Recently my laptop decided it would be fun to fuck with me so it has started freezing and not booting at random times. I'll just explain what I've encountered chronologically. 2 days ago: Everything is fine, I do a little browsing on the internet and a bit of playing Minecraft. I turn off the laptop after I'm done at around 1am. Yesterday: I boot my laptop before class to check some shit on the internet, everything seems fine. I leave my laptop on but closed. After class I go with a friend back to my room where I plan on showing him some of the basics of Minecraft. I open my laptop and since it was on High Performance it didn't go to sleep or hibernate. I open Minecraft and go to Play Offline and click my world to show my friend. My memory of exactly what happened here isn't perfect but sometime within the first 20 seconds my laptop just freezes, no mouse movement or anything. So naturally I hold the power button to shut it off then click it again to boot. After I clicked it the fan came on fast and loud as it usually does for a couple of seconds then it went off/slower. At this point it should show my BIOS but the screen just stays black with absolutely no noise coming from the computer except the plain noise it makes simply from being on. My friend is semi-busy so at this point he decides to leave and figure Minecraft out himself. I really have no clue what is going on but I decide that it could be that the CPU I switched into the laptop a couple months ago was bad and died. Soo I go through the long and arduous process of disassembling my laptop which involves over 20 screws and finally get to where I can access the CPU. I switch it out to my old CPU and pretty much just plug everything together without putting it in the "housing". I click the power button and guess what, it boots perfectly. So naturally I think, well I guess the newer CPU is bad but I might as well try it again. So I switch them out once more and plug everything back together to find that it is still successfully turning on (mind you I didn't wait to see if it would successfully boot to Windows with both CPU's). I then reassemble everything and reboot into Windows to find it yet again freeze. So I manually shut it down again and reboot to find that it actually will reboot this time. But since I shut down manually it asks if I'd like to boot in Safe Mode, which I choose. It then boots into Safe Mode just fine and ends up not freezing after a couple minutes, so I decide to shut it down. Then I booted into Windows regularly and proceeded to write an essay in Microsoft Office 2010 while browsing the internet, which took a couple of hours. All this goes smooth 100% from what I remember. When I got done with all my work I decided that it was time for some good ole' Minecraft. I opened it, surprised to see it not freezing, well that didn't last for long. I managed to get to the world choose screen after clicking Play Offline when it yet again complete froze. At this point I was severely annoyed, but even more so when I noticed that "World 1" was gone... My goddamn world had been deleted somehow in the past couple of hours. So yet again I hold the power button and when I try to reboot after the shut down it pulls the same shit on me as earlier, it won't boot again. At this point I just sit in my chair contemplating my situation and cursing in my head, pissed off that my laptop is broken and pissed off that my Minecraft world is history. I ended up just fucking around on my iPod for a little bit then decided it might be a good idea to try and boot the laptop again. So I clicked the button and it boots... then freezes after booting. I tried again to reboot it and found it would boot, but immediately after starting Windows it came up with the Blue Screen of Death. The screen had absolutely nothing about the problem except for MEMORY_MANAGEMENT around the top of the screen, and there were black vertical lines on my screen (not perfect, with black pixels missing). From there I decided I might as well just go to sleep so I did. Today: I get back after class and try to boot my laptop, thinking it should boot since it was booting last night after waiting for a bit. It does boot but on starting Windows it says Windows could not start and it asks if I'd like to start Startup Repair or try again. Naturally, I choose Startup Repair and leave it alone to do it's thing. I come back about 30 minutes later to find it... frozen. So I shut it down and reboot yet again to find it will boot but still won't start Windows. And again I choose Startup Repair but watch it, and I see about 5 seconds in it just freezes. So after that I shut it down and left it off. I'm really sorry about the wall of text but I felt maybe all the information could help find a solution. Right now I really don't know what piece of hardware it could be but I'm thinking something could have overheated and broken while I left it on during the day, though I do that regularly.
Nasty! It really could be any one of: bad boot sector on hard drive, faulty memory (doubt it), motherboard issues (not likely), windoze corrupted (very possible), overheating CPU caused by dead fan (maybe..). Your only real option is to try reinstalling Win - assuming you have the disks. The odds on bringing that puppy back from the grave are slim to none, and you know where slim went... Good luck
I would also suspect Windows being the problem but would Windows being somehow corrupted really cause my laptop to not even boot to the BIOS?
I suspect the motherboard. If it were memory, hard disk, or software, you would have seen the BIOS every time.
Could well be, however if he has bad memory it could appear to effect the BIOS as well. Problems like this are a bugger to diagnose. Travis, you're correct in saying that a corrupt HD or windows would not effect the BIOS. I missed the BIOS bit you described - must admit I skimmed your msg, my apologies. It seems from what you describe that the problem is not reproducable, it won't do the same thing every time If you have two mem sticks, take one out, then swap for the other. If possible, get a stick that you know works, and try that. Most computer problems are solved by trying one thing at a time, eliminating each possibility till you solve it. Can you try it again, and list in point form what happens ? Hang in there.
Yea I have another laptop that's been out of commission for months simply because I didn't want to pay for another charger, and it's RAM seems to be the same as this laptop's RAM. When I get a chance I'll switch em out and check it.