System Hangs

[Porsche]

I have model 1866-6TU, with 1.5 mb of memory. The past two weeks, I have been having a problem with system hangs (apparently ACPIEC error that says "the embedded controller (EC) hardware didn't respond within the timeout period; this may indicate an error in the EC hardware or firmware, or possibly a poorly designed BIOS which accesses the EC in an unsafe manner. The EC driver will retry the failed transaction if possible", according to the Event Viewer). I cannot even restart or make the machine reboot unless I remove both the ac and battery.

These errors happened under bios 1.04, 1.05 as well as the latest 1.06. I am not exactly sure how I can duplicate the problem, but it seems like that the errors happen when I am browsing using IE (not all the time) or when the computer has remained idle for a few minutes (again also not all the time).

I am at a loss. Does anyone else have a similar experience? Thanks.

[jd2020]

I've had the same problem pop up rarely. Tonight was first time I checked event viewer and found same entry -- four in a row. My T43 was unresponsive and screen was blank, though it still recognised a USB drive being inserted/removed!

Does anyone have any ideas?

[Gustavo]

Just sent it in for service. If its an hardware problem then it falls under warranty.

Or you could try to recover the machine and see if the problem resolves.

[christopher_wolf]

It sounds like a hardware problem to me. The only other thing that I can think of is that Windows is getting false positives about a bad BIOS/EC access pairing from a faulty system driver in Windows somewhere. Is this on the IBM preload or an off the shelf, non-OEM copy of Windows XP Professional? Before sending it in, you might want to try a deep restore and watch for that.