My Games keep crashing my Laptop.

[jack321]

I downloaded Alliance of Valiant Arms a couple of months ago and after about 20 minutes of gameplay, my computer just randomly crashes. I get a blank screen(a little bit of flickering too) and my keyboard doesn't work. I thought it was just an issue with that game so earlier today I downloaded steam and purchased Half-Life 2(amazing game btw). It ran smoothly for a couple of hours and then it started to crash in the same way as the other game. I would restart my computer, run steam and HL2, and after about ten minutes it would crash.

I bought the laptop in December of 09. Sony replaced my hard drive about two months ago(it stopped working). Before they replaced it, gaming wasn't a problem(except with bordelands http://bit.ly/dCCVko ). I used to play for hours with no trouble. The Laptop never really gets hot when I game and I keep it in a well ventilated area.

Anyone have any ideas? I figured I would try asking one of you guys before contacting Sony. I am still under their warranty.


Sony Vaio VGN-fw560f
Intel® Core™ 2 Duo P7450 (2.13GHz)
Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit
6GB RAM
500GB HDD,
ATI Mobility Radeon™ HD 4650 (512MB VRAM)

[Force Flow]

Do you get any error messages? What crashes, just the game, or your O/S?

If your O/S crashes, try disabling the automatic restart: http://pcsupport.about.com/od/window...-windows-7.htm
This will show blue screen error messages when they appear, which would help for diagnostic purposes

Run memtest86+ to check for bad RAM.

Try updating to the latest drivers listed on dell's site for your laptop: http://support.dell.com/support/down...=19&l=en&s=dhs

Make sure you do a windows update to grab the latest updates.

Install SpeedFan to keep an eye on temperatures.

[pam123]

The Sony Vaio VGN-fw560f doesn't appear to be one of the models re-called for bios/temp updates but check anyway :

http://esupport.sony.com/perl/news-i...=1&region_id=1

Then check for drivers for that model, you might have missed something.

[mknabster]

I know when you have Intel GMA video cards, they cause the computer to crash, never seen that with an ATI though. My sister's Dell has an Intel GMA 955, and whenever she tried playing the Sims 3, it shut the entire computer down. The Sims 2 did the same with our desktop, and so did Sonic All Stars Racing. Updating the drivers didn't do anything for me, same with directx. Try going to the run command, type in dxdiag, and see if there any errors with directx in there, or if it says there are things different with the ATI that are not suppsoed to be there.