Laptop constant power-on power-off cycle

[TylerFischer11]

Hello all, I've been experiencing a problem and need help with the diagnosis.
I have a Lenovo Y510p laptop.

About 6 months ago, I tried to turn on my laptop. It lit up, the cpu fan started and within a second, it terminated the boot up and shut off, just to try again a couple of seconds later. This turned into a never ending fail to boot cycle. Probably at the rate of 20 start ups per minute. The only way to stop it was to unplug the power and pull the battery. After plugging the battery and the power cord back in, i tried to power it on, and it worked just fine. I thought nothing of it, and life went on.

Now about a month ago, it happened again. The difference was that pulling the battery didn't solve the problem. With my trivial troubleshooting skills, i was listening to the laptop and i heard on the start up, something would start spinning. Ask me any day before this and any day after this, i would have known it was the cpu fan, but for whatever reason on this day, i thought it was the ultrabay (removable Lenovo slot-mine is a cdrom). So I quickly pulled it out, tried to power on the laptop, and everything started working just fine.

This continued for about a week or two until the issue happened again. This time there was nothing I could slightly fiddle with to fix it. I started searching Google on phone for similar problems. A lot of answers were pointing it towards the CMOS? Battery (I'm forgetting what it's called, but essentially the motherboard battery). After a little more searching I saw some people were able to fix the problem by pulling out a slot of memory. With the latter being easier to deal with than the prior, i pulled my laptop apart and removed 4g of ram (i had a total of 8g). I started it up with only 4g of ram, and everything was fine. I turned it off and reinstalled the extra 4g of ram. I booted it up with the original 8g and everything was fine, so I've been using it normally for the last two weeks.

Now during these two weeks I haven't been able to test too many things, as I've been incredibly busy as a chemical engineering student, but I did notice a problem that could be associated with this. My laptop has 8g of ram. That's plenty of memory to do most things. Well my laptop has been incredibly sluggish for who knows how long (probably 6 months when this started). Yesterday, i was looking at task manager and realized that while doing practically nothing, my computer was using 80-90% of its memory. It was normally at 7.2/8g. And I'm saying, this much of the resource was being used when only chrome was open, or when only task manager was open. Another thing was that when i would open a single window and single tab of chrome, after a couple of minutes, task manager would have 8-10 different chrome processes running at 20-100mb each of ram.

I was going to try to look into this over the weekend, but of course, my laptop won't boot and is having its original problem.

I'm posting this from my phone to get opinions and some trouble shooting help before i open my laptop again. I haven't tried removing the card of ram yet. I also probably won't be able to work on anything until the weekend, seeing as i have a heat transfer test tomorrow and an enzyme kinetics test on Friday. None the less though, every single reply will be vastly appreciated. I'll be replying and answering questions to the best of my ability in my free time!

Thank you all!

P.s. sadly I can't access my specs right now, so the best i can give you:
Lenovo Y510p
i7 4th gen (i think 4500qm or something like that)
8g ram
Nvidia 750m
Windows 8.1 (i haven't updated it in a while though)

 

[Lutfij]

Very eloquent post if I must say so and one of the professions I was aiming for before becoming an architect. Nevertheless I think the issue might have begun around the OS and is yet the OS though it could also be the memory modules causing havoc. Have a go with memtest86 for at least 10 passes with both your ram slots populated(with the 8GB of ram) and see if any errors come up until you finish pass #10. If any errors come up then the issue is within your ram modules.

It isn't a good practice to continually remove the laptop battery(not motherboard) on events such as the one described above as this can and will lead to corruption in your OS and possibly worse the HDD/SSD can be permanently damaged beyond repair sitting at home. Which leads me to suggest that your OS might have grown a form of corruption as you stated memory leak being one of the main issues after the system refusing to boot up. If you're system does boot up then try a repair install. Create a bootable USB installer and have a go at reinstalling your OS if you can't budge from a non responsive system. It can also be a case of bad drivers from Nvidia.

As per your ram, according to Lenovo's product specification page, you can populate your slots with DDR3L sticks rated at 1600MHz with 1.35v operational voltage in either single or dual channel mode. Something to think about if you'd like to borrow a stick or a pair of ram(s) from a friend and investigate the issue.