I have been having issues with my G73 freezing, rebooting, or BSODing (almost always a usb bugcode error on the BSOD) pretty much since I bought it. The issue is intermittent, but annoying, I've tried for almost a year to troubleshoot it. I finally RMAed the G73, and just got it back.
Well, back 1 day after RMA and already a BSOD and a hard freeze.
ASUS replaced the cpu under warranty during the RMA, and also reinstalled the OS. So those aren't the issue.
My problem again is:
random freezing, reboots, and BSOD (usually a USB bugcode error).
These events are always accompanied by an EventID 41 in the event viewer, which is a "Kernel Power" critical error, with the message "The system has rebooted without cleanly shutting down first. This error could be caused if the system stopped responding, crashed, or lost power unexpectedly."
This issue does not happen when the cpu is under load (it maybe happened under load once or twice, but very infrequently). It happens almost ALWAYS when it is sitting idle, or doing "idle like" things such as email or browsing.
This problem goes away with my cpu no-idle tweak, which is a registry edit that disables the cpu idle state; it basically ramps up idle cpu speed from 1.73GHz to 1.86 GHz. With this tweak enabled, never a crash, but the CAVEAT to that is the tweak heats up the cpu to the tune of 10 C hotter running temp (and that's at idle).
THOUGHTS??
Might it be motherboard, or maybe the power pack? Not sure it would be powerpack, though, I would expect crashes UNDER load, not under idle.
I am going to RMA again, but wondering if anyone has thoughts on how I should approach ASUS on suggesting what the problem is. I would have thought they could check for a bad mobo.
They claim on the report RMA sheet they stress tested my laptop for 1 day with no crashes, but like I said, usually under stress this issue doesn't happen, so I'm not surprised they had no issues during stress testing. I left it idle once I got it home, boom, hard freeze and a BSOD.
I really still think the problem might be in the power saving functions, I'm just not sure how. I have disabled as many of those as possible in the control panel, but that does not help, so I'm thinking more of a hardware issue in this regards.
Please let me know your thoughts.
My G73 is pretty standard, I7-740, 8gb, SG 500 gb HDD, 460M gc, win7hp, no o/cing, no "mods"
Thanks.
nuke