Asus notebook screen turning black and freezing randomly.

[whitenoise]

I have a 2.5 year old Asus N81vp laptop with 4 GB RAM (2x 2 GB) and 1 GB ATI 4650 discrete Graphics card. I am on Windows 7 Profession Edition. For the past 6 months (started just around last few days of 2-year warranty) this laptop is crashing infrequently. I am not running any games on this laptop. The crash/freeze happens randomly when I am playing a flash video or using google maps in chrome or simply switching between windows.

When the "freeze" happens, I get a black screen and the fan starts spinning at high speed. Connecting to an external monitor then does not give any output. Only hard-reboot gets the display back.

So far I have tried these options
- Re-installing AMD/ATI graphics card drivers (I already have latest version)
- Uninstalling graphics card drivers
- Using one RAM at a time (This didn't help anything because the issue seems to be intermittent)
- Ran memtest (test passed without any issues)
- Reinstalled windows from scratch
- Replaced the graphics card with a new one of the exact same model (the problem still exists to my horror).

The only significant progress I made in the last one month of troubleshooting is that I can reproduce the "freeze" on-demand by running HDR/SM3.0 test on 3DMark06. SM2.0 Graphics test and CPU Test run perfectly fine.

I contacted Asus (I am out of warranty) and they asked me to ship it to them. My previous RMA experience with them has not been that great so I decided if the problem is severe then I'd just buy a new laptop. But first I want to find out what/where the problem is. Can anyone help me?

 

[whitenoise]

Any suggestions anybody? I have monitored the GPU temperature for a while, and it is normal (45 - 53 C).

 

[sagara-kun]

getting same issues with mine, an asus laptop as well. what i discover was my d-gpu (hd 5470) doesn't support hardware acceleration n so is ur's..while on youtube for example, before the video load, pause it, right click on video >> settings >> uncheck "enabled hardware acceleration" (FYI, using firefox, dunno for other browser)...that's was for freezing n getting black screen; but lately random freeze is occurring...i'm on this issue, not getting much time to solve this though..but do try to disable global hardware acceleration.

 

[whitenoise]

getting same issues with mine, an asus laptop as well. what i discover was my d-gpu (hd 5470) doesn't support hardware acceleration n so is ur's..while on youtube for example, before the video load, pause it, right click on video >> settings >> uncheck "enabled hardware acceleration" (FYI, using firefox, dunno for other browser)...that's was for freezing n getting black screen; but lately random freeze is occurring...i'm on this issue, not getting much time to solve this though..but do try to disable global hardware acceleration.

Thanks for your suggestion. I'll disable hardware acceleration in firefox. However, as you said that does not solve the problem globally. I still get crashes when I use skype or simply switch between different windows (even after disabling Aero). Please post here if you find anything interesting.