Hello All,
Long post... Sorry!!
I hope that this might help someone.
We recently bought two of these laptops. Spec follows:
Intel Core i3-4000M, 12GB RAM, 1TB HDD, 15.6 screen, DVDRW, Intel HD graphics, Bluetooth, Wireless N, No Operating System.
Running Linux Mint 17 on one of them. No problems at all. I did change the wifi card for an Intel dual band one.
The second one was bought for SWMBO. I installed windows 7 ultimate onto this with no problems initially. I had to download windows 7 drivers as the supplied driver disk was for windows 8.
Anyone who has built a machine and/or installed windows will be familiar with this.. no biggie.
Anyway, after a couple of days, the windows machine crashed (screen contents "faded" to nothing). A hard reset was required to clear this.
Next, the machine would occasionally blue screen.
Crash dump analysis indicated that (possibly an errant/buggy driver) was crashing the kernel.
First thing to do was to run the usual diagnostic tools. A full memory check (24 hours) seemed to rule out the memory, A full disk recertification (hdd manufacturers tools, 4 hours.) seemed to rule out any drive problems.
The system was then fully stress tested for 24 hours. All results O.K. (before you wonder, all temps very good, well within spec.).
Now, without voiding the warranty, I couldn't open the case and use a diagnostic card... Technical support got me to do the usual tests (again!). They finally agreed that there was a possible motherboard fault and issued a fault number. Ebuyer could then RMA the machine and replace it.
The replacement arrived a couple of days later. A full reinstall later the machine was up and running.. Guess what happened next.
Yes, the machine blue screened again with the same Stop codes.
O.K. It's possible that there is a bad batch of motherboards.. but I wasn't convinced of this. Then I remembered reading about something similar with some HP desktops (same chipset family). The problem was identified as a problem with "something" that uses the Windows Filtering Platform (google it if required!). There is a patch for this which "should" be delivered via windows update (if required).
The update log showed that this update wasn't installed on the laptop, so I downloaded and installed it manually.
The machine has been running flawlessly for two weeks now. It would appear that this patch has actually solved the problem.
The required file is "Windows6.1-KB2913431-x64.msu" (update KB2913431).
As said before.. I hope that this helps somebody.
Bodge99.