SAGER laptop - Random reboot and boot-UPs!!

Hi Guys,

I just got this 2yr old laptop that is amazing. But I got it for free as it has a problem. It likes to reboot randomly. A lot. And as far as I have seen it seems to boot UP randomly after I have shut it down.

Details : Its a top-of-the-line SAGER laptop. It was sent back to them and they said the GPU is faulty and causing the problems. I think they might have just been a little lazy, so I disabled the 780m inside and let it run on the default Intel integrated GPU. It still randomly reboot - sometimes lasting 30secs, sometimes 24hrs. If the problem is a voltage issue, would simply disabling the discrete GPU get round the problem?

SAGER have also heavily modified the bios such that I can do absolutely nothing with it. No overclocking, no adjustments - nothing. I cant even F8 / Del into the BIOS at startup. My suspicion is that SAGER has altered the bios such that the laptop never fully reboots. Even if I ask it to reboot I think it just goes to sleep. The reboot time is far faster than my SSD PC (like 10secs), so it looks like it is exiting hibernation more than a clean reboot - but I cant check because I am locked out of the damn bios. This I think is the cause of the random boot-ups.

In safe mode (current) there seems to be no problem - at least so far. The only problem here is that I cant get any sound. Any ideas on that? So this leads me to believe there is a software conflict somewhere rather than a hardware / voltage issue.

Any ideas greatly appreciated.

Edit : Just randomly restarted in safe mode too!! Damn

Sounds like the laptop is on Windows 8. You need to reboot to UEFI from within Windows.

Have you cleaned it out from dust and reapplied fresh thermal paste?

Hi - Yes, I am running Win 8.1. I have got into the UEFI, but I cant see anything. I am very new to laptops so I dont know if bare UEFI / Bios are the norm. My PC runs 8.1 and I can get into the BIOS and change all the settings etc.

I haven't opened the case yet. Do you think accumulated dust could be causing shorts, or once I open it should I be on the lookout for something else? I am travelling at the moment so I wont be able to do anything for a couple of weeks.

Anything else I can check / do in the meantime that doesn't involve opening her up?

Thanks

A laptop with very few settings in the BIOS/UEFI is very typical.

You could get some canned air and blow the vents out to see if there's dust built up.

The temps are not high - rarely exceed 65c. Would that discount the need for new thermal paste?

Is there anything I can do from a software point of view - disabling stuff etc? The drivers are up to date.

But what are you doing when it's hitting those temps?

Could try Windows startup repair, not sure how much it would help.
Chkdsk would be good to run.
Memtest86+ would tell if the RAM has any problems.

It reboots randomly - could be from a completely cold start or during gaming (when it stays up long enough to do any gaming).

Temps dont really matter - I have seen it reboot when temps are at 40c. I am running CoreTemp, and I thing I notice is the watts of the cpu. It goes all over the place sometimes reading 1.1v, but I have seen it as high as 75v - the TDP for the chip is 47v. However it stays at 75v for like half a second if that. Are the voltage readings to be trusted - I know software volt readings tend to be unreliable.

Did you try any of those three things I suggested?

I ran both memtest and chkdsk and both came back OK.

However I also ran sfc /verifynow and theresult was "Windows Resource Protection found integrity violations". I have googled it and there seems to be lots of people with the same issues, but I havent seen anyone offering advice as to how to resolve these issues. Just some Microsoft guy saying contact helpdesk.

Would you have any ideas? This might be unrelated but as its a problem why not try to solve it and see if I get lucky.

Thanks

This could fix the integrity violations:
https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/2828269

I would run this command without the quotes "Dism /Online /Cleanup-Image /RestoreHealth" Run it in an admin command prompt. It will hang at 20% for a long time, don't worry it. After it completes, reboot your computer, and you can run the "sfc/scannow" command as admin. Remember no quotes.

Thanks for the suggestions - I have tried both ideas but the machine is still randomly rebooting.
Is there anything else I can try? Or do I wait till I return home and open it up to do the cleaning / removing the gpu and testing?

Thanks

Did you ever try Startup Repair?
Do you have any System Restore points?