I have a 6 or 7 year old Acer laptop. Nothing special about it's specs pretty average I think, it's got 256gb of dedicated video memory in an integrated graphics chip...

But that's not my issue. My issue is every once and a while, and by that I mean all the time, when I log on it will tell me that "windows.exe has crashed" and it will just be a black screen to which I have to shut off manually.

When I play Roller Coaster Tycoon 1 quite often it will crash to desktop and tell me something about the memory than it will crash and restart.

When I open google chrome it will crash... say something about memory than restart.

So my question is... has my laptop finally fallen off it's last leg? When I start it up it makes a horrible sound like blender sometimes. not as loud as a blender but if a blender could whisper... that's the sound. I try and keep good care of it, I clean it and such but still...

I'm not looking to fix it sicne I need a better graphics card but I did want to know how much longer I can go with this laptop before I need to upgrade.

The sound could be your fan going bad or your hard drive starting to go. Its hard to say. Does it over heat? My fathers 2 yr old Acer - the fan is going - instead of letting it go we are going to replace the fan (he is anti win 8 even thought I told him you can still get a laptop with 7 on it) As for the memory the only thing I know is Chrome is memory hog. Try a different browser for that. and see if it makes a difference.

To be safe I would start putting some pennies away every week so it wont be so bad when it does go.

I thought it might be the fan but it doesn't make sense. The only thing I do on the laptop is play games. So I'll start it up and play a game. It's only on when I'm gaming. So it doesn't have time to overheat.

As well I'm thinking more and more it's the graphics going on it as part of the problem. I just tried playing Fallout 3 and the graphics arn't loading in. Everything is blurry and smuged, and it's not because I'm on all settings low. As well I was playing Oblivion earlier and there was water and all manor of other thigns missing...

It could be very easily that your laptop is overheating, since gaming pushes almost all of your parts to its limits (well depending on the game), but never-the-less it takes its stroll on your laptop and only a little bit of time and a dysfunctional fan is needed for it to crash. It could also be a bad drive sector in your RAM or HDD. Maybe it's something harmless like a software discrepancy or maybe it's even nothing, meaning your PC doesn't meet the minimum system requirements.

If you really want to know what's going on, 1st try to clean your PC with CCleaner. That should get rid of all the junk. CCleaner has even a registry cleaner, even though I would strongly suggest against it if you don't know what you're doing.
After that you should disassemble your Laptop and clean it. Many guides are there on the waste space called the Internet, don't forget about youtube ;)
After you cleaned it physically, you need to know if all your parts are functioning correctly. I would advice you to take this link here for the Ultimate Boot CD, make a floppy, CD, DVD or USB image of it and use it to see if all your parts are doing their work as they should.
After all that, depending on your skills and what you encountered on your way, you should have a pretty clear picture about what is going on in your laptop and what's been messing around with you.

Happy hunting :)

P.S. If you need any more tips or details about anything, don't shy away from PM-ing me

256gb dedicated memory? Sounds kinda beefy for a 7 yearold laptop...

Most likely that's wrong and it uses shared memory which you can then adjust in the BIOS, and 32mb is the minimum while 512mb is the max.

As for overheating, i would say take some compressed air to the computer; Preferably you take out the screws and separate the cover off so you can get good in all the hard to reach places. If you have an air compressor, even better as it's dirt cheap (set it to 40-60 ps, preferably have a good nozzle for blowing airi).

If it continues to be overheating, you could probably get a cheap cooling pad, even having it directly off your lap will help, a few cooling pads i've had plug into the USB port and the small fans offer a small amount of air circulation. If you are good with fans, you can take them out, clean them and put them back in and have them working fairly well (i've done it a few times for my PC...)

Check your power settings, if you are using windows and it's on performance then it's going to generate a lot more heat. Go to balanced or power saving.

Lastly you can set up a small fan to blow over and under the laptop to help with cooling if nothing else helps. Probably won't be too helpful...

A computer can overheat in less than a minute.

Do you clean the insides? Have you done a memory check in the BIOS? Have you defragmentated the hard drive?

Good job oon making it last this long. What will you be replacing it with?

Laptops are notorious for drive errors, and you are beyond the life expectancy of a laptop.
If you hear lots of noise during bootup, or loading big things, then your drive may be failing.
Intermittent crashes with the same thing indicate the files are becoming a problem to read.
You should defrag and scan your drive for errors regularly, or risk losing or corrupting files (at lest once a month).

SMART monitoring software will show you if the drive has seen errors already, and what it's life expectancy is.
I can't post links yet, but I'll give you some names of companies and free tools, so you can chose the 1 that fits your need most.
Please only download software from the authors sites, or from the mirrors they provide, never those random download sites you see in google.

"Piriform - Defragler" Replacement disc defrag with SMART display.
"Smartmontools"
"gsmartcontrol"
"Active@ - Disk Monitor Free"
"Acronis - Drive Monitor"
"URL Toy - Personal SmartCheck"
"PassMark - Disk Checkup"

You will see errors on a drive that old, but if there are a lot of errors, you will have to decide between buying repair software or a new drive.
Using the "Extended SMART" test routine will often be able to fix some errors, but they may come back.

If you have been running the same copy of Windows all this time, then you are overdue for a re-install.
I re-install Windows every year so I get rid of the delays it gains, and I get a nice fast system again.
I recommend you backup ASAP anyway, but try and find your Acer reinstall disc or burn one before you cannot boot up.

Regarding your system spec and upgradability, I'm sorry to give you bad news.
You won't actually have 256GB of graphics RAM (nobody does), it is actually MB.
256MB has been dedicated to the integrated GFX chip, possibly means that your system RAM has 256MB used exclusively by the GFX chip. Some systems let you chose how much you use.
Acer are known for stretching the truth with careful phrasing and techno-babble to sell their great "looking" PCs.
However the important thing is that the only parts you can upgrade in a laptop are the CPU, RAM and hard disc.
Laptops don't use actual "graphics cards", so you are stuck with what it has.
If you can still find and afford a better CPU and RAM that fits an older laptop, once you also include the cost of fitting it, you will wonder why you didn't just buy a new laptop.

Yeah, it's shared memory but I have found that most games that have a mimimum of 256 I can run.

And while a bad fan and such seems all well and good, doesn't explain why older games that can run on a potato won't run on the laptop, I mean RCT 1, Deus Ex, SimCity 2000, they all crash right away.

Hmmm....

Something to consider. Try turning off all services you can do without. Disable eye-candy like aero if you're using Vista.

Try disabling Virtual Memory, or lowering it to something tiny like 4Mb; But depending on how much memory you have this might not work at all...

Perhaps the cpu is just showing it's age and some features aren't working correctly anymore.

Could also be a hint of the state of your hard drive; Schedule a full scan on your hard disk and have it scan the sectors. Give it a good 4-8 hours, so start it before you go to bed.

Something also coming to mind... Run DxDiag, and manually test the video DirectDraw & Direct 3D features... not expecting much though...

All the modern browsers are memory hogs. The new Opera, Firefox, all are using the same engine as Chrome: Chromium. Hell, even the new Internet Explorer is using that c..p.

Back to the topic: might need cleaning inside. If iyou have an integrated chip for graphics, new games, even stuff as Fallout 3 and Oblivion, are out of the question. A 6-7 year laptop that was never cleaned it might have a dust problem.

Also, many old or modern games do not support integrated graphics (Intel/SiS) or even the beefier laptop videocards (ATI/AMD Mobile and Nvidia Mobile series). So you might want to check the supported videocards. Do not assume that if you have 256mb, everything will be fine. You can find the supported videocards for all the games.

First off I think you meant to say 256 MB of system RAM, not 256 GB of video memory. If I'm wrong, please confirm.

What OS are you running? Is it 32 bit or 64 bit, and is it running XP, Win 7, or Win 8. The reason I ask is because 32-bit OS's can only address a maximum 4 GB of system RAM while 64-bit can address up to 256 GB and if you're running one of the newer OS's it will use more of your system RAM just to run the OS.

I suspect one of your problems may be you've installed too many background running programs and it is eating up your RAM to the point it won't even load a Chrome browser tab. To confirm this, do CTRL + ALT + DEL to open the Task Manager and see how much of your RAM is being used. If all your RAM is being used up, I recommend either doing a clean install of your OS to remove all of the suspect background RAM programs or just increase your system RAM to 512 MB or 1 GB of RAM.

Last I'd like to address the "blender sound" you mentioned. Only three things in a computer have moving parts that make noises: The CD-ROM drive, fan blades, and a hard drive. The CD-ROM drive wouldn't be causing your problem, that would only affect discs you're trying to read. If your hard drive is making noises then you'll have to immediately back up your files before it completely breaks. My hard drive made similar noises before it finally refused to boot (all my stuff was lost). Finally if it's just the fan blades, just blow out the vent holes with a can of compressed hair or use an air compressor to blow out the dust. Dust is usually the culprit behind blocking a fan's air flow.

With how cheap laptops are nowadays that can destroy that old ass laptop in processing power, I would advise to save your upgrade money on a new Laptop. It's not worth salvaging that decrepit, ancient hardware when the unfortunate happens.
That being said, if you haven't backed up your important info then I would do so.
You've said you have cleaned the laptop, but did you clean all the fans. Some fans require taking apart the laptop and I would not advise taking a laptop apart for the uninitiated. When you do clean your fans, make sure you put a pencil in the fan to keep it from spinning when spraying it with compressed air.
After 6-7 years that laptop has had an extremely respectable life.