Spacebear
07-11-2011, 08:49 PM
Ok, so I bought my HP Pavilion dv7 laptop just shy of 2 years ago. For the majority of the time, I only had minor issues, like sometimes it would freeze up on startup, and I wouldn't be able to click any icons, only move the cursor around the screen.
But about a month ago, I was watching a stream on Team Liquid, when suddenly my computer screen went black, and sound cut out. The lights on the keyboard were still on, and the fan was still running. So I just held down the power button to turn it off. I started to do that during any videos online, but it wasn't very consistent about it. I could get through 20 minutes of video one time, and it wouldn't fail on me this one time, for example.
Since then, it has been turning itself off like that during not just videos, but once when it was idle with a browser open, once when I was just browsing, once while I was playing Starcraft 2, once while listening to iTunes. There was one night where I couldn't get it to even boot up after failing, but that seemed to fix itself in the morning.
When it does fail, sometimes it just sits there on a black screen and all lights on, and I have to power it down. But other times, it will go black and just restart on its own!
Sometimes it also gives me an actual error message, but the errors are not all the same ones, and I don't get an error message most of the time, so I don't know what to think of it.
I brought it in to my local computer store (Not Best Buy!) to get some advice. They suspected either some sort of driver/software error, and that I should just use my recovery discs to start over and see if it fixes the problem. They also said that it might be just overheating.
I don't think that overheating is the problem, as it doesn't run very hot at all unless I'm gaming. When I game, it runs really hot, but its only failed once during a game. It isn't like it fails when I'm on it for a long time either, I was just browsing my Google Reader stuff for like 5 minutes, and it shut off on me just today. Not hot at all.
As for doing a recovery, I have not done that yet, since I don't know how, and I didn't listen very well when the computer store guys told me how to. But I really feel that it may be a hardware issue, since rarely anything changes on my computer. I rarely change settings, download anything, or even visit new websites. My computer and my usage habits have stayed mostly the same for about a year.
So this computer issue is finally pissing me off, so I come here to you good folks to try to figure out what is wrong before I spend any amount of money.
But about a month ago, I was watching a stream on Team Liquid, when suddenly my computer screen went black, and sound cut out. The lights on the keyboard were still on, and the fan was still running. So I just held down the power button to turn it off. I started to do that during any videos online, but it wasn't very consistent about it. I could get through 20 minutes of video one time, and it wouldn't fail on me this one time, for example.
Since then, it has been turning itself off like that during not just videos, but once when it was idle with a browser open, once when I was just browsing, once while I was playing Starcraft 2, once while listening to iTunes. There was one night where I couldn't get it to even boot up after failing, but that seemed to fix itself in the morning.
When it does fail, sometimes it just sits there on a black screen and all lights on, and I have to power it down. But other times, it will go black and just restart on its own!
Sometimes it also gives me an actual error message, but the errors are not all the same ones, and I don't get an error message most of the time, so I don't know what to think of it.
I brought it in to my local computer store (Not Best Buy!) to get some advice. They suspected either some sort of driver/software error, and that I should just use my recovery discs to start over and see if it fixes the problem. They also said that it might be just overheating.
I don't think that overheating is the problem, as it doesn't run very hot at all unless I'm gaming. When I game, it runs really hot, but its only failed once during a game. It isn't like it fails when I'm on it for a long time either, I was just browsing my Google Reader stuff for like 5 minutes, and it shut off on me just today. Not hot at all.
As for doing a recovery, I have not done that yet, since I don't know how, and I didn't listen very well when the computer store guys told me how to. But I really feel that it may be a hardware issue, since rarely anything changes on my computer. I rarely change settings, download anything, or even visit new websites. My computer and my usage habits have stayed mostly the same for about a year.
So this computer issue is finally pissing me off, so I come here to you good folks to try to figure out what is wrong before I spend any amount of money.