New T61 Freezing

[Ed H]

I got my New 61 a few days ago. and am having lots of intermittent freezes.

T61 - 6459-CTO
Vista Home Premium
T7500
WXGA 15.4 widescreen
NVIDIA NVS140M
2Gig Ram
160 Gig HD

The only software installed on it now are Kaspersky Internet Security 7 and MS Office/Outlook. I have reinstalled Vista Home Premium a couple of times but the freezes continue. At the moment I have it running in safe mode for a few hours and no freezes so far but this is a very random event so I don't know how to duplicate the problem. Any suggestions?

[KRASH]

It might be the same problem I had: T61 Freeze on battery

Edit: woops

[deeastman]

It might be the same problem I had: T61 Freeze on battery

Link points to wrong thread

[suikoden2003]

http://forum.thinkpads.com/viewtopic.php?t=51908

[Ed H]

Thanks for the link. I have the same symptoms but no turbo memory to fix with driver updates.

The freezing seems to be more frequent on battery than plugged in. I currently have the power plan set to max performance and to never turn off the hard disk. This seems to have cut down on the frequency of the freezes but they are still there. I have had 5 already today. Pretty annoying after coming from a stable, but slow, T30.

[eyecon82]

so you do or do not have turbo memory?

if not..just try turning off the APS
if so, do what i said in the thread link given above

[bdmclacken]

Others here have recommended some changes which may help based on your symptoms. I hope those work because they are straightforward changes which have helped fixed other's systems apparently. If not, there is also a way for you to try to diagnose the problem yourself if you're adventurous.
I think that even as opaque as a Windows type Blue Screens can be, you'd probably prefer to have a BSOD occur here instead of a freeze/hang? Even BSOD's can give a clue to a faulty .sys file that you could trace back to something like your video or sound driver or something, and then reinstall or update that component (or maybe just uninstall/disable it). Freeze/hang type events can be difficult to diagnose because they leave no such trace behind after you hard reset the system.
You might try googling this term- CrashOnCtrlScroll. I learned about it while diagnosing a software problem for the company I work for years ago. You'll find this is a registry change dating from Windows 2000 where you could force a BSOD on a system that was hung. The purpose of generating the BSOD on top of the hang is to try to figure out which component stopped, or hung, causing the system to freeze (it would be some sort of kernel mode component)
The way it works is, you'd add the registry value CrashOnCtrlScroll to your system now and reboot while the system is fine. You'd then wait until your next freeze event, and then do the keyboard combo (you'll read about that with the notes on CrashOnCtrlScroll) to cause a blue screen to occur from the freeze event. Assuming this part works, your machine will start to go through a BSOD (though your screen might just go black or something), and when your machine finishes the memory.dmp and reboots, you can find the memory.dmp file in your C:\ drive, and diagnose it using a tool like Windbg (Google that, download it and install it).
When you open the memory.dmp file using Windbg, try running a command like this-
!analyze -v
(make sure to include the leading bang or ! character) and it may show you which driver was responsible for the hung system.
This would be proper way of diagnosing the system on the way to fixing the actual problem (which Lenovo, or Nvidia, or Microsoft, or whomever should be undertaking). On the other hand, maybe you've just got bad memory or a problem in your system board too. But hopefully not those, just a simple software glitch. I'd try to operate without the AV software for now myself.
One final note. I haven't had to diagnose a hang for a long time now, certainly not since Vista was out, so I'm not sure this value still works. Most likely it will. Give it a try, it won't hurt anything trying it, and you might just successfully diagnose/fix your own problem.

[eyecon82]

for those who have turbo me related freezes

it looks like intel posted a new turbo mem driver with an updated matrix storage driver...my system actually boots up 10s faster...it may seem that intel has finally fixed this issue!!!!!!!!!

[Ed H]

so you do or do not have turbo memory?

if not..just try turning off the APS
if so, do what i said in the thread link given above

No turbo memory here. What is the APS you suggest turning off?

[eyecon82]

active protection system...the so called "airbag"

[Ed H]

active protection system...the so called "airbag"

Thanks...I have turned off APS so hopefully that will fix the problem. I am curious what the issue is with APS that would cause a freeze. My wife also has a T61 with no freeze issues at all. She has a little slower processor (T7300 vs T7500) and integrated graphics vs discrete for me. Otherwise, the machines are the same.

[eyecon82]

let us know how it goes...if you have the hybrid power saving option enabled in power management under the harddisk..disable that as well..

looks like we're almost neighbors! bloomingdale is just a few miles from schaumburg

[Ed H]

Unfortunately, I am still getting freezes on battery. Any other ideas?

[Ed H]

snipped

bdmclacken...thanks for the suggestion. I did Google this topic but when I went into Regedit, there was no appropriate registry entry to modify. This apparently does not apply to Vista.

[bdmclacken]

Hello,

The value may need to be added if it isn't already there (and unless you've added it before, it won't be).

I put the registry value in myself the other day but hadn't actually tried triggering a BSOD until I saw your post. I just tried it out here on my T60 now running Vista Bus 64bit and it still works. My machine wasn't actually frozen, but the command did bring on a BSOD directly.

Oh, and if you're docked and using an external keyboard the Right Ctrl- Double Scroll command probably won't work when you freeze up, at least from the remote KB. Make sure to do that combo right on the local TP keyboard. I think we had problems activating it in some places where they used KVMs on their servers and we had to plug keyboards in the machines and leave them til they froze.

Good luck, hope you figure out what the cause is.

[Ed H]

I was still having issues with freezes and reloading Vista Home Premium from the service partition the last time seemed to make it worse. It was regularly freezing on AC or battery. It got so bad I called Lenovo and they are sending a box so I can send it to the depot for service.

Previously, I had just been using the pre-configured power plans and had fewer freezes on max performance settings than on power saver settings. Earlier today I created a custom new power plan with all settings geared towards max performance and I have not had any freezes since. It has only been a few hours but that is unusual for my T61. Any others with the same experiences?