This is a new one on me - I'm hoping someone out there has some insight. I have an 8-month old Gateway DX4300 (AMD Phenom X4 9750 quad-core, ATI Radeon 4650, 8Mb Ram). Starting about a week ago, I began experiencing random black screen hard lock-ups: screen goes black, power button light is lit and steady, fans are running, but ALL activity ceases. The only way to recover is the pull the plug - holding the power button down will not work. This happens independent of the particular software that might be running at the time: spreadsheet, explorer, video, just the OS (Win 7 Professional x64). It happens 2-3 time per day.
I tried using the recovery console to go back to the system state 2 weeks ago - no luck. I tried vacuuming the dust caked on the air input (and inside the case). Nope. Replaced Norton 2010 with Panda cloud antivirus. Not the answer. Dropped Windows aero in favor of the classic interface. No go. Loaded Everest Ultimate to check temps - they are running 34-49 for CPU and MB, 50-59 for the GPU. Don't think that's it. Decided to test the memory chips, so I booted memtest86+ from the cd drive to test the memory overnight. I watched for about 25 minutes - no errors, and I went to bed and left it running. During the night, the same thing happened: black screen, no response was waiting for me in the am. So this is good info, right? Doesn't this indicate the problem is hardware-based? My guess is the 300W power supply or the video card, but I'm really just guessing here. Does anyone have some additional insight? I really don't want to send in the box to the factory.
(On a side note, do first-level techs know how to do anything other than tell you "Don't worry - resetting to factory-level defaults will fix this"? I had to get to the 2nd level at Gateway to have a decent conversation...
I sure could use some help if anyone has run into this, or a similar issue.
Thanks!
I tried using the recovery console to go back to the system state 2 weeks ago - no luck. I tried vacuuming the dust caked on the air input (and inside the case). Nope. Replaced Norton 2010 with Panda cloud antivirus. Not the answer. Dropped Windows aero in favor of the classic interface. No go. Loaded Everest Ultimate to check temps - they are running 34-49 for CPU and MB, 50-59 for the GPU. Don't think that's it. Decided to test the memory chips, so I booted memtest86+ from the cd drive to test the memory overnight. I watched for about 25 minutes - no errors, and I went to bed and left it running. During the night, the same thing happened: black screen, no response was waiting for me in the am. So this is good info, right? Doesn't this indicate the problem is hardware-based? My guess is the 300W power supply or the video card, but I'm really just guessing here. Does anyone have some additional insight? I really don't want to send in the box to the factory.
(On a side note, do first-level techs know how to do anything other than tell you "Don't worry - resetting to factory-level defaults will fix this"? I had to get to the 2nd level at Gateway to have a decent conversation...
I sure could use some help if anyone has run into this, or a similar issue.
Thanks!
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