Mere Musings

I’ve been getting a lot of BSODs on my three-year-old Asus X83Vb-X2 laptop lately. Like, multiple times per day. Yesterday was the worst: I could barely use the computer for an hour at a time before every program would start to hang, and then Windows would crash. I ran chkdsk.exe overnight because it also seemed like there might have been some errors with the hard drive. It hasn’t crashed yet today, which is great, since I might not have been able to make it through the writing of this post yesterday.

I’m running 64-bit Windows 7 Home Premium on this thing, which has all the same specs as when I bought it new (listed here), except that I replaced the 250 GB (5400 rpm) hard drive with a brand-new 750 GB (7200 rpm) drive last year.

I did some investigating of my own — looking at Windows’ Event Viewer and even downloading debugging tools from the Windows SDK so I could analyze the crash dumps — and as far as I can tell, a power failure is causing the crashes. It seems like people who were having this issue in desktops eventually found out that their power supply wasn’t sufficient for the components they had in their tower.

I’ve thought about replacing the power supply for my laptop. But I have two questions, assuming that I’m making the right assumptions regarding the cause:

1) Could the culprit be the new hard drive? Like, would the increased power demand of a 7200 rpm HDD over a 5400 rpm drive be enough to overdraw my laptop’s power supply?
2) Would replacing the laptop’s battery and/or power cable (i.e., the AC adapter) help at all, or would I just be wasting money?

I was really hoping that this machine would last a few more months. For one thing, I can’t afford to buy a new laptop right now. But I wouldn’t do so even if I did have the money, since I’m waiting for this fall’s Ivy Bridge ultrabooks (and I’m cautiously optimistic about Windows 8).