Getting to the bottom of some issues...7811FX AKA The Devil's Laptop

Before I bought my G73 (Fantastic machine by the way, couldn't be happier) I had a load of crap called the Gateway P-7811FX. I'm sure someone's 7811FX works but mine gave me nothing but grief. I'd say a month and a half after I had bought the thing, I started experiencing freezing issues up the yin yang, only in games though. I would play a game for 15 minutes and bam, completely locked up and caused me to hard restart it. So gaming was out the picture pretty much for good unless it was like the most barebones, light non-GPU heavy game.

Next I started experiencing lots of slowdown in Vista (Yeah the thing had Vista, looking back it was a terrible OS). It seemingly happened every time I updated Vista completely, like I would do a fresh install (Which I was forced to do a lot, which I will get to later) and install all my programs and it was perfectly fine. Then after running Windows Update and installing everything, my laptop just went down the crapper, it was much much slower. It didn't even compare to when I bought it or before with all the updates, I dunno what happened.

A year in owning this thing, two of my USB ports died, just like that. No reason, I took care of the machine like it was a child up to that point, they just died. I was blown away because I'm slowly seeing how this laptop is dying. Not only that, my wifi became unbearably wonky. For few months it was okay but after that, I could not keep connected if my life depended on it, I was constantly disconnected, it was freakin' ridiculous.

Now more issues and this one is when I started researching into new laptops but not have necessarily given up yet, I had hope for this thing, which was STUPID. Anyway I started getting monthly wave of freezing in Vista. Eventually after using my laptop for I'd say 3-4 months at a point, I started getting tons of freezing in Vista now. It would happen randomly, like watching a video or on Firefox, especially on Firefox and it happened all the time. I didn't get why it was doing this, I researched the hell out of it and found NOTHING. My final option was to do a clean install on Vista and lo and behold, it worked. Now it didn't last for long, I would do a fresh install, everything was dandy, and after a month or two the freezing issues began again and I had to repeat this process ad nauseum. I had no idea why or how, I always added the same programs and stuff after a fresh install and never added anything else and yet it kept happening after like a month. I did not understand why, it just seemed like this POS was messing with me at this point. I had heard about Windows 7 but I scuffed at it to be honest which was a DUMB move but whatever.

Now the final nail in the coffin, the freezing that would not fix NO MATTER WHAT. On the morning of the July 4th, at about 2AM, my laptop, of course began freezing again. I would restart it and like 5 minutes in, bam, froze. I opened firefox, froze, any video, froze, ANYTHING pretty much, froze. So in my endless grief I did a final reinstall but this time, it didn't work, It would freeze after a couple minutes, it was borked, There was nothing I could do, I assumed it might of overheated and I let it cool down and tried again but no, nothing worked. That was the final straw, I was like "That's it" so I took one of my old laptops, a Toshiba Satellite, which I bought months prior to the 7811FX and to this day it works perfectly. I had installed W7 on it and now it's better than ever, it's amazing, props to Toshiba for building great quality laptops but back to the subject at hand. I researched the living crap out of a new gaming laptop, I had caught a glimpse of the G73 and one of my friends had actually bought one prior to me, the A1 model IIRC and he recommended that earlier. So after researching it, seeing it was reliable and learning how competent the Asus brand is, I was sold. Later that day, I went to BB and bought this beast and it's all history now.

Now, my old 7811FX. After being wow'd by how awesome W7 is, I installed it on my old laptop as a final ditch effort to get it to work right, because it really wasn't with Vista and well, it works...sort of. Instead of the outright permanent freezes, it gets little mini freezes now. Like you would be surfing Firefox and it would freeze for like 2 minutes and go back to normal, I don't get it. Also instead of the freezing where you can't do anything, it would freeze but you could still move the mouse but when you tried to access the start menu or anything, it wouldn't work for a couple minutes then return to normal. Now I ask you all, what could possibly be the cause of all this crap? Is it the GPU, the CPU, my HDD? Any way I can fix this in hopefully salvaging this guy from being garbage? Regardless, I'm never ever buying from Gateway ever again.

 

Sounds like the HDD.

Maybe the HDD is spinning down, then taking it's time to get spinning again.

 

Gateway is known for being bad reliability-wise, but if it's the Hitachi HD and the problem only started a month or two after you got it then you can't blame Gateway for this one. You can't blame Vista either, which after the service packs was an improvement over XP IMO.

 

I'd agree too look at the HDD, my defective XT did those intermitent lockups in Win7............

 

Okay. I disassembled my 7811 and it went very smoothly, that sticky on the forum is a great guide. Anyway, it was filled to the brim with dust, the vents, the fan, everything. After taking it apart I spent 10 minutes with a can of air and a cloth just removing all the dust. I took a look at the HDD and I noticed nothing suspicious but as per your suggestion, I replaced it. Put in a 500GB Samsung in there and it was good to go. While it was disassembled I took a look at the thermal paste. It was abysmal to be honest, my CPU was so poorly pasted, there was barely any of it, just some remains around the damn thing. My GPU barely had any paste and it was poorly applied too. This explains why my temps were so poor before, coupled with the dust, naturally it'd overheat. Went out and bought some Arctic Silver 5 since I has in a hurry and I applied it, reassembled no problem. Installed Windows 7 and all my drivers, temps are looking really good. CPU is around 23-26C on idle with it reaching up the mid 30's at some CPU intensive stuff. GPU is usually idling on 30-35 with intense gaming at the high 50's. I ran about 2 hours of Resident Evil 5 at 1920x1200 maxed with no AA, no freezing or problems. Windows 7 is lightning fast now and again, no freezing or lock ups. So I guess my laptop is actually worth using now. I need to buy a new keyboard for this thing, one of my keys is completely broken. But yeah, happy ending?

 

Vista is not horrible, if anything at all IT WAS revolutionary (unlike apple). More on this in a little..
From my experience most problems experienced in Vista are PEKAC. People downloading limewire/bittorrent music, not scanning, or visiting websites that have malicious content.

Now with Vista. There is absolutely nothing wrong with the OS Windows Vista (overall), it was a necessary step for the stagnant hardware advances while XP reigned supreme.
Manufacturers were packing year old processors, old chipsets, and weak graphics cards (Intel P4, Intel chipsets?) into computers even when Vista was introduced, which is where it got a lot of it's bad reputation from (that and PEBKAC). You can't expect to run new software on old hardware.

Vista not only allowed for true 64 bit operating system, but also enhanced graphics and performance by pushing the API a few steps further (rendering older processors/integrated GPU's slow/sluggish). Some people may say well how come games run faster on XP then on Vista, because Vista's DX10 brought better lightning/textured graphics then XP thus needed more hardware to process the additional information..
The need for multicore processors, more ram, and more graphics power came out of the need to run Vista smoothly (and earn Microsoft Certification stickers known as "Vista Ready"), if anything at all you should thank Microsoft for taking the blow and pushing Vista out to push OEM's/Component manufacturers to start advancing their before-stagnant specifications in the hardware.

@ Topic
As people have said check the hard drive. It has symptoms of hard drive failure. However the graphics lock up may be another issue.

 

Nice work man. Seems like the 78xx series didn't get a good paste job like the 68xx series did. You should clean your notebook regularly and don't use it on the carpet or a bed if you want to prevent it from being filled to the brim with dust.

 

Update: The laptop STILL freezes in games....BUT, only when the temps reach a certain point it seems. For example, I was playing in my living room, it's very warm, there's no cool air at all so naturally that affects my laptop. Played RE5 for maybe 10 minutes and it got really hot and well it froze. Later I go play in my room which is relatively cold, I play for 90 minutes or so, no problems. Temps didn't get too bad and stayed consistently in the high 50's, low 60's. What I've gathered is that this laptop has issues with heat, which I kind of knew already. My question is what can I do extra for my laptop to make sure the temps don't get too bad, I'm willing to repaste if necessary but there has to be more I can do. Also considering how stellar Windows 7 is now, it probably really was the HDD. No thank you Seagate and your cheap 200GB HDD. Oh and my other good news, my Wifi has yet to drop out, at all. I dunno what I did, maybe the connections were loose or something but it's better than it was new.

 

One thing that helped a ton with my 7811FX was getting a laptop cooler to set it on. I did not have any problems with freeze up however, but I did disassemble the system shortly after purchasing it, as most of the white crap the factories install for thermal paste is pretty much junk anyhow LOL.

I picked up one of the Thermatake Massive23 LX's for $30 plus shipping. I have to say, it was one of the best purchases I made for my laptop. Dropped the temps a bunch. Not much of a difference when idling, but made a huge difference when gaming or running benchmark tests.

HERE is a link to the Thermaltake Cooler that I purchased

 

Oh shoot I forgot that this website wasn't working when I tried to post so I saved the message now here it is:

Repasting with ICD7 might be good since it sounds like with that stuff it is impossible to mess up a pasting job. If you want to play when it is hot you could use the .9V profile which will give you bad performance because of the 300MHz memory or you could simply underclock. Going from 600 to 400MHz core clock with same %decrease in shader will produce 33% less heat which would make a big difference in temperature. Also if you don't have a laptop cooler get one. The Notepal U3 is the best one unless you here from someone else that the fans of another cooler just happen to line up well.

 

Have you got a link to the Notepal U3 Ultimate Destruction?

I have heard great things about that cooler, but have not looked at one. The TT Massive23 LX seems to be a pretty good one though, but I would like to look at the Notepal as well

Edit: Found the Notepal U3 at Newegg. Good price, and having the custom fan placement would be handy as heck.

 

The lockup is the GPU downclocking and coming back up. nVidia has a memory timing issue, there are a few posts around with fix's.............

 

I must say that my Notepal U2 has horse fans. They work but only once they warm up. But the U3 has fans that you can change the speed of, so they must be higher quality.