Laptop issue, might need a new one

[easysurfer]

Would it help to open the task manager now, and keep it visible? If it freezes, there might be a clue on the frozen task manager?

-ERD50

Maybe. I usually just use task manager to kill a frozen program. But in Omni's case, once something freezes, only thing that seems to work is moving the mouse around.

 

[easysurfer]

Wonderful! Maybe the laptop just needed some attention/TLC, scratching behind the ears and so on... Or maybe all the pocking and prodding jiggled a connection or a slightly off soldering point where it now makes good contact. Best wishes for a prolonged cure.

Just a theory, but perhaps there was an automatic update that cleared up the problem. Seems like the issue may have been running gmail with a browser. I know sometimes, I open Firefox and it automatically updates. So, perhaps something like this happened and fixed whatever was wrong. Yet, gmail not working when the freeze happened may just be coincidence.

As long as the laptop works, the final answer could be "something happened" to fix the problem.

 

[gauss]

Did anything in the ambient environment change in the past couple of days?

IE. Turned on central air conditioning in the house or something like that?

-gauss

 

[omni550]

Did anything in the ambient environment change in the past couple of days?

IE. Turned on central air conditioning in the house or something like that?

-gauss

I had turned on the a/c a few days ago. But it was still having freezing episodes with the a/c on.

No other changes that I'm aware of.

 

[gauss]

I had turned on the a/c a few days ago. But it was still having freezing episodes with the a/c on.

No other changes that I'm aware of.

If after a certain amount of time you feel good that it is fixed, you might want to then leave it out in the garage for something like 24-48 hours and then repeat your tests out there.

The idea would be then to check and see if the problem returns with the laptop soaked under hot and humid conditions.

-gauss

 

[omni550]

If after a certain amount of time you feel good that it is fixed, you might want to then leave it out in the garage for something like 24-48 hours and then repeat your tests out there.

The idea would be then to check and see if the problem returns with the laptop soaked under hot and humid conditions.

-gauss

You read my mind. [emoji106][emoji41]

 

[omni550]

Status update...

Although I was gone for most of the day, I left the laptop on...and it "woke up" when I touched it upon my return.

So it's been on for 20.5 hrs., with gmail open in a tab for ~8 of those hours.

So far, so good.

Again, my deepest thanks to everyone for all the suggestions, guidance, and encouragement. Couldn't have done it without y'all.


omni

 

[easysurfer]

Hi Omni,

Just checking...laptop still symptom free?

 

[SecondCor521]

Any other engineers getting itchy that the problem seems to have fixed itself?

When I was working and fixing issues, I learned over time that problems usually don't fix themselves, so even if a problem went away at work, I always thought it was best practice to try to go back and reproduce the problem, root cause it, and figure out why it went away. When we said "Oh well, that's nice", the problem usually came back and bit us later.

Of course that was in a commercial enterprise setting. With a personal laptop and things like Windows Update where there are outside influences on the environment, shrugging and moving on is a very reasonable option.

 

[target2019]

1) I was expecting the toshiba utility would find something, if hardware. Wasn't run, so will never know. Unless it breaks again, and utility is run.
2) Recently mentioned by someone, I also was thinking of an update gone bad, causing a disk read error. That can eventually fix itself. I mentioned that SPECCY would have S.M.A.R.T status reading. Never heard back about that one.
3) Getting to this part of "the troubleshooting game," I am thinking of electrical power. This would include the connection at both end of power adapter. Also look at whether this could relate to a power strip or UPS fault. To make it more fun, let's look for brownouts from the utility. Or some transient occurrence in the house (pump, ac, other large draw).

 

[Jerry1]

Any other engineers getting itchy that the problem seems to have fixed itself?

It drives me crazy when things like this happen. Usually, it's my car that finds a way to fix itself the day I take it in for service. In this case, I can understand why omni would not want to spend any more time trouble shooting this issue. I would however, invoke a best practices program of backups and restore points. Odds are pretty good that it will appear again, and most likely at an inopportune time.


Thanks to omni for letting us in on a group fix of trouble shooting. Hopefully, something like an update did actually fix whatever was going on. I sure hope so.

 

[NW-Bound]

With buggy software, anything is possible.

And then, it could be hardware too. With a total number of several billion transistors in a PC, if just one transistor is getting flaky, the problem will not manifest itself every day, or every time you use it. That flaky transistor may just lay dormant, and bites you another day.

In a homebrew project, I recently had an inadvertent wiring short that applied 12V onto a microcontroller input pin that takes 3.3V max (that's the supply voltage to the chip). The board suddenly was not working right, and reported an off-scale analog voltage that the MCU was measuring correctly earlier. And when probing around to troubleshoot I saw that hair-raising high voltage on an input pin.

What totally amazed me was that the short did not fry the chip instantaneously as it should. Instead, when the wiring short was fixed, the whole board went back to working as normal.

A week or so later, the MCU went dead suddenly. I believe it was a latent failure caused by the over-voltage stress earlier.

PS. Earlier, I had accidentally stressed one MCU in a similar manner by applying a high voltage on one of its input pins. That killed that input, but the rest still worked. So, I put that MCU aside for use in some projects that will not need that input.

Took that out a month or so later to look at it. The whole chip was dead as a doornail.

 

[omni550]

Hi Omni,

Just checking...laptop still symptom free?

Thanks for checking.

I was hoping to post an "I'm cautiously optimistic that things are back to normal" post this evening, but......

It's been "on" for 3 days and running flawlessly. About an hour ago, I remembered that I'd never changed the BIOS boot-up order back from USB to HDD, so I went in and changed the order...which put the laptop through a boot-up. Things were running fine and then...IT FROZE!... just like it had been doing last week.

I wasn't keeping notes, so I can't be sure if it was at the usual 40-42 min. mark, but I'll bet it was darn close. I had to do the usual hard depress of the power button to get it to shut off. I started it back up 22 minutes ago and am now waiting to see what happens. Will report back...

omni

 

[easysurfer]

Thanks for checking. I was hoping to post an "I'm cautiously optimistic that things are back to normal" post this evening, but......

It's been "on" for 3 days and running flawlessly.

About an hour ago, I remembered that I'd never changed the BIOS boot-up order back from USB to HDD, so I went in and changed the order...which put the laptop through a boot-up. Things were running fine and then...IT FROZE!... just like it had been doing last week.

(I wasn't keeping notes, so I can't be sure if it was at the usual 40-42 min. mark, but I'll bet it was darn close.) I had to do the usual hard depress of the power button to get it to shut off. I started it back up 22 minutes ago and am now waiting to see what happens.

omni

I was hoping that things would still be humming alone fine still for you. Unfortunately, I see the freezing symptom has returned.

Hope I didn't jinx things .

 

[omni550]

Thanks for checking.

I was hoping to post an "I'm cautiously optimistic that things are back to normal" post this evening, but......

It's been "on" for 3 days and running flawlessly. About an hour ago, I remembered that I'd never changed the BIOS boot-up order back from USB to HDD, so I went in and changed the order...which put the laptop through a boot-up. Things were running fine and then...IT FROZE!... just like it had been doing last week.

I wasn't keeping notes, so I can't be sure if it was at the usual 40-42 min. mark, but I'll bet it was darn close. I had to do the usual hard depress of the power button to get it to shut off. I started it back up 22 minutes ago and am now waiting to see what happens. Will report back...

omni

Well, it just froze again...right at the 42 minute mark. [emoji16]

I had a couple of glasses of wine with dinner, so I'm not really into troubleshooting at the moment.

Tomorrow, should I go back up thread and start doing the suggested steps that were listed somewhere mid-thread...or have some new ideas come to mind? Please post.

omni

 

[easysurfer]

Well, it just froze again...right at the 42 minute mark. [emoji16]

I had a couple of glasses of wine with dinner, so I'm not really into troubleshooting at the moment.

Tomorrow, should I go back up thread and start doing the suggested steps that were listed somewhere mid-thread...or have some new ideas come to mind? Please post.

omni

Were you ever able to make a backup of your data and current system to an external drive?

 

[ejman]

Thanks for checking.

I was hoping to post an "I'm cautiously optimistic that things are back to normal" post this evening, but......

It's been "on" for 3 days and running flawlessly. About an hour ago, I remembered that I'd never changed the BIOS boot-up order back from USB to HDD, so I went in and changed the order...which put the laptop through a boot-up. Things were running fine and then...IT FROZE!... just like it had been doing last week.

I wasn't keeping notes, so I can't be sure if it was at the usual 40-42 min. mark, but I'll bet it was darn close. I had to do the usual hard depress of the power button to get it to shut off. I started it back up 22 minutes ago and am now waiting to see what happens. Will report back...

omni

OK so, it would seem that either the HDD itself or the software in the HDD is the cause of the freeze up no? I guess one conclusion is the Laptop motherboard itself is OK. A 500 GB HDD is cheap Like $20 or so but I'd recommended a SSD you'd be amazed at the speed improvement. I put in a 250GB SSD in my ancient I3 Asus laptop and the thing is a speed demon now!

 

[SecondCor521]

It's been "on" for 3 days and running flawlessly.

[...]

I went in and changed the order.

[...]

then...IT FROZE!

have some new ideas come to mind?

My suggestion now is that there it freezes when the boot order is set the way you had it set when it froze, so you should go back in and change the boot order back the way it was when it wasn't freezing.

It seems as though you did an A/B/A test and accidentally found a toggle. Toggle it back and make the problem go away!

Now of course why the boot order should cause your computer to freeze is an interesting question, and you can troubleshoot that further if you like. It could be a software timing issue, or an odd hardware issue.

...

We once had a hardware problem at work when we were developing a new product. I could reproduce an issue in my cube, and so I started swapping out components to isolate the issue. I swapped out the motherboard - didn't follow the motherboard. I swapped out the debug station - didn't follow that. I swapped out power cords - didn't follow that. I swapped out a few more things - didn't follow them. We eventually figured out that the quality of the electricity in my cube was different than the quality of the electricity in my neighbor's cube, and so the issue only would reproduce in that one location.

The point of the story is that if the problem follows something faithfully and regularly, then that must be the root of the problem, even if you can't always figure out why.

Good luck. I hope you enjoyed the wine!

 

[easysurfer]

My suggestion now is that there it freezes when the boot order is set the way you had it set when it froze, so you should go back in and change the boot order back the way it was when it wasn't freezing.

It seems as though you did an A/B/A test and accidentally found a toggle. Toggle it back and make the problem go away!

Now of course why the boot order should cause your computer to freeze is an interesting question, and you can troubleshoot that further if you like. It could be a software timing issue, or an odd hardware issue.

...

Yes, good idea about setting the boot order back to the way it was when the freezing. That should help determine if the bios setting and symptoms is a cause and effect just a coincidence.

My have to try to toggle, a few times to see if there is a pattern. Change bios. Let run a few days. Change bios again. Let run a few days. Change again and observe what happens each time.

 

[Sunset]

OP - when the boot order is USB first, is it still booting from the HD and the only difference is the actual order of boot ??

 

[bjorn2bwild]

The relevant variable is that the computer was rebooted, not the boot order. The freezing problem surfaced before the boot order was changed. BTW, it is fine to leave CD/DVD in the first boot order position, all my computers are set this way.
There is a processing bottleneck/wall at ~40min. in. That is the mystery that needs to be solved. Better to test than to speculate.

 

[Sunset]

The computer when booted with USB as first in boot order ran for 3 days, when booted as HD first boot order it froze in 42 min.
Originally computer froze in 42 min when rebooted and it was in HD first boot order.

Slowing down the booting my be giving the computer time to do all the sequential steps needed in booting.
Perhaps OP's bios has a setting to slow down the boot to achieve the same thing.

I had this problem with a computer once, where the speed of the booting was the cause of problems.

 

[bjorn2bwild]

The computer when booted with USB as first in boot order ran for 3 days, when booted as HD first boot order it froze in 42 min.
Originally computer froze in 42 min when rebooted and it was in HD first boot order.

Slowing down the booting my be giving the computer time to do all the sequential steps needed in booting.
Perhaps OP's bios has a setting to slow down the boot to achieve the same thing.

I had this problem with a computer once, where the speed of the booting was the cause of problems.

If switching to USB as first boot solves the problem, that is a simple fix. Puzzling, but simple...... and easy to test.

 

[target2019]

1) I was expecting the toshiba utility would find something, if hardware. Wasn't run, so will never know. Unless it breaks again, and utility is run.
2) Recently mentioned by someone, I also was thinking of an update gone bad, causing a disk read error. That can eventually fix itself. I mentioned that SPECCY would have S.M.A.R.T status reading. Never heard back about that one.
3) Getting to this part of "the troubleshooting game," I am thinking of electrical power. This would include the connection at both end of power adapter. Also look at whether this could relate to a power strip or UPS fault. To make it more fun, let's look for brownouts from the utility. Or some transient occurrence in the house (pump, ac, other large draw).

In addition to the above ideas:
1) the coin battery for BIOS settings should be a simple replacement.
2) BIOS itself come to mind. Has the BIOS ever been updated? Check Toshiba for that.

 

[omni550]

The relevant variable is that the computer was rebooted, not the boot order. The freezing problem surfaced before the boot order was changed. BTW, it is fine to leave CD/DVD in the first boot order position, all my computers are set this way.
There is a processing bottleneck/wall at ~40min. in. That is the mystery that needs to be solved. Better to test than to speculate.

BINGO...we have a winnah! I had left the computer on/running for ~3 days without rebooting. Changing the BIOS boot order caused the laptop to reboot itself. This put it back into the "~42 min. of-running-then-freeze" mode.

omni