Hello all, I recently upgraded from XP to Win7 after a BSOD (driver issue). I figured it'd be easier to just start over as I had a copy from my university. Anyway, all was well until yesterday. I was playing Medieval 2 Total War when the computer overheated and shut down. That had never happened before on either XP or Win7. I have a cooling pad with two fans over both the GPU/CPU which had solved the issue in the past. Today I noticed I'm constantly getting very high CPU loads (50%+) even just under idle. I actually had the computer shut off while trying to post this earlier. Any ideas what would have caused this so suddenly? process list: http://i38.photobucket.com/albums/e147/idfanatic623/Untitled-2.png I also have a hardware report from Everest but it's rather long. Let me know what you need specifically and I'll post it.
Are you on a desktop or a laptop? And when you say you have cooling pads with fans on the CPU and GPU, can you be more specific about these? Heatsinks, case fans, fan sizes etc?
Yeah, sorry about that. Should have made it clear. I'm on an MSI MS1717 laptop. There's an aluminum cooling pad that i bought that it rests on with two fans that blow air up to the bottom of the laptop where the GPU and CPU are.
Uninstall AVG and see if the overheating goes away. If it fixes the problem reinstall the program (if you want to) with the most recent version and only allow it do a full scan once each week. The picture you posted is very small and hard to read. High CPU usage is known problem with AVG anti-virus, look it up on Google.
I see, how old is the laptop? I recently bought a laptop off ebay which I was hoping to overclock to get some better gaming performance however even at stock the GPU temps were at 70-80 degrees C. I took the backplate off and unscrewed he fan, ran some cotton buds (Q-tips) around the heatsink and took out a mass of dust and fluff, dropped the temps to 50 degrees and allowed me to get a healthy 40% overclock on the chip. Might just be a case of it needing a good clean out.
Ensure that your laptop fan and internal are dust free. To do this get a compressed air can, and spray by holding the can upright all the time on the fan exhaust of the system and open the bottom panels to remove any dust inside.
laptop is about 3 yeas old now. I've never had problem before yesterday. As for the cleaning that was next on my list. The avg unfortunately I can't do anything about, as my screen just died. Go figure. I was playing M2TW and it again overheated and shut down. On restart I got a black screen. I could hear the drive spin up and everything else seemed ok. Is it possible it's just the backlight? Or is t something more major?
OK well scratch that black screen part. I just let it sit a bit and closed the lid and now that I tried again to restart it's working fine again. This thing seems to have some serious gremlins recently...
How do you know that it's the temperature causing the problems? Do you have any software like realtemp or core temp that could tell you what your idle and load temps are like just to determine that that's definately the problem?
I guess I don't know for sure that it's the temp but I can hear the internal fans spin up and get very loud and then a bit after that the computer just turns off.
Definitely sounds like an overheating issue to me. Have a go at killing off AVG; in the screenshot you showed us avgsrvcx.exe is using 65% (or so) CPU. Another thing to do is clean out the cooling system - sounds like you've got bad contact or dust clogging or something, not good anyway.
I've killed off AVG and installed core temp. Right now, running only firefox with a bunch of tabs i'm getting core temps of anywhere from 41-50 for one core and 46-50 on the other. Haven't tested it under load yet. Will it record a high if I play TW so that I can view it later or will I have to continually watch it?
Ye seems like temp is your issue those seem particularly high, did you have a try at taking the back panel off and having a bit of a clean out?
Not yet, I don't have anything to clean it out with as far as compressed air, I need to get some. Also, I don't know if this helps/matters but when I look at the information panel that pops up when I click on the temp indicators it shows peaks of 86 and 80 respectively.
Well I got a bunch of dust out of the fan/exhaust area with a dry q-tip, temps are a bit lower (2-6 degrees), but not a whole lot. BTW since I no longer have AVG is there a non-resource intensive anti-virus you would recommend? On a side note, I just saw the Tech Support board. This probably belongs there no?
So another update. Tried to play TW again, was fine for about 20 min or so, then got a random restart. This is different from normal where it just shuts down. Related problem or no?
Ye those peak temps are pretty high, Avast! antivirus is one of the best i know of and i install it on all my clients PC's as it runs away happily in the background without the user being aware it's even there, plus it's free. What makes you think it's a different problem this time?
I don't know if it is a different problem, I just thought it might be since rather than just completely shutting down it rebooted.
