Helios 300 crashing(?) issue

FH76

Hi. I have a Predator Helios 300, it's about 2 and a half years old. Until a few months ago it was largely fine, no real problems. At that point, it started to suffer a type of strange crashing issue, which has become worse and worse over the past couple of months, although I'm not really sure how to explain it.

Basically, it seems to crash for a couple of seconds, 95% of the time it's whilst I'm playing a game, but it can happen when the laptop is just idling as well. It's not a total crash, it's almost like it loses power for a split second, and enters standby. The fans go off, the screen goes black, and the backlit keyboard goes off, although my USB cooling pad keeps going. All I have to do is press a mouse button or a key, and it immediately reloads into the Windows login screen, and after I put the PIN in, it goes straight back to the game. I largely play classic WoW, and usually it doesn't even log me out, I just get a lag spike while the game catches up. It's hard to replicate it; sometimes I can go a day without any issues, yesterday I played for 4 hours with no problems and then had to turn it off because it kept dropping every minute or so, which pretty much renders any game unplayable. I was having this issue ingame today as well, although since I gave up trying to play and started writing this post, it's been fine.

It's not an overheating issue. Classic WoW isn't overly taxing, and according to Predator Sense the temperature rarely rises above 65 degrees in the CPU and 60 in the GPU; usually it's lower in both. Although it's rare, I've experienced the issue when I'm doing nothing more than browsing the internet. I also never use the laptop under battery power alone, it's always plugged in.

I thought it may be an issue with a loose connection, so I took the bottom off the laptop this afternoon, couldn't see anything that looked particularly troubling. Now I'm wondering if it's a RAM problem?

Any help is welcome. I bought this as a gaming laptop, and that's essentially impossible at the moment.

StevenGen

This could be that your battery is being overly charged and gets hot (Under load) and is never off the mains and is being charged all the time. Try to do a "Battery Calibration" which is:
1. Setup Power options to Balanced (Recommended) go to, right click battery icon at bottom right taskbar and click on Power Options
2. Setup Hibernate & Low Battery Options - Power options -> Change Plan Settings -> Advance Settings -> Battery ->Set it to hibernate. This will allow you to make your computer hibernate when it turns off on low battery. Now under low Battery level set all as never and at a critical level you can set it to 5%.
3. Let Your Battery Discharge - discharge your battery to its critical level and you can do by either using your laptop to its full or remain your laptop power on as such and after some hours battery will go on decreasing and then your laptop will get hibernate at its critical level. After the battery is completely low, charge you laptop to 100% and then Revert all the settings back that you have changed.

After doing the "Battery Calibration" do the calibration at least twice and see if the laptop performs normally and the battery charges to 100% every time? Also you can do a battery report and look under "Recent Usage" (Power states over the last 3 days) etc:
1. Open the command prompt.
2. Type in: powercfg /batteryreport
3. Make sure all hidden folders are shown
4. Open the report in: (C:) Users > name > battery-report

FH76

I've taken the battery out entirely, and I'll report back as to whether or not that's helped.

FH76

Played for two hours after battery removal - no issues. Turned laptop off, walked my dog, turned laptop back on - crashed inside the first two minutes of playing, same identical issue as before. Laptop temperature is about 60 degrees, according to Predator Sense.

FH76

According to Acer's little tool, it's a Predator G3-571, if that helps.

FH76

Anyone? This laptop is basically a £1200 brick at the moment.

Commodore_1995#

Turned laptop off, walked my dog, turned laptop back on - crashed inside the first two minutes of playing, same identical issue as before.

Did the problem return after connecting the battery again? Does your model have this button?

if this button is installed, try adding a few layers of electrical tape:

FH76

I have not reconnected the battery. I'm using the laptop on pure AC power at the moment.

Commodore_1995#

Even so, check that interlock button.

FH76

Will do, although it's almost 3am, and I'm not gonna open it up until tomorrow.

In the meantime, it's worth pointing out that it only seems to happen when I'm using the keyboard - I Skype with my fiance for 3-4 hours on video every other night, we have never had an issue. Same with watching Netflix, no problems. During games with keyboard usage, it happens frequently, and since I spent the past hour typing on tech support forums, it's crashed every 5 minutes or so. Nothing is open except Firefox. I'm starting to wonder if the keyboard is to blame, although I don't see how.

Commodore_1995#

ok! post the result here!