System Auto Rebooting No More

So I kept seeing situations where my laptop would just reboot with no warning. I would get a Win8 BSOD telling me about a BAD_POOL problem and then reboot. I pretty consistently saw this about 3 times a week.
I also found that whenever I enabled my LAN port while my Wifi was running, the same BSOD would appear about 95% of the time. Annoying but there were no overall increases in frequency so I again, I just worked around it.

Well, about 10 days ago I got an email from Avanquest that I could upgrade to System Suite 15 for free. I have been using various iterations of SS for about 12 years and that has NEVER happened. Sometimes I would get the, "Be an early purchaser of the next version for 20% off!!!" or whatever. Never got an invitation for a free upgrade.
So I took advantage of the upgrade, and coming out the other side, I pretty quickly realized that they no longer included their own firewall and instead migrated all of my rules to the Win8 firewall. The next thing I realized, after a couple of days was that I no longer had a rebooting system.
I realize that its a little early to claim victory but since Avanquest uninstalled their FW, I have had no issues. This has been true for about a week and is true when I enable and disable my LAN interface while leaving my WiFi connected. I still run into odd behavior from time to time, especially if I leave my running laptop undisturbed for a couple of days, but no BSODs.
I have to assume that they became aware of the FW issue and pretty quietly removed it. There were no obvious notices that they were dumping me into Windows FW. Just blurbs about all of the cool new stuff version 15 would do. I suspected something was up when they didn't charge me anything.

The conspiracy theorist part of me got to thinking that the NSA and Microsoft might work something out so that they would have a backdoor as needed. To help this along, MS would ensure that their OSs would be increasingly unstable with third party FW vendors. So everyone eventually gets dumped into the MS FW and it is a lot easier for gubmint and law enforcement agencies to have a look around.

Initial Purchase and Usage Impressions

I was initially supposed to receive the laptop on December 17th, but something delayed it in Dallas, so it was delivered a day later. When I went to Best Buy to pick it up, they said their system showed it on site but that they couldn't find it. A little deeper digging turned it up and a somewhat sheepish employee told me he disregarded the package twice because it was so big. He assumed that no way could it have been a laptop. He wasn't kidding! It looked like I purchased a small desktop computer.

Inside the main box are two boxes. One with some accessories, like power brick, driver cd etc. The other has the laptop.
Upon opening the laptop box, I realized there was yet *another* box within. This one was black and had a handle. It was about 99.9% the size of the enclosing box, so I have no idea what purpose it serves.
Everything was delivered in good shape.

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Setting up the system was fairly painless, other than my unfamiliarity with Windows 8.1 and waiting for about 200MB of Windows Update downloads to process.

I have thus far run Civ IV, The Stanley Parable and Skyrim, all on high-very high settings with no issues. Granted, these are nowhere near as demanding as most current games.I plan on running BioShock Infinite sometime early next year and will update at that time.

I like the fact that the underside of the unit has the vents arranged such that standard lap placing means none are blocked. I have run up to an hour or so of basic Windows usage and Civ IV with no lap heating problems.
If I stay away from Skyrim, I can get more than 2 hours on a full charge. I will dive into that later, in a future post.

The one minor (at this point) problem I am seeing is an occasional BAD_POOL_CALLER BSOD. I started seeing it after loading an Anti-Virus program and have seen similar notes in some forums. At this point, once it shows up and I reboot, it does not appear again and my AV program seems to be running properly. We'll see how it progresses.

One other initial observation: While it isn't crushingly heavy, even with the battery, it is a huge, bulky son-of-a-gun! I think it is bulkier than my old 17" HP Pavilion ZD8000. Of course it has 2 physical 2.5" hard drives installed, 4 banks of RAM, the AMD 8970M, etc. I guess it all evens out. Barely fits in my, "Fits all 17" laptops" backpack. But it does fit.

Here are the specs of my system:

CPU	• AMD A10-5750M Quad-Core Mobile Processor 2.50GHz 4MB Cache
Core Logic	• Mobile AMD A76M Chipset Mainboard
Display	• 17.3" Anti-Glare Full HD (1920x1080) 16:9 Display
Memory	• Dual channels DDR3 • Four 204pins SODIMM sockets, support for DDR3 1333/1600 MHz • Expandable memory up to 32GB, depends on 1GB/2GB/4GB/8GB SODIMM module• My system came with 4 x 4GB DIMMs for 16GB total RAM.
Video Controller	• Mobile AMD Radeon HD 8970M 2GB PCIe GDDR5 VRAM Video
Storage	• 1 x 120GB SSD drive configured as C: • 1 x 1TB SATA Hard Drive configured as E:• 1 x CDRW/DVD-RW optical drive.
Keyboard	• Red Backlite Chiclet 102 Keys w/ Gaming Icons
Sound System	• High Definition Audio - Realtek ALC892-GR • Built-in two speakers • Built-in one sub woofer
I/O Ports	• 3x USB 3.0 ports • 2x USB 2.0 ports • 1x HDMI output port • 1x VGA port • 1x e-SATA port • 1x S/PDIF output jack • 1x Headphone jack • 1x Microphone jack • 1x Line-in jack • 1x RJ-45 LAN port • 1x DC-in jack
Card Reader	• 4-in-1 Card Reader
Communication	• WLAN802.11a/b/g/n + Bluetooth4.0) Wireless Combo Card Module
Power	• Full Range AC adapter 180W, AC in 100~240V ~ 2.5A 50~60Hz, DC output 19.5V, 9.5A • Removable 9-Cells Lithium-Ion battery pack 11.1Vdc 7800mAh 87Wh • Battery life: 120 minutes
Operating System	• Windows® 8.1
Dimension	• 16.85" x 11.34" x 2.17" (W x D x H) • 7.9 Lbs. (13.85 Lbs. with Battery)

Where it all begins

CYBERPOWERPC FANGBOOK AFX7-400

I recently bought one from Best Buy and I will chronicle my experiences here. I haven't seen much on this particular variant of the Fangbook so I thought I would add to the discussion.

My version has the AMD system board and Radeon 8970m GPU.

Once I actually receive my unit (December 17th I am told) I'll post full system specs and some pix.