Hi! Any help/leads would be appreciated.
One of my laptops is a cheap Lenovo IdeaPad N586. Surprisingly solid workhorse (cheap!), and I really like its keyboard, so more often than not, this is what I like to use.
The system says its processor is an AMD A6 4400M APU with Radeon HD Graphics 2.70 GHz.
It has 4GB RAM and runs Windows 8.1.
Except for software, I haven't added anything else to it. For the most part, I run Google Chrome on it, working online, using SAAS apps, etc. So far so good.
In the last few months, however, it started doing something really weird: It would crash sporadically. One minute I'm doing my thing, then poof! Black screen. It just crashes dead. I press the power button and it starts up again (cold boot). And all is OK until the next time it crashes.
After living with that behavior for a while, I noticed that it would more than likely crash when viewing videos or even animated GIFs. Now it's a pain. I clickthrough to a news item, and the site has an embedded video clip or two? Crash. I clickthrough on a pic I want to see, and it turns out to be a .gifv? Crash. Etc. etc. etc. This is consistent behavior now.
Works fine otherwise. If I'm on Google Docs writing, no issues. But any place with any kind of video or animation (Facebook, for example), crash.
I'm no hw guy, and I wouldn't know the first place to look to try and fix this. Asking at computer repair places, I get the impression they're going to just gut out and replace all its innards (motherboard, etc.), which will obviously take care of the problem, but I may as well just buy a new laptop if that were the case (probably will be cheaper too). Please advise. Thanks!
PS One other observation: I think it has more of a tendency to crash randomly (not just with vids and animation files) if it's plugged in as opposed to working off of the battery.
One of my laptops is a cheap Lenovo IdeaPad N586. Surprisingly solid workhorse (cheap!), and I really like its keyboard, so more often than not, this is what I like to use.
The system says its processor is an AMD A6 4400M APU with Radeon HD Graphics 2.70 GHz.
It has 4GB RAM and runs Windows 8.1.
Except for software, I haven't added anything else to it. For the most part, I run Google Chrome on it, working online, using SAAS apps, etc. So far so good.
In the last few months, however, it started doing something really weird: It would crash sporadically. One minute I'm doing my thing, then poof! Black screen. It just crashes dead. I press the power button and it starts up again (cold boot). And all is OK until the next time it crashes.
After living with that behavior for a while, I noticed that it would more than likely crash when viewing videos or even animated GIFs. Now it's a pain. I clickthrough to a news item, and the site has an embedded video clip or two? Crash. I clickthrough on a pic I want to see, and it turns out to be a .gifv? Crash. Etc. etc. etc. This is consistent behavior now.
Works fine otherwise. If I'm on Google Docs writing, no issues. But any place with any kind of video or animation (Facebook, for example), crash.
I'm no hw guy, and I wouldn't know the first place to look to try and fix this. Asking at computer repair places, I get the impression they're going to just gut out and replace all its innards (motherboard, etc.), which will obviously take care of the problem, but I may as well just buy a new laptop if that were the case (probably will be cheaper too). Please advise. Thanks!
PS One other observation: I think it has more of a tendency to crash randomly (not just with vids and animation files) if it's plugged in as opposed to working off of the battery.
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