Computer whiz?

[DazZ.]

Well here's your problem! p.e.b.k.a.c.

thumbs up to anyone who can tell me what that means.

How is this pebkac?

 

[Nanaki316]

I've come to the conclusion this is definitely a heat problem. WoW crashed again on it's charger after 2 minutes and I now can't even play The fucking Sims because my system overheats in 5 minutes.
Stupid question but thought it was worth asking, can it depend on what sort of power supply you plug a brick into? I.e a wall socket on it's own or in an extension with like 5 other plugs in it?

 

[Continuity]

Stupid question but thought it was worth asking, can it depend on what sort of power supply you plug a brick into? I.e a wall socket on it's own or in an extension with like 5 other plugs in it?

I've never heard of anything like that, but it goes without saying you shouldn't overload a socket, nor should you run electronics on the same circuit as machinery (e.g. tumble dryer)... but as long as you're not doing anything daft like that I wouldn't worry about the quality of the power being an issue.

If it is overheating can you narrow it down to either the CPU or GFX card? It sounds odd to me that it would be overheating so quickly with such as undemanding game as WoW... I think the only way that could be is if you have a dead cooling fan or something. I have some mates who I play L4D2 with and they get issues with overheating but only after about 20 minutes+ of gaming - they solved their problem BTW by getting cooling mats to put their laptops on, might be worth looking at if this is a heat issue (i'm not convinced of that mind).

Do you get anything in event viewer other than the application hang?

Also, try running WoW with your battery out and just the power cable in. Just to eliminate power from the equation.

 

[Nanaki316]

Stupid question but thought it was worth asking, can it depend on what sort of power supply you plug a brick into? I.e a wall socket on it's own or in an extension with like 5 other plugs in it?

I've never heard of anything like that, but it goes without saying you shouldn't overload a socket, nor should you run electronics on the same circuit as machinery (e.g. tumble dryer)... but as long as you're not doing anything daft like that I wouldn't worry about the quality of the power being an issue.

If it is overheating can you narrow it down to either the CPU or GFX card? It sounds odd to me that it would be overheating so quickly with such as undemanding game as WoW... I think the only way that could be is if you have a dead cooling fan or something. I have some mates who I play L4D2 with and they get issues with overheating but only after about 20 minutes+ of gaming - they solved their problem BTW by getting cooling mats to put their laptops on, might be worth looking at if this is a heat issue (i'm not convinced of that mind).

Do you get anything in event viewer other than the application hang?

Also, try running WoW with your battery out and just the power cable in. Just to eliminate power from the equation.

Nothing else happens really. The fps crashes to like 1 and becomes unuseable. I'll exit the game in the normal way but it doesn't actually close. I then have to force quit it through ctrl+alt+delete but that takes forever because my laptop freezes SO badly after it.

The good news is I've been in contact with Dell. Apparently I'd missed an alert of a new BIOS update so we thought it might be that, turns out it wasn't. When I got off the phone he said "Go play games for a couple of hours and see what happens." But it was exactly the same, it went longer, but still crashed eventually. They're calling me back tomorrow, now suspecting it is in fact the motherboard.
I guess I'll have to see what happens from there