Can this weird thing possibly be happening with my computer?

In My Humble Opinion
1

I had some random hibernation events over the past several weeks, and the last several times I realized something weird.

I typically have my laptop hooked up to a second monitor.

I can’t say for sure whether the following is true of every instance, but on the three last incidents, the ones where I was checking for this, the weird crash-to-hibernate happened while I was playing a graphically intensive game on the second monitor.

Here’s the thing–I also play these very same games often on the primary monitor, and the crashes never occur – not since I started keeping track.

But then try to play these games on the other monitor and, each time I experimented with it (just three so far, and I really don’t want to trigger this crash anymore so I’m not sure how much further experimentation I’m willing to go into), the crash occurred while playing these games on that monitor.

But! I am always using that monitor, if not for games, then just as a second desktop monitor. And the crash doesn’t seem to happen just because I’m using that second monitor. It seems to be happening specifically when I play graphic intensive games on that monitor.

My question is, can this possibly be? Is there any mechanism you can think of that would cause this? Or is it all just a coincidence?

2

Does it happen during ALL graphic intensive games, or just one specific one?

3

Does it happen if you switch the monitors around (connect the cable of one to the other)? Might help you isolate whether it’s a monitor problem or a cable/port problem.

4

Is the laptop plugged into an AC outlet? Maybe it’s depleting its battery at high speed when the graphics board is pumping polygons to the external monitor port, and Windows just hibernates it when the battery gets too low?

Some laptops use low-power Intel on-board graphics for spreadsheets and YouTube, and switch to a separate power-hungry NVidia chipset when a game invokes Direct3D or OpenGL.