So my 6 moths old gaming laptop is starting to act weird. It's an Asus G73J, the older model without sandy bridge and a 5870m gpu.

I bought the Ubisoft pack from steam yesterday and installed Rainbow Six: Vegas 2, Far Cry 2 and Call of Juarez: Bound in Blood.
When I played CoJ my compuer suddenly crashed, not to desktop, just shut down. And it refuses to start up again unless I wait 1-2 min. It has never done this before so I thought it might just be some random thing. I tried the game again and it died on me after ten min or so.
I felt the fans, which are very hot, but they've been like that in most games, and the computer is built with these giant two fans to stay cool.
Anyway, I stopped playing CoJ after a third crash and went onto Rainbow Six. I played that for 3 hours yeterday and it went on fine. This morning I played Far Cry 2, no problems there either. But just now I started Rainbow Six again and I've had 2 crashes.

Now, I'm thinking either the computer is faulty or I've been pushing it too hard. I set the three above mentioned games on their highest setting.
I thought about going in to the pace I bought it and see if they could help me, but to save me some shame if they tell me it's my fault I need to know...

... A game that can crash my laptop from ovrheating, should that game also have performance issues? Because I've had great FPS and no problems whatsoever in the games themselves before crashing.
I can't find the notebook review on the laptop now, but I remember their test showed this machine should be able to play most games on higher settings, and all of these games are a few years old (most of them older than the computer I belive).

Other than that, is there anything else that could have happened to my laptop that has it crashing during games? Or anyway to find out what's causing it?

Specs
CPU: i7 720QM 1,6Ghz (2,4 OC)
GPU: 5870m
RAM: 8Gb

Thanks for any help on this.

The specs for CoJ are here:

Windows XP (SP3)/Windows Vista (SP1)
Intel Pentium 4 3.2 Ghz, Intel Pentium D 2.66 Ghz, AMD Athlon 64 3500+
1 GB Windows XP / 2 GB Windows Vista 1 GB
NVIDIA GeForce 6800-9800/GTX 260-280/ATI RADEON X1650 – 1950/HD 2400-4870
4 GB of disk space
DirectX 9.0c sound card compatible with DirectX 9.0
DVD-ROM

I think your laptop is dying from overheating. Prop your laptop up using its feet (augment this if needed), operate in a room with good dry air flow and keep the ambient air as low as possible.

It's possible for laptops to die from heat damage but I don't think that's happening here. I would clean dust from inside the laptop anyway, just to be safe.

This could be a driver malfunction, what GPU drivers are you using?

Mount and Blade made my laptop shut down from overheating without any performance issues to warn me (besides the fact that I could bake an egg on my laptop right before it would crash). Six months sounds way too early for overheating problems though, my laptop's dying process started after two years.

My laptop exceeds those specs. And why would I have to pry it open? What would I do?



The ones that cme with the laptop. Not sure how to see that though.
EDIT: I looked at CCC and found the number 8.683, I think that's it. I never got any new drivers becasue I read that the Asus laptops had been having problems with some drivers, although I can't remember if it had problems with ATI's drivers or Asus own drivers.


Also, I've had my latop on a pad with two fans in it for extra airflow 90% of the time.

Then I would definitely update your GPU drivers as soon as you can.

http://support.amd.com/us/gpudownload/Pages/index.aspx

AMD put out some new drivers on Feb 15. I've been holding back as well because they were conflicting with my 64bit OS. I installed them and all is good in the hood.

I used to have an issue like this with my old rig running a radeon 9800pro when I was playing Oblivion. Turned out the actual fan on the GPU broke off, and it wasn't able to cool itself. I was having no performance issues, so I launced Oblivion in windowed mode, and opened up the CCC to monitor the gpu's temperature and to my surprise the thing was on fire.

I opened up my computer and found the mess.

It sounds to me like for whatever reason the fans aren't doing the job they're supposed to. Given the age of your laptop I would call this a manufacturing issue. Which means you should probably take it to the place you got it and have them look at it. Don't go opening it up or anything because that might void some warranties.