My 6 day old laptop clicked and turned off. Should I be worried? Return it?

Z

zamardii

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I bought a brand new Asus Vivobook from Staples a week ago and everything has been working fine until today. I was typing my assignment for school in Microsoft Word when the whole thing just turned off. You know that loud click a laptop makes when you hold the power button down to do a force shut down? That's what happened only by itself. First time it happened to a week old computer. Should I return it to the store?

I am only worried because I had a netbook that I ordered from Newegg who's hard drive started to fail right after the returnable period.
 
where were you using the laptop? how hot was it? that sounds like a potential thermal shutdown but winword generally doesn't do that .
 
It was sitting on a flat desk. Last night we had the windows open so it wasn't particularly warm in the house. It was just sitting there with the fan barely audible when it turned off.

Also, last night it powered up again like normal and left it on. I shut the lid to go to bed. This morning I open it up and it completely off instead of being in standby. Normally I never "shut down" 1080p the laptop so I can use it immediately upon opening the lid but it was completely off so it must have turned itself completely off during the night even though it was plugged in and sitting on a desk.
 
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Check if it's getting hot.

As for the "turning off overnight" thing... it could just be a power setting.
 
At 6 days old I would just take it back to where you bought it and return it/exchange it for another model. If the second one does the same things...maybe it's a design flaw, but this early in, I'd take advantage of your retailer's return policy under the heading of "better safe than troubleshooting an intermittent problem for weeks until you're out of your return period and have to deal with an RMA headache."
 
Also having the same problem with an Asus Vivobook I7 Core. Has switched itself off 3 times in total, running no excessive programs in all but one case, which was a game.

Irritating because it has no warning, nor an error message after.
 
I'd return it. I have a x202e, but I bought it refurbished which implies someone had issues with it.

I have noticed they have had a lot of bios and driver updates fairly recently.
 
PXC, based on those searches it seems like it happens after its been on standby. Thinking about it, that's exactly what happened with me in all three cases, the Vivobook had been on standby.

The touchpad software also disables right before this happens,I think, so that might be a good indicator.
 
My girlfriends 1 week old asus vivobook (i5) also JUST did the same thing, as per why i'm here. This is her 3rd one, we had to exchange the first because the space bar collapsed, second one they gave me didn't even start up, it had the hard drive click of death upon first bootup and only went into bios. Now this? I suggest no one buys asus laptops... We're out of luck now, at this point it has to be sent in for warranty work, the first 2 exchanges we got lucky.

I hate buying ANYTHING these days, you expect problems... What kind of consumer market is that...

Edit: got caught up in ranting, forgot the details

Other than downloading a file, it wasn't even running any other applications than firefox. Plugged in, full charge, I turned to talk to my girlfriend after checking the download and bam, heard the hard drive click off, full, abrupt power down. No shut down procedure, just off as if i held the power button.
 
Sleep/Standby modes are not the best designed parts of any system. Don't know weather to blame the hardware/software or a combination. Turning it off saves a lot of issues among various brands and models. Just my experience.
 
it's most likely a software bug in a driver, try getting the generic version of your drivers or modifying another OEM driver to work. I have had only dell laptops and I have never had one give me problems with sleep and hibernate... Some drivers don't like being put to sleep...
 
My MacBook Pro did this exact thing, AND, it consistently did it while running on battery power when the battery meter was reading 80% (give or take a little.)

From what I have heard, it was a symptom of one of the cells in the battery pack being bad. the regulator in the chip tries to pull a little more from the bad cell, the bad cell can't produce the voltage, output voltage drops and the computer shuts down cold. I had to buy a new battery, as mine was over a year old, but your's should be covered, (ofc, it looks like someone resurrected an old thread, if I'm reading the dates correctly.)

If this happens to you, I'd say, call the manufacturer, and ask for a warranty replacement battery.

Note: many manufacturers consider the battery to be a "Consumable" part, and may not include normal wear-and-tear on the battery as a warranty issue, (this applied to me, as again my MacBook Pro was over 1 year old. The new battery DID come with it's own new 1 year warranty.)

Anyway, that's what I know on the subject.

Tim D.

P.S. I think the loud click associated with these sudden power down situations is the HDD using whatever power it has stored in capacitors to park the heads, to minimize damage to the heads or platters if it's dropped while shut down.
 
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As an update, after stopping using standby mode, I haven't had the problem again.
 
^ then it's a driver issue or it is a BIOS bug, did you ever check to see if there is an updated BIOD or driver?
 
Personally, I went looking for updates to BIOS and various other drivers, ended up unsure whether I had new ones or not then got scared by the prospect of trying to update complicated drivers and ran away from the computer... :(
 
OP your 6 days in on the 14 day return period.

Return and get a new like device or get something else.

Good luck.

Time is ticking away
 
samm said:
OP your 6 days in on the 14 day return period.

Return and get a new like device or get something else.

Good luck.

Time is ticking away
Click to expand...

Yeah! Especially since the original post was made on 2/19/2013! :D
 
Sometimes what can happen is the power plug at the back/side can work slightly loose and the tip gets hot and the machine will detect the higher resistance and voltage drop and shut off, if the tip is really hot is a sign this may have happened.
 
I suspect that these are more related to power flow than temperature. These modern CPUs measure the amps and somebody who wrote the BIOS had a bad idea. When I see this the unit is never particularly hot.
 
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