Intermittent Freezing

EchoFox · 18 Jun 2010 at 00:37

My IBM ThinkPad T43p has a problem. It will freeze at random intervals, and then become responsive again. Keyboard, monitor, mouse; the whole thing.

I thought it could be the HDD, but I have run a chkdsk /f /r to no avail - no bad sectors reported.

Any ideas?

EchoFox · 18 Jun 2010 at 01:46

Oh, Notebook Hardware Control says the CPU temp is around 50.

(Just playing a 720p YouTube video now, and it's stabilised at 78-80 degrees C. Stopping that immediately drops it back down to 50. I think it's normal.)

EchoFox · 18 Jun 2010 at 20:28

Yeah I downloaded memtest yesterday and have been meaning to run it. Will get on that later.

oh, possibly related symptom. The laptop occasionally randomly reported that hardware had been disconnected by playing the Windows hardware ejection sound effect. I removed my PCMCIA and ExpressCard devices, and I'm hoping that's the cause of that.

EchoFox · 19 Jun 2010 at 19:53

Right. I have a long story.

Old IBM ThinkPad T4x series laptops, but (in my experience) particularly the T41/42 models have this problem where the GPU disconnects at seemingly random intervals from the motherboard because the solder breaks. I think mine has that problem.

I didn't think of it before because I have never, ever, ever seen a report of a ThinkPad T43p like mine suffering from a bad solder.

I figured I'd need to reflow the solder, which would suck, so instead I ran 3DMark05 Pro on near the highest possible settings, and I planned to do it for a few hours and then turn off the PC. Well, I didn't have to wait that long. It went to sleep on its own because it was so hot.

I then let it sit for a while. Fingers crossed that fixed the solder. So far so good, anyway.

If it does happen again, I will try removing one of my sticks of RAM as you, Avonvilla, suggest. I did run memtest+ to be help rule out the RAM as a culprit, and it completed one pass with no errors. It was 90% through the second pass when I decided it was 4am and probably time to go to bed.

EchoFox · 20 Jun 2010 at 17:16

Right, the issue cropped up again, as well as the hardware ejection thing, so I removed the 1GB RAM from under the bottom of the machine. Problems still occurring, I could still remove the stick from under the keyboard.

I noticed a weird thing though. The system stopped responding when I press down on the lower right portion of the palm rest, and then when I remove my hand it continues like nothing happened. I've done it, reliably, several times. That's where the HDD is. Maybe something's up with that. Or it could be to do with the palmrest connection, since it house the fingerprint scanner, mouse pad and buttons.

I really have no idea what the hell's going on here!