Asus G74SX won't stop crashing. Getting worse.

[Wtfismyname]

Greetings everyone

I posted here a while ago about my ASUS laptop acting weird , such as the crashing display driver....

In the last months here things are steadily getting worse and more frequent.
By that I mean I see the likes of -

-Blue screens of death
-WHITE screens of death
-Crashing display drivers
-Black screens of death
-freezing

I am honestly on the verge of returning it (if I even can!) for a fresh one , but I'm also a laptop noobie .
I'm asking , do you knowledgable people here know why it would be doing this? Faulty memory? bad hard drive or do I need a fresh re-install of the OS.
I don't know! I do know that I'm sick of it crashing like it is. It's kind of depressing.

If it helps , I've noticed that the majority of the time the crashes occur when I'm browsing on FIREFOX or surfing youtube

thanks guys , would like to get this figured out. I want my G74SX to last for a long time , hopefully I can fix it

[Idestruction]

Well, telling us the error messages from the BSODs would help a lot more. But, it sounds like a bad hard drive to me. Does your HDD make any funky sounds (like grinding or a whining sound)? If so, I would suggest getting a new HDD before the one you have crashes for good, and making a backup of your install on an external HDD or a DVD if you have one. Bad memory would not cause that many errors, and it is fairly easy to diagnose. If you want to test your RAM, go download a copy of memtest86 and burn it to a cd. Boot off the cd and let it test the RAM. It will tell you if any of it is bad.

From all of the years I have been working with computers, this sounds like a dying HDD to me.

[Wtfismyname]

crap , that's what I figured 😕
Yes the HDD makes odd wind up noises
thank you , I guess I'm off to find a new HDD

[Idestruction]

Wtfismyname wrote:
crap , that's what I figured 😕
Yes the HDD makes odd wind up noises
thank you , I guess I'm off to find a new HDD

Tell tale sign of a failing HDD. Make sure you are able to keep the HDD up in order to copy any important files/documents before it fully dies.

[Wtfismyname]

oh I have , went into full backup mode

Can I just send it to ASUS for a new HDD since it's still under warranty. I've heard some horror stories about that (not getting OS installed on new HDD etc) but I really can't afford a new HDD.
I'm frustrated because I dropped over 1500 on this and it's already kicking the can.
I wanted to just return the whole thing and get the g75 but I doubt londondrugs (where I purchased from) will allow that.

[Idestruction]

You could try. I do not know their policy on dying HDDs. Although, HDDs are extremely cheap and getting cheaper all the time. You most likely wouldnt need anything over 750GB if you do not do a lot of video editing or anything like that. Give Asus a call and see what they will do for you

[dstrakele]

Once you've completed backup of your important files, try running CHKDSK C: /F /R from an elevated Command Prompt (right-click on the Command Prompt icon and choose "Run as Administrator", then enter the command).

If this and memtest86* fail to find errors, press F9 at the ASUS splash screen and restore Windows to the 1st partition. This will completely overwrite your OS partition with a new ASUS factory installation of Windows 7 - just like it came out of the box.

If you can still reproduce the crashes by using the stock browser to access YouTube videos and surfing the web, and are beyond your retailer's exchange/return period, set up the RMA.

[brecker]

if your hdd is actually dying, if you delete everything on it, you will release all the bad sectors and problems will came back once you overwrite them...

i once had a discussion of what to do with corrupted files with a google engineer and the conclusion was to leave them there 😛

now, the problem is mainly using firefox and youtube, which both create a lot of temporary files... and windows is usually configured to write them to the hdd

so if you wanna try something temporary, after you backed up all your important files (in case the hdd fails definatevely at some random point), go to control panel, system, advanced system settings.

Then go to settings in performance, and in the advanced tab disable the pagefile.

And after that go back to adv. sys settings and go to environment variables. I'm assuming you have 2 partitions on the hdd, since asus ship the notebooks like that, change the variables location of TEMP and TMP (for both user & system variables) to folders you will need to create previously on the second partition.

Once you done both you will now be using the ram and a new part of the hdd to manage temporary files, which may temporary solve the errors you are facing...

hdd's are really cheap nowadays, ssd's are getting there as well :p, the best thing you can do is getting a new one, perhaps you can avoid this for a few months if you manage to make your system stable again, but it will get slower, files will get corrupted, and at some point the hdd will fail for good...

i'm not really sure asus policy regarding hdd's, but i wouldn't get my hopes up, because in the user manual it states that the hdd is one of the parts, if not the only, that will brake, so i'm not sure they will cover it...

i've broken 4 hdd's over the past 7 years with different notebooks... i've learned a few things after that... one is not to move the notebook much if the hdd is writing stuff, the other is to stay away of seagate hdd's (some people may like them, i don't wanna start a flame war, but i found that they are more fragile than the competition drives...)