Freezing intermittently

[Amadeus]

I've got my 2133 KX870 (C7, 2Gb) two month ago, brand new, with Vista Home.

I was intermittently getting bluescreen with sources pointing to a different piece of hardware every time. I did all kinds of tests on RAM and HD with no negative results. Then I noticed that the BIOS version is still F.02, so I upgraded it to F.06. After that I stopped getting the bluescreens, but rather the "screen-freezes". I am very aware of overheating issues, but this happens even on a freshly-cold system. Sometimes it would run for days without problems, and sometimes it would freeze minutes after turning up under the same conditions.

Lately I've re-formatted HD and installed Windows 7. All to find out that the behavior is still the same - without any warning, cold or hot, it suddenly freezes the screen. Nothing in the Event Log, of course.

I went through this forum's history, but could not find similar problems.

Please, let me know if anyone had encountered the same problem.

Thank you.

[luvit]

read the link in my sig.
i hope it helps... you're experiencing what i did during my first week or so of ownership.

[gorlov]

I have two mini-notes. A 2140 HD on which I run Win7rc, and a 2133. My 2140 is excellent. My 2133 freezes often. Very often.

2133 KX870AT (2gb C7-1.6MHz) that came with Vista Business.

I have upgrade Vista to SP2 with all the latest drivers (except for the synaptics driver, which seems to want to shrink the active area of the touchpad to a much smaller size by killing the edges). On power, it seems to work (most of the time). On battery, it died all the time on HP Optimized. Yes, I have the latest BIOS. Yes, I have fan on while on power in Bios. I never have it on my lap, and it is always well ventilated. Then I switched to a custom power mode based off high performance. It is much better, but still occasionally freezes.
I then tried Win7 RC-7100. Freezes. Win7-7137. Freezes. Win7-7201. Freezes.
HP offered to "fix" it (return box is sitting waiting to be used), but I am concerned that this affects quite a few 2133's, and may be systemic rather than a hardware defect.

(and I am quite experienced in technology, having at home everything from Sun Servers, large multi-TB NAS's, FreeBSD and OpenBSD systems, and all sorts on Windows systems from XP to 2003, 2008 and Win7. I have never had something quite this annoying.)

[zbrown0529]

One:

If you have BSD and SunOS and have never had something thats annoying as the problems you have described then it seems you have never turned those machines on.. especially the SunOS ones.

Two:

Don't rant about your problems, all that does is take up time and space.

Three:

The problems you described here are described elsewhere in the forums, look around and you will find the appropriate fixes.

Cheers!

[ZBoater]

I've got my 2133 KX870 (C7, 2Gb) two month ago, brand new, with Vista Home.

Are you sure it was Vista Home? I would have thought all the 870s came with Vista Business, but I could be wrong.

Can you tell if there is hard drive activity when it freezes?

I would suggest using Process Monitor, a utility from the Microsoft website. If you run it and turn autoscroll on it basically tells you every little thing your system is doing, like writing keys to the registry, loading programs, etc. Maybe you can correlate something your machine is doing with the freezes.

My 870 with Vista Business did not have that problem. DO you have any peripherals connected, like a USB drive?

[gorlov]

To ZBrown0259 - I have my SunServers running, but running netbsd, freebsd and openbsd, all headless. And my expression of annoyance was not meant to be a rant, but how bewildering this problem was.

I did not have any external USB items connected.

So I reinstalled Win7-7201 from a bootable USB Microdrive - clean install after imaging the Vista w/ PartMagic. Five clean installs all failed at the exactly the same place - towards the end of the post reboot configuration. Each time the machine was elevated at the back by the 6cell and in the front by a spare 3cel, so there was 3/4 inch of clearance under the bottom of the machine, and the BIOS was set "fan on when on AC".

So, the sixth time, immediately after each reboot, I would wait about five minutes for the machine to cool (although it wasn't really that hot). It went to completion, and then failed a few more times after the installation was complete. So win7 (and I had previously tried 7100, 7137, each of these at least installed before freezing). was not a fix.

I went into the power setup, copied the high power setting into a new custom setting, adjusting CPU, screen, etc all to reduce power or power down. Win7 has more tweaking ability than Vista. I kept the power on for the PCI bus and a few more things (I'll document later). So I had a new power setting that was very thrifty on power, but didn't crash. And yes, high power only on Vista made the 2133 freeze far less, but do you really want a laptop that runs it's battery down in half the time it should?

And yes, I combed thru this and every other forum on the net before posting my original posting. Snippiness belongs on Linux or OpenBSD forums, not here.

I had done all the detailed power monitoring before, and when it froze, there was not disk activity, nothing in any of the windows log files, and nothing unusual in the detailed Win7 activity monitoring screens (which froze when the machine did).

[ZBoater]

That is very strange. If it is failing like that even on a clean install, I would suspect some sort of hardware failure. It doesnt necesarilly need to be power/heat related.

[gorlov]

My guess, as it seemed to be the exact same spot in the install, as it said it was configuring settings, was that it was configuring the power settings. After it finally completed, the fresh install has a "balanced" power setting. I saved it, and shortly, I will do a setting-by-setting comparison between the original balanced setting and the new custom setting that seems to work well.

But odd that 7201 was the one failing on install, whereas the real RC (7100) installed fine, but just would lock every few moments.

And now, with 7201, it has been a day without freezing (it hasn't frozen yet, either on power or battery). And I have set the power setting fairly aggressively on conserving power, with CPU throttling down to 5%.

But then again, it could have been sunspots.

[Jawbox]

As far as the touchpad, I'd guess that the drivers are using the edges as virtual scroll wheels. Try opening your trackpad control panel to change this. You may need to install a newer trackpad driver.

[gorlov]

The touchpad works great with the windows default driver, but doesn't have the scroll features. With the HP/Synaptics driver, even when you enable edge motion and scrolling, and then minimize the size to zreo, and then either leave edge motion and scrolling disabled, then the touchpad has fairly large "dead" regions around the edges. With the touchpad as small as it is (especially vertically), this for me was worse than using the basic touchpad features in the non-synaptics driver.