Solved! Laptop freezes under heavy load on AC power

Jul 23, 2021
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Hey! I have an ASUS TUF FX504GM laptop, which was working flawlessly until last week. I don't know what happened, but seems like there was a power surge after which my laptop froze and smoke was coming out from near the fans. I immediately removed all connections and manually forced shutdown by holding the power button. I let it cool for sometime. After that I opened the back cover, only to discover one of the IC was burnt completely and the laptop was not able to charge.

image for the burnt IC on motherboard (I was trying to attach the image, but it was taking whole lot of space)

I took the laptop to the local technician, who suggested I should submit this to the service center (though I'm out of warranty). Local guy tried powering the laptop on using direct AC supply, which I don't know how, worked. I have some very urgent work that needs to be done till next week and I don't have a spare laptop at hand, so currently, using the AC mains to power the laptop through a UPS, with the battery disconnected. The problem now is:
  1. Whenever I do some heavy task, like, video rendering, the display just stops and the whole system freezes with no way to recover, I can force shutdown by holding the power button.
  2. I tried to run the laptop on power saver profile, it severely limits CPU to <1GHz, but seems to be a bit more stable.
  3. I found I was using bitdefender, which was causing frequent crashes, so removed that, as well as installed older version of nvidia driver also seemed to have helped a bit.

I have drawn the following conclusions:
  1. Charging the battery doesn't work, also, windows is not able to recognize the battery (says battery not present), so my guess is that IC that got burnt was somehow responsible for charging the battery, and since it was damaged, it has shorted the battery???
  2. Random freezes occur because when CPU runs on higher frequency, it draws more power???? and since AC is not able to supply that much, voltage drops and in turn, the system stops responding.??? (or) the fried IC has also done damage to some other components??
  3. I took a backup of the system using Macrium reflect, and re-installed windows, it worked without any crashes (I didn't run any heavy tasks of sort), but somehow feel some other piece of hardware got damaged too and has some malfunctioning driver??? (I used driver verifier, it went into a BSOD, but couldn't understand anything from that)

I know it's still dangerous to run a laptop like this, since it can damage more components and I want to get this repaired ASAP, but since I have to finish WFH for this month, I need some tips if someone has faced any similar issues. If anyone can suggest something to make the laptop usable for some more days, I will be glad.
 
Solution
There are two things you need to check.
Make sure there's no virus. I would suggest you run Microsoft Defender Offline Scan. Search "Windows Security" from the Start Menu and Virus & threat protection > Scan options> Microsoft Offline Defender scan > Scan now.
If the issue persists, try updating your graphics driver.
Jul 23, 2021
1
0
10
There are two things you need to check.
Make sure there's no virus. I would suggest you run Microsoft Defender Offline Scan. Search "Windows Security" from the Start Menu and Virus & threat protection > Scan options> Microsoft Offline Defender scan > Scan now.
If the issue persists, try updating your graphics driver.
 
Solution