My Current Difficulties.

Yougirasu

Hello to everyone who reads this, I was wondering if I could get peoples opinions on what I should do with my current technical difficulties that are becoming quite irritating. First though, I'll go ahead and give you the brief history.

I went onto PC Worlds website almost 5 months ago (5 months exactly is this Sunday) and purchased a refurbished Acer 7551 laptop from them to replace my worn and full current laptop of 4 years. I got it because it ticked all the right boxes (good graphics for my price range, nice memory and a modest battery life) for my gaming and social needs and it worked fine for months, up until the Christmas holiday period. At that time, I believe it was Friday night/Saturday morning, just before New Year, when it suffered a fatal error giving me a blue screen of death before my hard-drive failed on me. It went out for repairs the following Thursday and returned a week later with a replaced hard-drive, full valet and a quality check (admittedly, its original box was quite battered during this time, which I wasn't impressed with).
However, on Sunday, three days after its return, the laptop received another Blue Screen of Death. But this time it restarted fine and nothing seemed out of the ordinary so I left it as it was and continued with things. But the problem resurfaced yesterday during my late night surfing (I was watching a Livestream and surfing the web), but it didn't happen once, it had the same problem twice in 15 minutes.

Now, I've looked at the event history and seen that the error is sourced in the Kernel-Power area, but that's about all I know. With this first occurring just three days after it was repaired and underwent a quality check, I'm not exactly pleased with Knowhow. But I'd still like to know what my options are, as far as I know I could either call up the Knowhow team again through the PC World number and see about a second repair (I've gone and picked up a leaflet with the number on again, having misplaced the first) or to simply consider a refund and find another laptop due to it being within 6 months of purchase (I've had a look at the DELL Inspiron Q15R that they have refurbished, which seems just as good and cheaper). Although, if anyone has any fixes or suggestions I'm eager to hear them as I'm beginning to feel lost and unsure of what to do.

fwor

My initial guess would be that they could not be bothered to install the current motherboard device drivers.

If you go onto Acer's website you'll find them available for download.

Yougirasu

Okay. Thanks for the advice. Is there anything I need to know to do this or is it as simple as go onto the site, locate the download and download it?

Actually, I went and had a look, but I have no real idea which ones I should download to try and solve my problem. Can anyone point me in the right direction? I'm feeling a bit overwhelmed again.

GunJack

http://www.acer.co.uk/ac/en/GB/content/drivers

go through the boxes to select your model, then:-

try the e-power one on the applications tab, and the correct graphics driver to match your hw from the drivers tab

Yougirasu

Thanks for pointing out the e-power driver GunJack, I completely missed that one. But I'm not seeing any graphics driver in the drivers tab and I'm not sure what you mean by hw either. I'll try it as it is with its new e-power thing, but could you clarify what you meant by everything else should it fail. Although if I'm honest, I'm getting tired of sorting something the repair company probably should have caught when they did a 'full quality check' before they sent it back.

robmar0se

Hi, In addition to the suggestions already made, I would run a chkdsk c:/r within the command prompt, reboot and get the lappie to check the hdd. I don't have a high opinion of knowhow or whatever they are called now. If the error report at the end shows bad sectors, my bet is that they put in a refurbed hard drive.

If clean, I would also download memtest86, create a bootable CD (as described on the website), and run a RAM check.

Lastly if none of the above or previous suggestions answer your question then post the BSOD here, expecially the 0x000000nn, the nn gives us a clue as to where the issue might be.

PS checking up on the kernal stop error this is what I found on the MS site:

The kernel power Event ID: 41 error is generated under different scenarios where the computer is shut down or restarts unexpectedly. When the computer that is running Windows is started, a check is performed to determine whether the computer was cleanly shut down. If the computer was not shut down correctly, a Kernel Power Event 41 message is generated.

- this might imply that what you are seeing is the follow-on from an original error, ie not the error itself - if that makes sense

GunJack

hw = hardware. There's two different graphics drivers listed, one for ATI graphics chip and one for t'other chip fitted on those models. Look in your device manager (right-click on Computer, Properties, Device Manager) and it'll tell you which one you have, so download that graphics driver and install.

Scho

Any chance you can post the event log errors? (Don't paste the pc name or anything though)
a google of the error message and error codes can generally help sometimes.

Did you ever get a chance to read the BSOD error message as well?