Laptop locks up periodically

[Kapav]

Hi everyone. I've been having issues lately where my laptop locks up. I have a dual boot setup with Ubuntu and Windows 7. In Windows 7, my laptop will at times become very slow and unresponsive; my mouse still moves, but I can't interact with much. If I minimize a window, that window stays up but becomes transparent and unresponsive. Ctrl alt delete just leads to a black screen with a mouse cursor I can move. In Ubuntu a similar thing will happen, where sometimes I'll have times where my mouse can move, but I can't type or interact with anything. The cursor will adjust to the correct icon (hand when holding and dragging a window, though the window won't move, or the uppercase i shape when over text) but again no interaction. These lockup periods can last seconds or minutes, with intervals between them also varying. I assume because there are similar problems for both OSs that there's a hardware problem but I don't know what. Has anyone else experienced anything like this? I replaced my HDD with an SSD to try and fix it but no dice, a clean install of only Ubuntu 14.04 still has the issue.

 

[VirtualLarry]

Honestly, that sounds like a SATA storage timeout issue. You say that you replaced a HDD with an SSD, and it's still doing it? That's weird.

 

[ylin0811]

Maybe the laptop is overheating? Does the laptop feel extremely hot underneath? Download hwmonitor or hwinfo and see what the temperature is at for the cpu.

 

[Kapav]

I ran memtest over night and when I woke up I found that my laptop had shutdown because it overheated. Before I went to sleep I saw that it had gone through 2 passes without errors but I don't know what happened after that. I monitor my temperatures regularly and the freezing doesn't seem to directly correlate with super high temperatures but there might be a relationship there.

 

[ylin0811]

The sensor might not be accurate. I would open up the laptop and re-apply the thermal paste. Give this a try.

 

[John Connor]

Dust it out too.

 

[corkyg]

Cleaning out dust and dirt will probably do more good than messing around with replacing thermal paste. That can create worse problems in a laptop.

 

[Kapav]

Thanks everyone, I'll open my laptop up and completely and dust it out. If the problem still happens I'll try putting in some new thermal paste.

 

[C1]

If it is an Intel processor you are using then they employ a safety feature in which they slow down when over heated (vs AMDs which are notorious for destroying themselves).

To test the heating theory, just aim at close range (eg, like 6 inches away) a house fan turned to high speed while you run the laptop and see if you can still make it freeze up.

If by chance it runs okay, then you should plan on tearing the whole unit down, clean it out (including cpu fan) & re-compound all the heat sinks using arctic silver. While your there, it is actually best to replace the cpu fan as well as the BIOS battery too.