Desktop / Laptop covers OFF ... I use a Needle Nozzle Air Gun on the Air Compressor to blow out as much Dirt / Dust as I can .. ( plus I like the sound the Fan makes when it spins from 90psi air flow -- wwwhhhhiiiizzzzzzzzzzzzz )

    Dirt/Dust is a big cause of Restricted Airflow which leads to Overheating -- which affects the CPU & GPU ....
     

    Waldojr

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    Sounds like the gpu chip is overheating and possibly raising up from the solder joints. I've seen this happen and when you push down on the right spot on the keyboard area it would come back on again. Open the laptop and blow the dust out and get a laptop cooler if you're doing any hardcore processing.
     

    maxwelhse

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    I wouldn't implicitly default to it being a hardware error. It's been my experience, especially with HP, that they have fairly terrible software issues that usually take forever to get patched on their end.

    For instance... I was using my ZBook 17 G3 one day and it just decided to stop charging, period. Wouldn't charge no matter what I did and this happened out of the blue. With about 50% of the battery remaining, as a last ditch effort I updated the BIOS and that fixed the issued. My ZBook is my work laptop and we have about 6 of them in my group and I'm the only guy to have that problem, just there's a patch for it...? Freaking weird. Right now we're having massive issues with Solidworks and their nVidia drivers too. This has been going on for months and HP is so quick to respond to our issues that we're moving to Dell...

    I'm with the other guys saying that just good old dirt and dust is always a likely candidate too, but I'll toss it out there that you may need to replace the thermal paste on your CPU/GPU as well. Usually the factory stuff is only effective for 2-3 years at most and if it was applied poorly at the factory, even less time than that. You can install a free program called Hardware Monitor by CPUZ (or CPU-ID) and it will monitor your temps in your real time.

    What I propose before you dig deeper on hardware issues is to experiment with various driver packs from both HP and their associated vendors. Try the nVidia drivers directly from nVidia, then try the HP specific version. Same with chipset drivers. Try Intel, then try HP's, etc, etc. Do them systemically one at a time and see if your problem goes away.

    Since you have a fresh install of everything, you can mirror an image of your SSD to another drive, install that second drive as a boot, try one thing, see if it works, if not then re-image from the SSD and try again. That bit might be a little overkill and perhaps unnecessary, but won't hurt.

    So, sure, it could be hardware, but HP has fooled me plenty of times before and software solutions are free. Hardware solutions are not.

    I don't need a shirt and am just happy to help, but thanks. ;)

    edit: You may also consider trying older versions of the driver packs from all vendors. As a baseline, I'd consider rolling everything back to the revisions it should have shipped with since clearly it worked properly out of the box.
     
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    erasure

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    Could be overheating.
    Seconding what everyone else said about dust. Also, I 'fixed' a laptop once by sticking a couple wooden shims under it, lifting it off the tabletop so there was airflow under. Might be worth trying.
     

    Sheepdog Gear

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    Thanks guys! So I just edited the OP....

    "Don't know what I was thinking. The programs DO NOT jump over to the secondary monitor. I was wrong on that. Long night. Sorry!"

    Come to think of it, I do notice that it happens more often when I'm deep into a PhotoShop project, etc., when the fan is pumping harder.

    maxwelhse: I have the newest version of CPU-Z but I cannot find the real-time temp reading. Do you know where it is? And for the heck of it, I had CPU-Z run a stress test on the processor. I was trying to induce a load to increase heat to see if the monitor would fail. Oddly enough, it didn't. I thought it would.

    On another note, while I was in there swapping hard-drives, I noticed the fan was pretty remarkably clean. I intended on cleaning it, but it looked great. (Odd since I run this machine A LOT and have never cleaned it.)

    I think my next project will be to re-apply the thermal paste.
     

    maxwelhse

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    maxwelhse: I have the newest version of CPU-Z but I cannot find the real-time temp reading. Do you know where it is? And for the heck of it, I had CPU-Z run a stress test on the processor. I was trying to induce a load to increase heat to see if the monitor would fail. Oddly enough, it didn't. I thought it would.

    As I recall, when you install CPU-Z it actually installs a few different utilities. The one you want to run is HWMonitor. HWMonitor's default screen is all of your temps, loads, battery status, etc.

    Since you ran a stress test and it survived it (I'm assuming you ran a GPU stress test too... I believe there's an option for that), I'm fairly positive you don't have a heat related issue. I don't know about HP, but Dell has a thermal events log in the BIOS that you can go review and generally speaking if the laptop has a thermal event it will straight up shut down and log it rather than continue on. But... HP could be different.

    Also for what it's worth, I have two display drivers in the device manager. Intel HD Graphics 530 and the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 960M.

    This is normal. The HD graphics is built into your processor. To be safe, you can disable/suppress the Intel video adapter in the device manager if you want. I don't think I've ever had to do that, but I don't think it will hurt anything and it could be causing you some weirdo issues.

    I'm still on the side that this is software related in some way. You may also have some just generally undesirable thermal things happening, but I would expect that to result in an outright failure or the laptop shutting down if it's that bad. If nothing else, CPU temp performance throttling should be obvious long before you get to that point (and HWMonitor will also show you real time clock speeds).
     

    Sheepdog Gear

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    Ok thanks! I'll look for that utility.

    And it was actually just a CPU stress test. There wasn't an option for GPU. So it could've been a pointless test to begin with.
     

    maxwelhse

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    Ok thanks! I'll look for that utility.

    And it was actually just a CPU stress test. There wasn't an option for GPU. So it could've been a pointless test to begin with.

    Usually the CPU and GPU share a heatsink which is heat piped to the fan anyhow so if the overall temp comes up, the GPU temp will come up as well. You can run the test again while watching HWMonitor and see if that theory plays out if you want. It's been so long since I ran those utilities that I can't remember if I had another one for GPU tests or not. I'm sure there's something out there.

    You can also go about your regular work and simply watch the GPU temp yourself and see if there's a correlation between temp and problems.
     

    cburnworth

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    Also for future reference you can download a bootable operating system to test your hardware platform, this will eliminate windows driver issues. Ubuntu and you can even make windows 10 to run from the thumbdrive. If it is really cranking & overheating they make external fans that clip onto the exhaust port and run through usb. While the fan was clean did it seem like it was running fast enough to cool it down?
     

    Waldojr

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    Usually the CPU and GPU share a heatsink which is heat piped to the fan anyhow so if the overall temp comes up, the GPU temp will come up as well. You can run the test again while watching HWMonitor and see if that theory plays out if you want. It's been so long since I ran those utilities that I can't remember if I had another one for GPU tests or not. I'm sure there's something out there.

    You can also go about your regular work and simply watch the GPU temp yourself and see if there's a correlation between temp and problems.

    Same makers as CPUz and Hwmonitor make PowerMax stress test for gpu/cpu. But definitely watch Hwmonitor while running, If it hits over 75c then stop the test. It your screen starts to flicker than you know overheating is a problem.

    There is also MSI afterburner and Evga precision X1 you can use.
     

    maxwelhse

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    Same makers as CPUz and Hwmonitor make PowerMax stress test for gpu/cpu. But definitely watch Hwmonitor while running, If it hits over 75c then stop the test. It your screen starts to flicker than you know overheating is a problem.

    There is also MSI afterburner and Evga precision X1 you can use.

    Yep! That sounds familiar!

    75C seems a touch conservative though. The machine I'm on right now is idling at 68C and this is normal (even with the house at 80F right now due to broken AC). It will get up to around 90C when it's working hard. That's with clean fans, clean internals, and Kryonaut or IC Diamond thermal paste (depends what I had at the time).

    Anything much over 90C for very long would have me worried. But... that's me and my experience with my stuff. Other things may be different.
     

    Waldojr

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    Yep! That sounds familiar!

    75C seems a touch conservative though. The machine I'm on right now is idling at 68C and this is normal (even with the house at 80F right now due to broken AC). It will get up to around 90C when it's working hard. That's with clean fans, clean internals, and Kryonaut or IC Diamond thermal paste (depends what I had at the time).

    Anything much over 90C for very long would have me worried. But... that's me and my experience with my stuff. Other things may be different.

    68C is high for idling for my builds. At idle I'm at 38-44c, working I'm at 55-60c that's for CPU. GPU idle is 40c and stressing it with max settings it never goes over 68c and that's overclocked and I'm not on water.
     

    maxwelhse

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    68C is high for idling for my builds. At idle I'm at 38-44c, working I'm at 55-60c that's for CPU. GPU idle is 40c and stressing it with max settings it never goes over 68c and that's overclocked and I'm not even on water.

    We're talking about laptops. It's a completely different world in terms of thermal management as compared to a desktop PC and they generally have specialized chips exactly for these higher temp environments. At this exact moment my GPU is at 61C and 55/60C on the CPU cores and my cooling fan is on idle RPM. At least on this machine, this all completely normal and it has 2 more fan speeds to go before it even starts to get unhappy.
     

    Waldojr

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    We're talking about laptops. It's a completely different world in terms of thermal management as compared to a desktop PC and they generally have specialized chips exactly for these higher temp environments. At this exact moment my GPU is at 61C and 55/60C on the CPU cores and my cooling fan is on idle RPM. At least on this machine, this all completely normal and it has 2 more fan speeds to go before it even starts to get unhappy.

    Yeah I figured after I posted that you were talking about a Laptop, Enclosed spaces have a lot more heat. I don't have a laptop with a gpu chip in it or I would love to test the temps out. I bet running the Powermax app on a laptop would make it really interesting to see how high it can go and if it shutdowns itself due to temps.
     

    maxwelhse

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    Yeah I figured after I posted that you were talking about a Laptop, Enclosed spaces have a lot more heat. I don't have a laptop with a gpu chip in it or I would love to test the temps out. I bet running the Powermax app on a laptop would make it really interesting to see how high it can go and if it shutdowns itself due to temps.

    I'm sure that's something you could look up based on a specific model of laptop and GPU. The one I'm now is an ancient dell with an NVS 3100M and approaching 200F doesn't seem to phase it. Pretty sure I've seen my Zbook G3 with what I believe to be a Quatro M3000M get up to the 190Fs on the GPU with no problems.

    My suspicion is that they simply derate their performance as the temp goes up, but I usually can't tell as far as performance. I'm usually CPU limited when it comes to my actual work.
     
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