What happened to my laptop just now?

[Zephik]

I'm not sure what just happened, but I was playing around on Sketchup and my laptop just froze up, my cooling fans kicked into high gear and then my monitor turned off. I had to power down to get my monitor to turn back on, which means that I just lost around an hours worth of Sketchup work. So, I'm feeling kind of confused right now. lol. What just happened? Does anyone know why my laptop did that? I was creating a "modders mesh" side panel at the time when it froze. My method I used to do this was just by creating a small area of modders mesh, then using copy and paste to stack the pieces together into one large piece. I noticed that whenever I hit "ctrl + v" it would stall for a second or two before the item appeared on my screen. Then when I clicked it into place it would stall for another second or two. I got about halfway when it froze and went black, which has never happened to me before on laptop or desktop.

Any idea's as to what happened? Maybe my computing power isn't good enough to handle detail work with Sketchup?

Laptop Specs:
Intel Pentium M @ 1.60GHz
512MB of RAM
ATI Mobility Radeon 9700 Series

Side Note:
I'm not sure where this thread belongs so please move it where you see fit. Apologies for the inconvenience.

[Drum Thumper]

Sounds like it overheated. What surface did you have your laptop on when this happened?

[Zephik]

Oooh... I wonder if that is what happened? I had it on my bed, on top of my comforter. Hmmm, but it does have vents on the sides, top, and back. There are also vents on the bottom though. I feel most of the air being pushed out the back, which is never blocked.

Would high temperatures affect my laptops performance? Such as the stalling in high detail areas in Sketchup for example?

[DaveW]

Laptops usually suck air in from the bottom and expel it at the sides. You should never put a laptop on a blanket or similar as it will get sucked into the input vents and overheat.

-Dave

[Zephik]

Your right Dave, when I hold a string near the vents, I can tell which are exhaust and which are intake. The bottom ones are in fact, intake.

Just now, I had my laptop on my lap playing around with Sketchup. I'm assuming my legs were blocking the intake on the bottom of the laptop because my screen went black all of the sudden again. This time the fans did not kick into high gear though. The program was running smoothly too...

Something just seems weird. Sketchup only takes up about 30k in the processes and I've run plenty more than that before without the screen going black and that was while having it on my bed. Shouldn't the entire computer turn off if its overheating? It's only the screen thats turning off, everything else is still humming peacefully. The only way I can get the screen to turn back on, is if I reset the laptop.

Maybe I have a short? But why does it only happen when I am running Sketchup? Also, it only does this when I reach a file size in Sketchup that is past 1.2MB.

**okay, something is definitely fishy. I just opened Sketchup again and about 3 minutes into it my screen went black. Hmm...

[nil8]

I'm betting it's the video card. Does it use shared memory or does it have it's own?

The way to tell is to hit the windows key + the pause key, check how much memory windows is reporting. If it's 32,64, or 128 mb lower than your physical memory, you have shared video memory.

If your video memory can't handle sketchup, the laptop can't allocate more resources and it could be causing the screen to go black because you have no more video memory to use.
Check in your bios and see how much memory your graphics card has and if you can change the number, then install as much memory as humanly possible in the laptop and hope for the best.

In either case, if your video card overheats, it will shut itself off, thus killing your display until you restart the machine or let the laptop cool down for a while.

These are the only two things I know of that would kill a laptop's display in your current situation. I highly doubt about shorting wires, loose connections, or sheer damage.

[Zephik]

Well this is interesting. Whenever I delete THESE lines it causes the monitor to shut off. I can do anything and everything else... but the second I touch those lines the screen goes black. I've tested it a few times now and thats what I do every time before my monitor goes bye bye.

okay, well, that doesn't make any sense to me at all. Did my Sketchup program somehow sync with my laptops physical hardware? See, now that would make sense as unrealistic as that may be. Because at least then I could say, oh, well those lines represent the circuitry to my monitor, when I sever those lines in the program, it severs the lines in my laptop.

lol what is going on here... this is the weirdest program glitch I have ever heard of.

[chaksq]

I have issues with sketchup crashing as well, although the machine I run it on is kinda old.

[xRyokenx]

You could always try making one of these.

[Zephik]

I was actually thinking about doing that. Even though my problem isn't overheating. It had something to do with the Sketchup program. I don't know what was up, but it was definitely weird. But I had a pretty "cool" idea for a home brew laptop cooler that wouldn't cost a whole lot. I might do it if I have scrap pieces left over from my project.

Anyways, everything seems fine now. I erased the entire thing and uninstalled Sketchup. After reinstalling Sketchup and recreating my doodle, it all seems to be working fine. Thankfully.

Thanks for the help guys. That was a very... weird problem. If anyone knows why it was doing that, for future reference I would appreciate knowing. ^_^

*******
Well never mind. Its doing it again. Gah! If I had more than 5 dollars in my pocket right now, I would just go out and buy a brand new pc. lol I'm getting so tired of all of these dumb little problems popping up every other hour.