Laptop refuses to shut down/hard locks on reawaken

Jealous Deva

Hi, I'm getting a bit desperate here, so I thought I'd see if anyone has any ideas. I have a Razer Blade 2015, it ran fine for over a year, but about a month or two ago it started intermittently refusing to shut down. I shut down through windows, it appears to shut down but the computer never stops running (Screen goes black but everything clearly still has power, fans are still running during this process at various speeds, sometimes minimal sometimes full blast, basically wherever they were when I shut things down. If I try to turn the computer back on or hit the spacebar or mouse, the keyboard lights up but nothing happens. At this point the computer is frozen, the power button ceases to work (holding down the power button 7 seconds which usually does a hard shut down has no effect) and the only way to recover the computer is to let the battery run down or manually open up the case and disconnect the battery cable for 30 seconds. After this the computer resumes normal function. This happens probably 50% of the time I shut down the computer, all other behavior is normal.

I have been told various things regarding this, here's what I have tried:
Disabling fastboot and hibernation
Resetting boot order in bios to default back to the SSD first (No idea why this would matter, but I was told it so I tried it)
Update all "Intel" sourced drivers, including management and video card


Someone else suggested it might be a registry corruption and to reinstall windows, I have no idea if this is the case but I'd rather avoid doing a clean install if at all possible (I am on DSL and don't really want to redownload 400 gigs worth of games from steam if I can help it).

So anyone run into this? Any obvious solutions stick out that I am missing? I'm a few months out of warranty, otherwise I would just RMA the thing, but again would rather not deal with the hassle and expense if it is something I can fix myself.

wunderbar

There are two potential problems here. One is that your windows install is broken. The only real fix to that is to do a PC reset (the modern take on re-installing windows). Yes, this means that your games either go poof or you need to move them somewhere else. If you have any spare hard drives lying around you could move your steam library there, or a 1TB external drive on Amazon is about $55. That might be a good option for you anyway, as if losing the library is something you don't want, a backup of said library is probably something you should have anyway.


The other potential problem is that there could be a hardware problem with the laptop. Unfortunately the only way to get to that is to rule out a software problem, which means a PC reset, which see option 1.

My personal believe is that I'm 90% sure it's just the windows install that's lost it's mind. If you can find any way to get your steam library backed up, do a PC reset.

Jealous Deva

wunderbar wrote: »

There are two potential problems here. One is that your windows install is broken. The only real fix to that is to do a PC reset (the modern take on re-installing windows). Yes, this means that your games either go poof or you need to move them somewhere else. If you have any spare hard drives lying around you could move your steam library there, or a 1TB external drive on Amazon is about $55. That might be a good option for you anyway, as if losing the library is something you don't want, a backup of said library is probably something you should have anyway.


The other potential problem is that there could be a hardware problem with the laptop. Unfortunately the only way to get to that is to rule out a software problem, which means a PC reset, which see option 1.

My personal believe is that I'm 90% sure it's just the windows install that's lost it's mind. If you can find any way to get your steam library backed up, do a PC reset.

I guess that’s what I will do, I have a 1tb external that is currently sitting on my wiiu largely unused that I can repurpose. The fact that everything else works fine and I’m not having problems in high stress applications makes me think it’s probably not a hardware issue, too.

Aioua

BIOS/firmware updates are usually worth a shot with issues like this

Jealous Deva

It looks like my bios is up to date.

Apparently cutting off hibernation does not really cut off hibernation, you have to use a super secret elevated command prompt to do that in windows 10 for reasons? So I'm going to try that, then if that doesn't work it's time for a windows reinstall.

Jealous Deva

So update, reinstalled windows completely, worked ok for a week or so, same behavior again. Seems more common after running intense games, may be some wierd overheating thing. Regardless seems to be a hardware issue, may be time for a new laptop.