Question Laptop screen goes black a few minutes after startup ?

[el_guapo]

I have an ASUS Rog Strix G513Q Laptop

I can only get a few minutes out of my laptop before the screen goes black and there's no reviving it. Actually, it seems to go black if I'm not actively engaging the cursor, but if I'm actively moving that, then instead of going black the screen sometimes just locks up. This has made it challenging to troubleshoot as I have a limited window to try things before I have to do a forced shutdown. I had the latest Nvidia graphics card driver and I also tried uninstalling it. I've done a hard reset. I've gone into safe mode. I've F2ed my way into the BIOS at startup and loaded the optimized defaults. None of that helped.

I use the machine as a work computer, so I've lost a day of work and counting and at this point I'm getting a little desperate. I'm almost to the point of trying a reinstall of Windows 11, but it's a 3D animation machine and I don't want to take that step unless it's absolutely necessary because it's going to take forever to reinstall all of the creative programs and plugins.

Some additional info that may or may not be relevant: The computer has long had a problem with freezing upon startup. This always occurs when the Republic of Gamers logo is on the screen. This necessitates a forced shutdown and restart. It doesn't happen all the time, but it happens often enough that it's not a surprise. Usually one restart is sufficient to bring it back, but sometimes it takes more.

A few weeks ago I disabled Maximum Lifespan Mode for the battery in the MyASUS app because I was going on a trip and wanted the battery charged higher than 60%. Now I can't get the laptop to reenter Maximum Lifespan Mode. I can select it, but the battery stays fully charged when plugged in.
I'm not sure if this could be a battery issue or a power supply issue. Maybe a memory issue? I recently started having problems with Adobe After Effects sucking up all of my available memory when opened. I attributed that to Adobe, but maybe it's related?

If anyone out there has any suggestions for things I could try, I'd love to hear them. Thanks!

 

[el_guapo]

Here's an update:
I think I may be narrowing down the problem to an issue with either Windows Power Plan settings or Nvidia's graphics driver.
I managed to reinstall the latest GeForce Nvidia graphics driver. (the laptop has an RTX 3070) That was a race against time to get the installation complete before the machine froze up. Once installed, the machine stayed on and didn't freeze up again. So I thought maybe that was it. [Narrator: That was not it.]
Feeling emboldened, I decided to see if I could get the Maximum Lifespan Mode working again in the MyASUS app so my battery wouldn't say 100% charged all the time. MyASUS turned out to be still set at Maximum Lifespan Mode, but the system was still not acknowledging that.
So I went into the Power & Battery settings and there I could again see the warning that "Power mode can't be set while the high performance power plan is used."
I then went into the Power Plan settings in the Control Panel and changed the plan from "Performance" to "ASUS Recommended." A couple of seconds later the machine locked up.
After a restart I quickly uninstalled MyASUS just to see if that may have been causing a conflict. After the uninstall the machine locked up again.
Next, I reinstalled the Nvidia graphics driver to see if the machine stayed on again and it did.
SO... there's some kind of issue going on with either the Nvidia driver or Windows Power Plan settings, no? I presume it's the former, but it seems weird to me that uninstalling the driver didn't resolve the issue earlier in my troubleshooting.
Maybe the next thing would be to try rolling back to a previous driver version and see if the same problems occur?
More to come...