Hey there, how about I help you look at those error messages (BSOD) so we can fix them?
Hey there, how about I help you look at those error messages (BSOD) so we can fix them?
Dump Files from 3 BSODs here A few details that may or may not matter. First one was while I was asleep and it was supposed to be hibernating but the battery was dead when I opened it which usually means it chose not to hibernate and instead did dumb stuff until it died. This happens periodically. Here and there. Wasn’t too concerned. Looked up the error and it mentioned maybe the hibernation file size being too small can cause it so I upped that to 100. Next day it did not BSOD during hibernation so I was happy and forgot about it. I was deleting some files about half an hour after opening it and boom, another BSOD. Grabbed my phone to get a pic of the screen but it was gone before I could snap it. Now I’m panicking thinking I haven’t done a backup in months and grabbed a drive. Another blue screen about 10 minutes later. Really panicking now but I was able to back it up after that. Which took hours. No more blue screens and none today after deleting files for several hours. I just had it at the computer place for literally like a month in October. Upgraded RAM to 32. Switched out my C drive for a bigger one and mirrored it for me. Found bare spots in my liquid metal that were black (known problem with ASUS ROG STRIX G15 Advantage edition laptops). He re applied the liquid metal and did not tell me until after that it was his first time. Thermals were awful when I got it back and he had bare spots too so he had to fix that. I saw the 2nd bug report can maybe point to bad drives, RAM, or thermals so I went over that. All new. I monitor temps constantly. Have not noticed issues. CrystalDisk is not showing any bad or pending sectors on either drive. ASUS “diagnostic tool” says everything is fine. I paid this guy half of what I paid for the laptop in October and I’m really stressing out about having to do that again. If someone can read these and maybe give me an idea as to what the issue might be so I can decide next steps I’d appreciate it! Edit- Forgot to mention, he says he was on the phone with ASUS for hours trying to get BIOS to update and they could not figure it out. I guess they told him I’d have to RMA it if I want to fix that and I’ve heard ASUS RMA horror stories a lot so I did not do that. It’s BIOS 311 right now
Welcome to the forums! You are a new visitor here, and your current BIOS is 311. That means it has an updated version called ROG-Republic of Gamers | Deutschland | ASUS Entdecke die Welt von ASUS - Alles rund um die besten Mainboards, Grafikkarten, Monitore, Notebooks und vieles mehr erfährst Du auf der offiziellen ASUS-Seite. rog.asus.com The latest BIOS number is 331. You will notice that #11 is not on their official page unless you accidentally mentioned another laptop's model name.
If you keep getting BSODs, look in C:\Windows\Minidumps and make sure to put those files here. Please share them with me. I have never liked messing around with hibernation file sizes. Honestly, if your main drive is too small for a hibernation file, you need a bigger one or just stop using hibernation all together. It really needs to match the size of your installed RAM. If you upgraded the RAM but didn't reinstall Windows (which seems to happen often), then it makes sense that there was an error with the hibernate file. I would suggest turning off hibernation (using powercfg -h off) and deleting the old hiberfil.sys file, then coming back on again (powercfg -h on) to make a new file. If you want extra safety, try rebooting between turning it off and on. Did you check this when you swapped out your RAM? Make sure those new sticks have exactly the same part number as the old ones. Is the new and old RAM listed together on the QVL for your motherboard? You said they cloned your C: drive to help me, so maybe you didn't need a full reinstall? Cloning isn't always 100% safe. In my experience, I would always choose a clean install of Windows instead. I understand why you want to save time by cloning, but if you want a stable and reliable system after changing the drive, a clean install is better. So now there are doubts about whether your main drive is in good shape. I also worry that bad paste jobs might have damaged your CPU. Have you ever checked the temperatures? I would suggest downloading HWMonitor (it's free) and looking at the CPU temps section to see how many cores are running. Please post two screenshots of what it shows: one when everything is completely stopped, and another with a lot of heavy activity coming in. The minidumps might give us more clues. I know this isn't going to help you right now, but from my experience with the builder, I wouldn't trust him much either.
There were 4 (?) files in the minidump folder and one big “memory.dmp” outside of the folder. I copied all to a folder on my desktop and zipped them. Did they not all upload properly? Here it is again with just the minidumps this time! Hopefully that works? I’m entirely unsure what he did exactly when upgrading the RAM but given he happily took my money to mirror my old drive knowing he was also upgrading the RAM and would need a fresh install to do that properly I assume he didn’t do one. That’s actually upsetting because he knew I was perfectly capable of installing the drive myself. I only had him do it because I wanted it mirrored and didn’t know how. So I paid him for that and will now have to wipe it, anyway. Total waste of my money. I even added the heatsink and thermal pads on it myself before having him put it in. A fresh install will only wipe the drive windows is on, right? Not the one in the other slot? I actually used up that 32gigs of RAM pretty fast and decided to upgrade again to 64 so I just bought a new kit. When I install that (going DIY this time) I’ll do a fresh windows install. I’ll compare the sticks. I still have the original ones. I wasn’t aware of this QVL thing, though. Or part numbers… Are you assuming it’s quad channel and I added 2 to the original ones? It’s dual channel so we replaced them entirely with the new kit. Do the part numbers still need to match if you’re replacing them? I just looked up my laptop on Crucial’s compatibility chart and went by that. Damn. Guess it’s better to find out now than after I put them in, though. I’ve been monitoring my temps since not long after I got the laptop using CoreTemp. I have it set to ding with popup if temps go above 85. On idle it’s usually low to high 30’s. Gaming mid to high 70’s or sometimes up to 86-87 briefly depending on the game but usually not prolonged. One specific game I got that was unoptimized had it hitting 96+ just on the main menu and actually caused the laptop to shut itself off. But this was the first time I’d ever seen it that high or had the laptop shut itself off due to temps and I stopped using the game right away. This was what prompted me to have him check the liquid metal to be safe and that’s how we discovered the bare spots on CPU and GPU (patiently waiting on the class action against ASUS for that one because it’s a pretty big screw up). I also know he was messing with the game to replicate my issue and caused the shut downs quite a few times. Ran the game much longer than I ever did. Repeatedly. Idk if that’s enough to damage anything? After his bad thermal job I was unable to open any game without it shutting itself off so I didn’t use it at all before he fixed it. As for trustworthiness, I’m already looking for a new place to bring it to. It’s hard in my state. We’re all forest. This place an hour’s drive one way had great reviews but (I know it’s not skill related) a day after he got the computer he got my full name off my microsoft account and found me on facebook… I was instantly worried about my decision (and VERY glad I bought a laptop with no webcam). My perception of their professionalism went right down the drain after that. Skills wise, I think he bit off more than he could chew and should have informed me that he was out of his depth so I could decide if I wanted my hardware to be his first time working on something. Especially something like liquid metal. He had it for nearly a month. I noticed silver smudges on the outside of the laptop when I got it back. I can’t imagine what that could be besides liquid metal. I haven’t opened it up yet… Based on current temps though it seems like he fixed his mistake. It’s back to normal. I use a nice fan tray now for gaming so it rarely hits 80. Often 55-75 based on game. But I can download the app you mentioned if you think it’s better than CoreTemp? I do wish it showed me GPU temp as well because that’s one I don’t often see. Only CPU. But I do have that app open 24/7. This is idle with no tray fan. It did hit 86 without my tray fan while I was messing around in BIOS looking for my motherboard number. I had to google that, didn’t realize BIOS put it under load but apparently it does. That’s the highest I’ve seen it since I got it back. He did run the crazy game again before returning it for like an hour (found out later he actually played it along with several other games he ran. Not sure if I paid him for that time or not). He said temps still hit 90ish but didn’t go high enough to shut it down anymore. I didn’t try it, myself. Scared of that game now. Haha
No idea why my first version without the links posted, plus my final one when I changed it, are both here. It was my fault. Please skip the first draft. I keep searching and typing while you were there, probably messing up things too much. Me and forums don't get along well at all. Edit - found the delete button and deleted draft 1 but didn't know how to remove your part so it's still counted as two. Slowly getting better...
I now have the minidumps, thank you. Looking at these files, I think the most likely reason for all those blue screens is that your NVMe drive is broken. Two of the dumps show a 0xC0000185 error code, which means the computer's I/O device sent back an error message about trying to read data. In one file, the problem happened while waiting to get a read from the system drive (the hard drive or SSD). The other file seems like it was trying to pull data from the network but stopped when reading pages from the system drive. Another file shows CRITICAL_PROCESS_DIED and those are almost always hardware problems, but usually it's RAM that causes BSODs even though the system drive might be okay too. There is no evidence of a bad hard drive in this specific dump. However, one file looks like it was corrupted somehow; the debugger couldn't load it completely, which suggests something wrong with the system drive again. The fourth file shows an INTERNAL_POWER_ERROR, meaning the computer didn't finish its power switch in time and crashed. That is almost always a hardware issue too, but we don't know exactly what failed to switch off correctly here. Based on everything I see, there clearly seems to be some kind of hardware problem with this laptop. I would suggest checking the NVMe drive based on these clues. Maybe you just need to take it out and put it back in carefully (re-seating). That often fixes many annoying computer problems. To answer your questions about RAM, dual-channel motherboards are very rare and expensive; yours will be running in a basic dual-channel setup. Even so, you should not mix different RAM sticks because their timing settings must match perfectly across all of them. I noticed that in these four dumps you only have two Crucial 16GB sticks installed (CT16G4SFRA32A.C8FE), so we can rule out mixed RAM as the cause for all those blue screens. I don't think it is likely to be something wrong with the person who put this laptop together for you. If there is any way you can return it and get your money back, I would do that immediately.
I mean, ASUS built it. The computer shop took out the drive, memory, and liquid metal. Everything else came straight from the factory. I bought this in 2021, so my warranty expired back in 2022. At that point, I think I can't fix anything myself or even try those old suggestions? Maybe it's safer to just try them out first and see if opening it up makes sure nothing is obviously broken inside. I paid about 700 plus a small tip at the previous repair shop for those mods. The laptop cost 1,500 with the original parts. I'm scared about doing this all over again because I might just end up buying a whole new laptop instead of fixing what's broken. 😔 Should I go find another repair place and only let them look at it? They can figure out exactly which part is failing and then tell me if fixing it makes sense? Also, if the broken piece is one of those three things they replaced less than four months ago, do I need to call that shop again just for a bill? Thanks for helping! It's good to have an idea before spending too much money.