OT: Dealing with random laptop lockups

I have an Acer Aspire E15 laptop that I use for running LTSpice and doing various business-related tasks. Unfortunately, over the past few weeks or so it's started to randomly lock up completely on a daily basis

- no blue screen, just totally frozen and unresponsive.

I've tried resetting Windows 8.1 to its factory condition, updating the BIOS, and installing the latest wireless and chipset drivers to no avail. I've also had CHKDSK repair all errors with the drive, and let memtest86 grind on the memory overnight, but in the latter case no faults are ever detected.

I'm sort of at a loss as to what to do now, any suggestions? I'm unfortunately leaning towards the fact that this indeed is some kind of motherboard/hard drive hardware failure, or an issue with the memory that memtest isn't picking up.

Reply to
bitrex
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My "first step" when dealing with a wonky (Windows) PC is:

- image the EXISTING disk drive

- reinstall windows

- reinstall the apps that SEEM to be the most problematic

If this "behaves" for a significant period of time, I and figure something about the previous build was wonky and try to reinstall everything, etc. I can always "restore" the previous image and be no worse off (than I was)!

If it is still flakey with a minimal build, then I try installing

*just* Windows and seeing if I can get Windows to misbehave. (sometimes applications "annoy each other")

If that happens, I can either wonder why Windows is "suddenly" misbehaving (recent updates??) *or* suspect something has gone south in the hardware -- so, install another OS and see how reliable *it* proves to be/not be.

If I can run the machine reliably using some other OS, I ask myself, "Why don't I just run THIS OS??!" :>

Reply to
Don Y

I may dual-boot a Linux distro and see what happens. Unfortunately, I have some software which I need to run that absolutely will not work under WINE :-(

Reply to
bitrex

The point is to have a *known* configuration that you can ponder. Windows tends to degrade in the BEST of situations! If you can get the machine to *appear* to behave in some other configuration, it suggests the contents of the disk are the problem! :>

(Imagining the disk gives me freedom to muck around without fear of "accidentally" screwing something up)

Reply to
Don Y

Windows 8.1 has a "feature" which allows you to restore it to "factory configuration" by running a program from the recovery console.

I tried that after backing up my data, and it hasn't seemed to help matters much.

Reply to
bitrex

I just finished working on exactly that laptop at a customers. No lockup, but the Atheros AR956x driver need to be untrashed. Nice machine, cheap, but a bit sluggish, even with an i5-4210.

Any reason you don't bother disclosing the full model number? Just curious because it seems that everyone with a computah problem does the same thing, and supplies as little information as possible. It will be something like "Acer Aspire E15 E5-571-563B"

  1. Make an image backup of the drive. I use Acronis True Image 2014. If the machine decides to go nuts, and take everything on the drive with it, you'll be very thankful for the image backup.
  2. Check the Event Viewer for any error messages that appear just prior to the hang.
  3. Fire up a program that checks the S.M.A.R.T. data on the hard disk. If the hangs are coming from the hard disk drive, S.M.A.R.T. should show something.
  4. Create a bootable CD for running MEMTEST86 or MEMTEST86+. Boot and run them for at least 2-3 hrs. Any errors that it finds are definitely a problem. This is the most common problem I see with hangs. However, it's usually NOT bad RAM. It's the RAM falling out of the socket, or inserted at an angle.
  5. Check if overtemp sensors are working. Find a CPU exerciser that heats up the CPU and see what happens. If it slows down and continues to run, it's working. If it hangs, it's not. Be sure to clean the fan(s) out before testing.
  6. Boot a Linux LiveCD from CD or flash and see if things work. If yes, beat up the system doing everything you can think of including running LTSpice under WINE. If it works without hanging, it's a fair guess(tm) that something is wrong with your unspecified Windoze installation.
  7. Try running: sfc /scannow This is usually a waste of time but occasionally, it does fix a few things.
--
Jeff Liebermann     jeffl@cruzio.com 
150 Felker St #D    http://www.LearnByDestroying.com 
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Reply to
Jeff Liebermann

That's the "refresh Windoze" feature. It puts the operating system back to a fresh Windoze 8.0 installation, with no updates, no vendor enhancements, and leaving all the configuration problems, viruses, spyware, junkware, malware, and such in place. I'm working on an HP something laptop right now for a friends 14 year old daughter, who did the "refresh" thing. I'm now on my 2nd day of updates. My guess(tm) is that I've downloaded and installed about 5 GBytes of updates so far. I think you could do better with the Acer recovery partition (alt-F10).

--
Jeff Liebermann     jeffl@cruzio.com 
150 Felker St #D    http://www.LearnByDestroying.com 
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Reply to
Jeff Liebermann

Thanks for the suggestions. The full model number is Acer Aspire E15 Start ES1-512-C685. No i5 here, just a junky Celeron N2840. It does OK so long as one keeps the tab count in Google Chrome fairly low.

Reply to
bitrex

What about under virtualbox? or dosemu?

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umop apisdn
Reply to
Jasen Betts

Probably a lost interrupt or resource conflict somewhere or some other hardware related glitch. It may be old age and bad capacitors.

Try Bluescreenview from Nirsoft which I think is free and will with a bit of luck allow you to see whatever minidumps exist.

formatting link

You might have to enable heavier handed diagnostics but you could be out of luck if the failure is disk related it can't save crash data.

If you are lucky the crashes will all be the same place or related faults.

Try booting from a Linux disk and running a few diagnostics under Linux for a while. This will likely detect any physical hardware related faults. I had a Toshiba laptop go bad this way losing its mouse and keyboard functionality along with the on-off switch.

It would work OK with a USB keyboard and mouse plugged in even after the things internal ones had gone AWOL. It seemed to be a known defect. Only some actually failed completely some days it was fine.

Switching off in that lost keyboard state required removing the battery.

Reinstalling windows is a last resort mainly advocated by the superstitious and corporate helpdesks. It seldom cures hardware faults.

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Regards, 
Martin Brown
Reply to
Martin Brown

There are Linux varieties that will boot directly from CD and install appropriate drivers for the hardware that they find. If it still dies horribly after a while then you know it is hardware rather than code.

That is how I knew my systems had physical hardware faults. One was bad capacitors on the motherboard memory subsystem (easily fixed) the other was a defective borderline timing keyboard interrupt (impossible to fix). Basically when the machine got warm the keyboard & mouse failed.

I don't often see Windows degrade beyond things that can be quickly fixed by deleting a few enormous hidden files left over from failed updates or broken software installers not tidying up.

The registry can get mangled if you install and uninstall lots of random shovelware junk or get malware infections. Again you can fix this but it require knowledge of where to look and going into the dreaded registry of twisted passages all looking alike with a flint axe.

Imaging the disk is a must before doing anything that might lose data.

It also makes sense to cut a CD/DVD of all valuable user files and verify it on at least one other machine. A CD that will only read on a failing or failed machines drive isn't a lot of use as a backup.

I prefer to have valuable stuff on three independent media backups with at least one of them fully verified before doing anything risky.

I don't subscribe to the reinstall Windows as a cure for everything. It might be necessary but usually faults can be traced to a single rogue driver recently installed about the time the fault shows up.

--
Regards, 
Martin Brown
Reply to
Martin Brown

On Sat, 01 Aug 2015 07:54:13 +0100, Martin Brown Gave us:

Try compressed air and cleaning of the cooling device structures.

I'd bet the running a "knoppix" live session on it, and then running gkrellm or such would allow one to see what kind of temp rises it is experiencing before/as the lock-up occurs.

I'll bet it is thermal in nature. My 5 year old i3 Acer laptop doesn't do it. Ever... and it runs a full tilt graphically oriented screen saver (G-force) (heavy fractals),which taxes the CPU and GPU (Intel integrated variety) immensely, which spools up the fan every time it runs. When I take it out of screen saver the fan spools down so I know it is as hot as it can get.

Reply to
DecadentLinuxUserNumeroUno

On Fri, 31 Jul 2015 17:37:34 -0700, Jeff Liebermann Gave us:

You have had this obsession with using that lame 'term' for a computer for years. Sad, really. So childish. Do you also use a dollar sign when you write "MicroSoft"? Why be such a 'lamah'?

Reply to
DecadentLinuxUserNumeroUno

On Fri, 31 Jul 2015 18:00:00 -0400, bitrex Gave us:

Thermal. Period.

Blow it da hell out. Better than blowing it da hell up.

Find the thermal management system exhausts, and blow BACK the other way out the inlets. Do it outside or out in the garage.

Reply to
DecadentLinuxUserNumeroUno

On Fri, 31 Jul 2015 18:00:00 -0400, bitrex Gave us:

That wasn't very bright. You should have installed a preview version of Windows 10 for that matter.

I have ALL of my power management "features" turned off, so it runs everything full tilt all the time and have no problems. And it's an Acer Aspire too.

I do not know if a preview version is even still available. If you get the full version, make sure to turn off all the probing crap and phone home crap and log in locally.

I'd say your 'problem' is thermal, but seeing this statement you made about resetting tells me that you may have futzed around with it for some time in a not very knowledgeable way.

Oh and I use my browser, but never have more than two or three tabs open ever, and that only when searching something up.

I have always thought that folks who leave ten "tabs" up on their browsers are 'asking for it' in so many ways.

Reply to
DecadentLinuxUserNumeroUno

On Sat, 01 Aug 2015 03:03:09 -0700, Don Y Gave us:

Bullshit. Back in the "fully grasped full insertion" days maybe, but modern laptops use modern DIMM sockets which have sharp contact points which get impinged upon via the manner in which the DIMM is held and locked in and they have insertion/removal cycle counts numbering in the thousands with no failures.

Reply to
DecadentLinuxUserNumeroUno

On Sat, 01 Aug 2015 03:03:09 -0700, Don Y Gave us:

I think your problem in this regard then is a failure to keep a PC based database, and trying to manage said failure knowledge from memory... human, fallacy ridden memory. Bad retention and bad data rampant with 'cross-over' errors.

Hell, your "re-install Windows" suggestion was a clue that you are clueless in a lot of cases. And it was second on your "list"!

Reply to
DecadentLinuxUserNumeroUno

On Sat, 01 Aug 2015 03:03:09 -0700, Don Y Gave us:

Update logs are easy to examine and sport a link to them right on the update page.

Man, you are just FULL of poor information!

I'd say with you, the problem(s) lie with the "User's helper".

Reply to
DecadentLinuxUserNumeroUno

On Sat, 01 Aug 2015 03:03:09 -0700, Don Y Gave us:

Yeah... his name is usually DonY. "Wonky" from the get-go.

You are 'just too much' man.

You claim to "back up the system" about five times more often than you even need to.

I can 'install' either Windows or Linux or both on a system, THEN run all the updates, then app installs, and THEN make a backup of a completed system.

Far better. Far easier. Never a problem.

Reply to
DecadentLinuxUserNumeroUno

At work I keep at least 20-30 Firefox tabs open at any given time (only two or three on IE). The browser doesn't get closed for months at a time. No problems. I also keep 50 PDFs (maxed out) open with PDF-XChange for months at a time.

Reply to
krw

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