POST errors/No display/Inconsistently unresponsive

Hello everyone,

I KNOW THIS IS A LONG POST BUT I TRIED TO BE VERY THOROUGH SO PLEASE DO NOT BE SCARED! :)

It has been forever since i've been on here. I finally graduated nursing school and officially a licensed Registered Nurse! What a journey. But now i need some help with this darn computer. It may be a lengthy explanation, but it would be amazing if i could get any input from the members of this community!

So it started a few weeks ago. My computer was running fine and I shut it down to go to bed. The next day, I started it up and the screen stayed blank. The hotkeys on the top were lighting up as normal, fans moving, everything functioning normally except no display. I tried to plug it into an HDMI and VGA connection for external display and neither connection worked. I hard reset it around 4-5 times and then i got 2 short POST beeps back to back. I tried my best to find the issue this was referring me to but i kept getting different answers and couldn't come to a final conclusion. I kept trying restarts, reseating RAM, replacing RAM, blowing out the fans, and other various things to try and solve this POST failure, but none seemed to work.

1/3 of the time, the computer will turn on normally, I can boot Win 7, but then it will freeze within 2-5 minutes.
Another 1/3 of the time, I turn the computer on and the screen stays black, no external display, but no POST beeps or anything of the such.
And the final 1/3 of the time, I turn the computer on and within a few seconds i get the two POST beeps, and there is no display still.

The one time i had the computer up and running for longer than 10 minutes i looked at Speccy to see my temps and assess health of the hardware. Nothing was overheating, the health looked okay (from what i could tell), and everything seemed to be fine. Unfortunately, I went to make dinner, forgot to disable sleep mode, and the computer went to sleep. When i woke it up, the screen turned on and the windows login showed up, but it was unresponsive from the get go. No idea, this whole thing is ridiculous.

One side note and i don't know if it is relevant or not, but one of the times i started the computer and got into windows, i set a Memory test to run at startup. I then restarted the computer and when I saw the memory test page flash, then the screen changed to black and "Unregistered Exemption Handler" appeared in the top left corner. I had to hard restart to get out of the error and when i did, my computer beeped the POST errors again and didn't start the rest of the day.

So now I have no idea what is going on. I tried to backup my data (to the most current files) when i can get into windows but it freezes at some point during the transfer and never completes. I was about to update my BIOS to see if that would make a difference (there is a newer version available), but then i let the computer sit on the F2 Startup screen and it froze after 2 minutes (the clock stopped moving), but the computer/display stays on. So now i don't want to attempt this due to the chance of it not responding during the update and me bricking my laptop.

My full system specs are available below the post if anyone needs more information. I have a Clevo W870CU with an ATI Radeon 5870 graphics card and my BIOS type if Phoenix SecureCore revision 1.01.12S (KBC/EC Firmware Revision 1.00.10)

If anyone has any ideas, suggestions, or just wants to say hi, please feel free. I am desperate for some assistance. Thank you so much!

Nurse Ben

Roy,

There were no BSODs or any error reports of any nature, which adds to the difficulty at nailing down the cause of the problem. It is a custom build from cyberpower PC but i bought it in 2011 and the discs have been lost over the years but i have the drivers for the laptop on a USB drive and a clean windows 7x64 installation disc.

torchwood said:

Hi Neverhavemoney,

please follow the instructions here, and post them in the BSOD sub-forum.

Blue Screen of Death (BSOD) Posting Instructions - Windows 7 Help Forums

Roy

I see its a Cleevo,(specialist build), did they provide you with discs

Well,

Apparently i solved the issue. I finally had enough free time to really open up the laptop and dust her out. I didnt have a can of compressed air so i ended up taking the cover off the 2 fans and manually scrubbing them with q-tips and 91% isopropyl. I cleaned out the heatsinks with a toothbrush, and finally put new artic silver thermal paste on the CPU (which i redid the seating on first) and the GPU. The computer started right up the first time, no issues or warnings!

I proceded to do stress tests on the hardware to see where i was at. I opened up Speccy to keep an eye on everything, especially the temperatures of my hardware. I ran prime95 first in all 3 options and everything passed over 2 hours and the temps on the hardware involved maxed out at 75C. Very pleased with that.

Next i ran FurMark at 1920x1080 for about 15 minutes to stress the GPU. While everything seemed to be okay (no flickering or pixelation on the screen), the temp did reach 92C after 5 minutes and leveled out for another 4 before I stopped the test. I wasnt going to burn out the card on the first day i got it back up and running. I was so happy to have it up and going that i didnt want to shut it off. But, as humans, we all must sleep, so i shut her down and crossed my fingers she would start back up this morning.

And she did! Shes back up and running without any issues (and seemingly running quicker overall). Just figured i would leave this here for anyone who is having a similar issue.

Nurse Ben