Question Lenovo IdeaPad 3 17ABA7 - Windows 11 crash ~3 minutes after boot

[Luno]

Hi,

I recently bought this laptop for a family member for light to medium intensity office use. I exchanged the preinstalled 512GB SSD with a larger 2TB drive (WD Green SN350), everything else is original. After about 2 months of really great performance, Windows 11 started to crash about ~3 minutes into booting. This can be accelerated when the laptop runs on battery only, almost immediately crashing before being able to log in.

Event Viewer / Reliability Monitor shows a lot of of "WHEA" warnings (but never critical errors) about memory parity and many flavors of "Windows didn't shut down correctly" without any helpful info. On occasion there's a bluescreen with CLOCK_WATCHDOG_TIMEOUT (101). According to the internet, this error can literally mean anything and can be caused by both software and hardware issues across the board. The laptop is currently RMA'd to make sure there's no actual hardware defect present in the parts I can't really test (Board, CPU).


What I've tried so far:

[Hardware]

- Unplugging all external devices
- Removing the battery to run on AC only - no change
- memtest86 and Windows' own memory test confirms RAM is okay
- CrystalDiskInfo confirms SSD is fine

[Software]

- Full virus scan - nothing found
- Installed all updates and newest drivers - no change
- Rolled the system back to a restore point 2 days before the issues started - no change
- Tried pretty much everything Windows offers on the "repair" side of things: DISM, SFC, chkdsk - no change
- Tried a "clean boot": msconfig -> Hide all Microsoft services -> Disable All - no change

For some reason, booting in safe mode works and there's no crash even after hours of runtime, even when doing more intensive tasks like a full scan with Windows Defender .

There's also one thing that's really bugging me about the laptops assembly: In this video (not the exact model but very similar) you can see a teardown of the components. At ~1:50 when the SSD is removed you can see a "wet slab" underneath it. I assume this is some kind of thermal pad? Not that I haven't seen these before, but the fact that it's just stuck between the SSD and the PCB is a bit strange, also that it's literally "wet" and leaves visible "wet" spots where it was seems really weird to me.

Might be nothing though, time for the disclaimer: Neither a Windows 11 nor a laptop expert, so please feel free to use crayons for explanations . Thanks for reading and all incoming suggestions

 

[Colif]

If its till playing up after the RMA...

Can you follow option one on the following link - here - and then do this step below: Small memory dumps - Have Windows Create a Small Memory Dump (Minidump) on BSOD - that creates a file in c windows/minidump after the next BSOD

1. Open Windows File Explore
2. Navigate to C:\Windows\Minidump
3. Copy the mini-dump files out onto your Desktop
4. Do not use Winzip, use the built in facility in Windows
5. Select those files on your Desktop, right click them and choose 'Send to' - Compressed (zipped) folder
6. Upload the zip file to the Cloud (OneDrive, DropBox . . . etc.)
7. Then post a link here to the zip file, so we can take a look for you . . .

it working in safe mode can mean two things:
1 its a driver to blame and they don't work in safe mode
2 its hardware as safe mode is less stress than normal mode.

There's also one thing that's really bugging me about the laptops assembly: In this video (not the exact model but very similar) you can see a teardown of the components. At ~1:50 when the SSD is removed you can see a "wet slab" underneath it. I assume this is some kind of thermal pad? Not that I haven't seen these before, but the fact that it's just stuck between the SSD and the PCB is a bit strange, also that it's literally "wet" and leaves visible "wet" spots where it was seems really weird to me.

possibly a thermal pad, used to act as a sort of heatsink to take heat away from nvme
something like https://store.emprgroup.com.au/p-584893-5p20s37630-lenovo-pad-thermalpad-l-82r3-weihan.aspx

 

[Luno]

Update:

Laptop came back. RMA report says "Device has a defective electrical component (mainboard)".

Not sure if they only replaced the mainboard or if I got a completely new unit, either way I'm really relieved that the IdeaPad said "It's me, not you"

Here's hoping that this one fares better and the first one was simply a friday afternoon model.