G75VW - freezing issues - SATA controller problem?

[briancarnell]

I bought a G75VW back in November 2012 and for the first 6 months, it worked flawlessly.

Earlier this year, however, it started randomly freezing, typically when I was away from the laptop. For example, I'd set up a video encoding job before going to bed and when I'd wake up the screen was black and the laptop was nonresponsive. I'd have to power off and power on.

Those occurred fairly rarely, so I assumed it was probably some OS-related issue. The frequency with which they started happening kept increasing, however, and became extremely annoying.

Finally, I was in the middle of playing a game about a month ago when the laptop froze while I was using it. I powered off and back on, but the laptop refused to boot past the BIOS screen. I attempted to reinstall from the hidden partition, etc, but nothing worked. I was able to remove the hard drives, and copy of all my data successfully. Then I sent it to ASUS for warranty repair.

Got the laptop back quickly. ASUS simply replaced both of the hard drives. On the Repair Detail sheet shipped back with the laptop the repair tech noted:

1 Symptom: HDD Bad Track Repair: Replace SATA SSD 256gb

2 Symptom: Error Message Repair: SATA JET-C 750gb

The thing is the laptop exhibits the same behavior...it freezes up randomly about once a week.

I'm concerned there's a bad motherboard or SATA controller issue here that is the real underlying issue.

[Tsuki]

Is it freezing without going to BSOD?
Are you using a page file? If not, turn it on for a while and see if you can get a crash dump...if you have that, solving the issue will be much easier.

Sounds like a cpu/memory/controller/board issue. This is very broad spectrum though, It will be difficult to figure out without testing many different things...If you can't produce a dump file; I would start with memtest86, then prime95 for cpu test, then onto furmark for GPU testing. Outside of memtest, though, it will be hard to isolate the issue as furmark/prime95 can replicate the same crash without giving you information on exactly what it was.

It sounds like a lot of work, but if you don't want to RMA the system again its where I would start; otherwise just send it back out.