Question Lenovo C740 works well for 3 months; then unable to boot past loading screen

[mtbiegel]

Hello,

I have a Lenovo Yoga C740 Laptop that I bought in May 2020. Here are the specs:

• 10th gen Core i5-10210U
• 16 GB DDR4-2666MHz (soldered)
• 256 GB PCIe SSD (not soldered)
• Integrated Graphics

LONG STORY SHORT:
My Lenovo laptop that I bought in May 2020 worked great until August; then it would fail to boot past the Lenovo loading screen. I sent it back to Lenovo to have them fix it, and they returned it saying that they replaced the SSD. After this, I used it for roughly a week and the same problem of not being able to boot past the Lenovo loading screen occurred again.

ENTIRE STORY:
From May to August, the laptop worked flawlessly, getting great battery life and performing well for my needs. Then disaster struck…

I tried turning it on in late August, and it get stuck at the Lenovo loading screen and fails to boot. After 3 attempts of trying to turn the laptop on, Windows brought me to the Recovery page to give me options on how I wanted to troubleshoot the problem. I tried many of the options, yet to no avail, they did not work. The last step I did was to boot from a USB and install a fresh copy of Windows. I then proceeded to go back through Windows installation and get back to the desktop so I could resume my work. The solution of re-installing Windows from a USB worked for about 30 minutes until the laptop froze while I was on the desktop. Then the same problem occurred again, where it would get to the Lenovo loading screen and then fail to boot.

I reinstalled windows from a USB three more times, but after I fully install it and get to the desktop, it freezes every time after about 30-60 minutes of use.

Now it’s September, and it has been 2 weeks of me trying to reset the computer from the USB. I get on the phone with the garbage technical support that Lenovo has, and they finally were able to let me send it back to them as of September 9th to have them look at it and fix it.

Now it’s October 10th, an entire month later and they finally shipped it back to me, saying they swapped out the PCIe SSD and put a new one in it (Honestly, I could’ve swapped out the SSD this in 10 minutes myself, let alone an entire month). I turned on the laptop, and it worked great for a week until it began to have the same problem again where it would get stuck at the loading screen AGAIN and not boot.

So my current dilemma is:

• What other component could be causing this computer to crash?
• Lenovo says they replaced the SSD, but I have no idea if they actually did, so the SSD could still be a point of failure.

 

[geofelt]

For a basic functional test
Run memtest86.
It boots from a usb stick and does not use windows.
You can download the free edition here:
https://www.memtest86.com/download.htm

If you can run a full pass with NO errors, your ram should be ok.

If you can get into the bios, see what level it is, and what might be fixed if there is a newer bios.

Failure after a time is often a heat issue.
Laptop coolers are small and inefficient.
See that your cooling airways are clear.
At idle, you should see 10-15c. over ambient if your cooler is working.

 

[mtbiegel]

For a basic functional test
Run memtest86.
It boots from a usb stick and does not use windows.
You can download the free edition here:
https://www.memtest86.com/download.htm

If you can run a full pass with NO errors, your ram should be ok.

If you can get into the bios, see what level it is, and what might be fixed if there is a newer bios.

Failure after a time is often a heat issue.
Laptop coolers are small and inefficient.
See that your cooling airways are clear.
At idle, you should see 10-15c. over ambient if your cooler is working.

Sorry for the late response...just got around to doing some tests.

As of now, I've done MemTest86, reinstallation of Windows, CrystalDiskMark on NVMe SSD, and Aida64 Stress Test.

MemTest86: Ran this test off a USB, and it came back with no errors after passing all 4 tests.✅

Reinstallation of Windows: I decided to reinstall windows once again just to see if anything would change after doing MemTest86. As of right now, it is running smoothly with no obvious performance issues or crashes.✅

CrystalDiskMark: Ran this application on the SSD to see the speeds of the Samsung drive. I don't know exactly what the drives rated speeds are, but during the test, it produced 3363 MB/s read speeds and 1538 MB/s write speeds, which seems adequate and nothing that might cause failures.❓

Aida64 Stress Test: Did a stress test on: CPU, FPU, cache, system memory, and local disks. This test lasted 2 hours under full load, and the temperature of the CPU never exceeded 80 degrees; there was no thermal throttling, and the fans spun up loud (verifying they worked). No crashes occurred during this full stress test.✅


Final thoughts:
So in conclusion so far, MemTest86 didn't produce any errors, Windows is running fine so far (5 days), and Aida64 stress test didn't fail or crash at any point.

As of now, the NVMe SSD and RAM have been tested thoroughly, so these components are most likely not the problem. The CPU has been stress tested, so it's likely not the problem but still a possibility.

It's possible that it could be the battery....not able to supply enough voltage maybe? Also, it could be a problem with the motherboard...I don't really know how to test this though.
Any other ideas?

Thanks!