4 year old laptop, how will I know if/when it's about to die?

[Kobe Eveleigh]

Current laptop is a Toshiba Qosmio with a 2.67ghz i5(the original i5?), 330m. Windows 7

I have had this laptop since March 2011. Planning to upgrade to a gaming desktop ideally during Black Friday or Boxing Day. However I think I'm starting to notice troubling signs that might mean my laptop could die soon. I'm concerned it might not last until the fall. I've had 5 blue screen of death crashes since the start of the year. But more commonly it will just freeze and require a forced shutdown(holding power button). Usually what happens before is the internet will suddenly stop working(even though meanwhile it works totally fine on the android phones), giving the "DNS Server is not responding" error.

Wi-Fi icon sometimes changes to this: http/s13.postimg.org/8gl40b65j/Not_Connected.png

Usually 1-2 minutes later Windows stops responding and nothing other than holding the power button for a forced shutdown will work. The freeze seems to happen about once or twice a month. I've done full computer AV scans and nothing comes up. I did it after every BSOD. BSODs each happened while playing different games. Once while playing Skyrim, once on Fallout New Vegas, the others while playing old RPGs(like FF7 PC version). No overclocking at all, I know it's a terrible idea to OC a laptop like this where parts cannot be removed or replaced.



Background info about next desktop. Not directly relevant to my laptop's issues but if my laptop dies soon I'll need to make big compromises. It's going to be quite an expensive PC.


I'd like to make a custom high budget well thought out gaming desktop build, wait for Black Friday/Cyber Monday/Boxing Day and take advantage of sales but if this laptop suddenly dies I might have to consider buying during the summer. This will have a big effect on the PC build budget, especially if I'm suddenly forced to buy during July/August. I will have a lot less to spend and can't take advantage of sales.

The planned desktop build's main components so far:
A 4K capable monitor, 60 hz
Graphics card: GTX 980 TI, maybe I'd consider a Fury X or 390X if there's an amazing deal on it.
Processor: i7-5820k 3.3Ghz 6 core
Storage: 512 GB SSD for actively played games, with 2-4 TB HDD for more storage. Decently fast RAM, 16GB

Games: Skyrim, Fallout 4, The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, GTA V, maybe MGS V and Star Wars Battlefront.

Budget: I'm in Canada so prices are higher. The plan for the budget was to see how much it would cost me to get 4K with decent settings for the above games then decide whether to go ahead with that or consider a 1440p focused build. If the 4K build would be over $3000 and the 1440p build would cost around $1000 less than the 4K build, I'd opt for the 1440p build. I might go for an AMD card instead if I focus on 1440p, they seem like they may have better Price/Performance outside of 4K gaming. I already have an X1, eventually getting a PS4 so building a PC for 1080p isn't very appealing, unless my laptop abruptly breaks. I don't think I want to wait for Pascal graphics cards and Skylake i7s since it seems they'll probably be released at holiday 2016. GTX 980 TI seems impressive for now, a better deal than Titan X though still highly priced. Fury X seems like it might be okay though having 4 GB VRAM could hold it back at 4K. Probably good for 1440p.

 

[MarkW]

Blue screens generate .dmp file which can be parsed out to give you (or us) a better idea of why your system is having what problems. Those files are saved into C:\Windows\MiniDump.

There is a BlueScreenView program you can download to see what the .dmp files are trying to tell you. At the very least you can pass that info here. The download links are at the bottom of this page:
http/www.nirsoft.net/utils/blue_screen_view.html

 

[Kobe Eveleigh]

Strangely my C:\Windows\MiniDump folder is empty. The last BSOD happened about late May while playing Skyrim. Downloaded BlueScreenView, will check immediately after another happens. I also remember I had a BSOD after awakening from sleep mode late last year.

And is there any way I can get info about the other freezes? The laptop has an abrupt slowdown followed by a total freeze 1-2 minutes later. Trying to do anything after like using the shortcuts open start menu, open task manager, ctrl alt del won't work and it just shows Windows or explorer.exe has stopped responding. It's even happened despite few programs/processes being active. Since the freezes started happening, I started to keep Task Manager open and check for unusual spikes in CPU usage/memory whenever the laptop seems to slow down.

It doesn't seem to have an explainable cause on the software side, at least not an obvious one so I'm worried it may be hardware. Maybe the motherboard, processor or something else is starting to go.

 

[MarkW]

I am almost wondering if you don't have a hard drive that is starting to develope some bad sectors. You might want to go into the drive Properties, and use the Check Disk tool on the Tools tab.

If that finds bad sectors, I would recommend backing up anything you want to save ASAP. And then get a replacement drive.