Acer 'gaming' laptops. Just don't.

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So, after dealing with a endless series if these P.O.S. 
laptops, time for a write up.

The current version of this dog excrement on the slab today is:
The Acer Predator Helios 300 with nvidia 1060 graphics, and
an 8th gen i7

It was manufactured 4/4/2019,  and lists the model number
N17C1 Although the part number lists PH315-51-78YV

Acer gaming laptops - are not gaming laptops.  Stop buying
them. If you need a gaming machine for the love of whatever
you hold sacred get a gaming desktop for f's sake. Or at
least buy one from a company that actually knows how to make
them properly.

They don't game without destroying themselves, they will
eventually auto update to windows 11, and Acer has no
intention of ever releasing an Acer OEM window 11 nvidia
driver for them, so it uses the public nvidia version out of
windows update, which of course it seems runs it at the
wrong clock speed and damages it because of course acer was
too cheap to install proper cooling, or to adjust the
firmware in the nvidia hardware to an appropriate clock
default. The windows 10 Acer version of the nvidia driver
seems to under clock it to compensate somehow.

The update to windows 11 also seems to do something weird to
the intel rapid storage cache system, but that could just be
this particular unit.

They will generally hang on a while, the record seems to be
about 6 months, after updating to windows 11, but they will
be running the video card so hot that it is doing damage.  
Eventually you will get one of the following:

If it is really cooked you will get a bunch of watchdog
violations, and its a brick.

If you are lucky only the nvidia chip will be damaged, and
you will either get an error 43, which can be removed for
short periods by a clean remove or reset of the video
driver, until the chip hits about 70 celcius then it will
simply crash, throwing an 0x00000116 bluescreen blaming
nvlddmkm.sys  although if you pop the dump into a debugger
it will also implicate dxgkml.sys

It is also interesting to note that the faulting address is
decrementing each time, which seems to suggest to me
anecdotally at least that it is systematically burning its
way backwards through the video chipset.

Or you might get a simple page_fault_in_nonpaged_area
0x00000050 in ntoskrnl.exe, the video card will look ok in
device manager, except if you check task manager or look for
the nvidia control panel it will be like there is no nvidia
gpu hardware installed.

Supposedly 'nando4' developed a fix for the error, here
https://egpu.io/forums/expresscard-mpcie-m-2-adapters/script-nvidia-error43-fixer/
but since it is behind a "log in" wall, and I flat out
refuse to sign up for one more thing after having over 500
logins for crap that never needed a login in the first place
I have not grabbed a copy to test; and i find it a personal
insult they expect someone to sign up for an account just to
download a tool.

It appears to basically clear the 43 flag in the registry
and restart the driver.  Which after having done the same
thing the long way around, (DDU/clean remove/clean install
tools) just causes the video card to choke again the moment
it hits 70 degrees again.

It is not all bad news however, if you don't actually intend
to use this laptop for any sort of serious gaming, if you
deliberately disabled the nvidia driver, it will be perfect
happy to run entirely off this intel UHD 630 on board
graphics from the i7-8750h cpu, and is actually a decently
fast workhorse laptop - which I rather suspect is what it
was designed to do in the first place before they slapped a
helios sticker on it and tried flogging them off as gaming
machines to get rid of all their old 1060 chip inventory in
2019.

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