Laptop randomly reboots
I'll try to keep this short. I bought a used Lenovo T520 back in May. It
had the motherboard with nvidia GPU. Because it sucks power and doesn't
really have good suspend/resume support, I bought a used mother board
off of ebay that only had intel integrated graphics and I swapped it
out. All was well and I had installed in it 8gb +4gb of ram.
It ran like that for about 8 weeks before I bought an 8gb stick and
stuck that in, so then I had 8gb + 8gb of ram. After about 6 weeks of
running like, it randomly rebooted overnight. I shrugged it off and
thought maybe the power went out or something (even though it had a
battery in it). But then about 2 weeks later it did it again..and then
two weeks after that. So I pulled out the new 8gb stick I had put in and
let it run with just one 8gb stick. It ran like that for about 10 weeks
without a problem. I put the old 4gb stick in just for fun, bringing it
back to the original 8gb + 4gb configuration. But about 2 weeks later it
rebooted again. At that point I bought a matched 16gb kit (8gb + 8gb)
from new egg that seemed to come recommended from google searching for
compatible ram for this model. But just a couple of days ago (about 3
weeks after installing it), it rebooted by itself.
I am kind of at a loss here now. I can buy another motherboard and swap
it out again, but that takes a few hours and I don't feel like doing it.
The cooling and thermal stuff is all good on the laptop,I've ran prime95
and video encoding for hours and it is fine (temps stay below 80* at
least, normal usage is 40-55*). I've also ran memtest for a few hours.
What I find weird is that the machine suddenly reboots. At least a few
years ago, ram issues would just lead to a kernel panic screen. But with
this, the machine is just like someone pulled the plug and rebooted it.
I started to wonder if there is some built in watchdog somewhere that
will reboot the machine if it hangs, but I can't tell? Other than that,
if this is the kernel that is rebooting the machine, is there any way I
can get it to dump some info somewhere before it fully reboots? Before I
go through the pain of swapping the board again, I'd just like to really
know that this is a hardware issue and not the kernel detecting
something and just choosing to reboot...
Thanks for any info,
Sam
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