New Laptop Completely Locked Up and Won't Shutdown

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Severon

Member
Hello

I'll be giving PCS a call tomorrow but I wanted to post this problem im having here in case anyone else has had the same.

I brought the Defiance VII only a few months ago (Oct) and twice Ive had the following problem. One just now and a few days ago.

The laptop keyboard locks up. There is no response at all.
Both times I was playing Rust
The mouse still works.
Ther are no error messages or anything that appears on the screen to indiciate there is a problem.
Certain programs such as paint and notepad won't closing down via the top right hand X. But instead closing them from the task bar at the bottom.
I can click to shutdown the laptop, however it gets to the blue shutting down screen. Follows up with the Blue Screen of Death and then Shows nothing but a black screen and doesn't actually shut the computer down.
The fan is still running at high speed (because was playing Rust). It doesn't stop or slow down despite now the game having being closed down.
While the computer is on the black screen, I cannot do anything, it's just locked up.
Most critically. The power button does not work and doesnt do anything.
The only thing I can so is wait for the battery to be fully used up which takes up to 5-6 hours!!

After the laptop battery had died, i can then finally power back on. But again, there has been nothing to indiciate there was a problem?

Has anyone else had this issue / fix?
I'm really in despair as I've never had such a critical failure of a PCS laptop before. Especially practically new.

Any help you can provide is grearly appreciated.
 
ubuysa

ubuysa

The BSOD Doctor
That sounds pretty definitely like a hardware issue to me. I know of no way software can do all that.

If you had a BSOD then there should be a memory dump, either in the folder C:\Windows\Minidumps or a kernel dump in C:\Windows\Memory.dmp. Upload any dumps you find to the cloud and post a link here.

I doubt they'll help identify the cause but it might give some pointers?
 
S

Severon

Member
Hardware was my line of thinking but I'm not hardware savvy enough to diagnose properly.

There doesn't seem to be anything in the Minidump folder and no Memory.dmp file either. Might be somewhere else?
 
ubuysa

ubuysa

The BSOD Doctor
Severon said:
Hardware was my line of thinking but I'm not hardware savvy enough to diagnose properly.

There doesn't seem to be anything in the Minidump folder and no Memory.dmp file either. Might be somewhere else?
Click to expand...
No, those are the key dump locations, unless you've modified it manually.
 
S

Segwayrider

Silver Level Poster
I had something similar to that (only usb mouse working, black screen with full fans, though not the blue screen of death). It only happen once however, and I "fixed" it by removing my external battery, and starting it up again (as told when calling PCS). Never had the issue again.
Here's the tread if it helps
Keyboard stopped working mid gaming on laptop | PCSPECIALIST
Though since I didn't do anything but turn it off and on again, and you have experienced it twice so I doubt it will.
 
S

Severon

Member
Ah that's interesting.

I have an integrated battery however and no means of being able to remove the casing, but at least I'm not the only one who's had this issue.
 
R

RogWal

Silver Level Poster
Have you tried holding down the power button for 10 seconds? That is often a means for a hard power off when a laptop has issues shutting down.
 
FerrariVie

FerrariVie

Super Star
You can try removing the battery cable, I think that it might be reachable on your chassis.

And by the way, a similar thing happened to me twice in the 4 months that I have the Nova (same chassis as @Segwayrider ). I believe that it might be a PSU issue of some sort, because both times it happened while playing RDR2, so you can imagine that both CPU and GPU were running at full power. I have MSI Afterburner overlay and could see that the temperatures were quite controlled (around 79° on both CPU and GPU), so it's not a temperature-related issue in my case.

However, I don't seem to have had the issue again on the last 3 weeks or so. The only change I made 3 weeks ago was to undervolt the GPU (using 105W now, instead of 115W) to make the fan noise a bit lower, so even though it was not done to solve the crash issue, it seems to have helped as well. But not sure if it's a coincidence, as the crashes seemed to have happened randomly (even though it was on RDR2 both times), so not yet 100% sure if the undervolt really helped or not. In case it really helps, then I would guess it might be a power brick problem because only very demanding games would make that happen (at least to me).

I'm keeping an eye on it, so will update you guys again in case it crashes again, even with the GPU undervolt.

FYI, it happened like this: keyboard turning lights off (first step) but still working for a few minutes (15 or so), then the keyboard stops working completely and either of the 2 would happen:
1- The screen turns black at the same time as the keyboard locks down, with sound also crashing and the laptop becoming unresponsive. Power button doesn't work and fans keep spinning constantly at the same speed as they were before the crash. Only removing the power cable and battery would make the laptop restart. This only happened once (first time).
2- The laptop is still responsive, fans ramping up and down as usual and the game still playable (mouse only), while the keyboard is completely unresponsive. Using the mouse, I was able to close the game and go to windows -> restart. After the shutdown process, the laptop crashes and the same thing as in bullet 1 happens (remove power cable and battery needed to reboot properly). This happened on the second time that I got such a crash.
 
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