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Asus K53E Laptop with 0x00000124 BSOD
My brother has had this laptop for maybe 2 or 3 years, not exactly sure. Anyway, he said it stopped working one day. He bought a new laptop and I'm trying to see if this Asus K53E is fixable. Started with his install of Win7, original install from Best Buy a few years back. Battery in, no AC charger plugged in, boot up Windows in regular mode, the laptop freezes at various times before the login screen with a BSOD 0x00000124 error. Try booting with battery in and AC plugged in, I just get a flashing cursor on black screen after Asus BIOS page, nothing. at. all. Same result with battery out and running on AC only, just flashing cursor. If I boot in safe mode with networking without AC power, laptop runs fine until battery dies. If I plug in AC charger while booted in safe mode, it's fine and no freeze. Unplug AC and it's still all good in safe mode. But plug AC in again and bam, laptop freezes up. I tried booting without the driver signature verification option, no luck, BSOD again. Interestingly, if I just boot into BIOS on the battery, all is well and dandy. Plug in AC power while in BIOS and the BIOS freezes! Tried restoring with the ASUS recovery disks my brother burned, BSOD. Then I did a clean install of Windows 7 64bit, erased recovery partition, made one giant partition from whole drive, and was able to fully install Windows, no lock ups or BSODs somehow. Problems still exist with a virgin Windows 7 64bit install, BSOD 0x124 with regular boot but will run till battery is dead in safe mode. Updated BIOS with the easyflash tool in BIOS from 216 to 217, 218, and then 219. 221 looks like just a Windows 8 fix, haven't flashed it. Still no luck, BIOS page freezes when I plug in AC still. Research says 0x124 is hardware failure but I don't understand how it works fine in safe mode but not on regular boots? I've read that in safe mode it doesn't load all the drivers, but even with a virgin 7 install it still will hang when trying to boot regularly. The AC charger isn't the problem, all symptoms still exist with another charger (same voltage, slightly lower amperage, same tip size). I've removed RAM and cleaned it, removed the HDD, nothing is working. I read the post about what to do before posting a BSOD thread and decided for s&g I'd again do a completely virgin clean install of Windows 7, boot regular and let it BSOD, reboot into safe mode, and use the SF Diagnostic tool. However this time... when I went to do a clean W7 install just like earlier, I get the same 124 BSOD. So now I've formatted the drive, it copied W7 files, and started expanding and then I got the 124 BSOD. Luckily, I did save the minidump files from before I started dicking with everything, but it sounds like minidump files of 124 are kind of useless. I've zipped the 3 last minidump files and are attached.
Any ideas? Thanks!
EDIT* Also, I've read the thread by H2SO4 about the Stop 0x124, I've done 1,2,3,4,5, and 7. Regarding step 6, I have memtest86 on disc I could try running, and I've heard about something called Prime95 but I think that runs in Windows? Currently downloading the ultimate boot cd ISO, supposedly it has Prime95 and memtest86 on it.
Regarding steps 8 and 9, I suppose I could start ripping into the laptop? Brother said he was almost always using laptop on a hard surface so I don't think anything got cooked. He didn't play games, just mostly about a million browser tabs open, youtube, facebook. And step 9, I don't really know what I can do there. I'm wondering if it's got something to do with the charging circuit or perhaps the battery.