X301 128Gb Vista Business Freezes-Requires Hard Reboot

[shfawaz]

I've been using an X301 for a couple weeks now with great results. In the past week, I've experience randoms freezes that come out of nowhere and the only out is to hold down the power button and reboot. I'm using the latest version of Firefox, Thunderbird and Windows Vista Small Business for the most part. I have office 2007 installed. I'm not running any anti-virus.

Anyone else experiencing this? The last time this happened I was watching a video clip with Windows media player with nothing else open, so I can't blame Firefox this time around. It's frustrating when this happen because ctrl-alt-del won't even bring up the task manager, the system simply says the program(s) have stopped responding, although I can press the Windows Key and the start menu pops up. Wierd. I even get a silhouette white screen sometimes when this happens which at this point I know is not good news and the only solution is to hold the power button and reboot.

I also have trouble with Access connections freezing up and becoming unresponsive very often.

Very frustrating. Any help would be appreciated.

[csv96]

Are you running the original Lenovo install or a clean install? Every time I get a new Thinkpad, the first thing I do is wipe the drive and clean install Windows and only the most critical Lenovo drivers and utilities. I haven't had any issues with random freezes.

[shfawaz]

I'm running the original Lenovo pre-load. I understand that it presents bloat, but I simply don't have the time to go through and build my own install, especially with all the time and effort I've spent customizing this preload.

I know allot of people swear by the wipe and re-install procedure, but I'm not fully convinced that starting from scratch and piece-mealing the parts is gonna solve the problem.

I've since updated the bios & all the drivers. No freezes since (it's been almost 5 days) so I'm keeping my fingers crossed that updating to the latest bios has helped.

Fact is, Vista isn't, and never was ready for prime-time. Even the MS Windows 7 presenters at CES whom I interviewed extensively outright admitted that Vista had performance issues and memory management problems that have been thoroughly addressed in Win7. After spending a good hour prodding the poor sap, as well as going through some very long demos, I came to the conclusion that Win7 is actually Vista SP3. And to think MS will sell it as a new OS.

[bluewale]

I had similar random freezes with my X301 (128GB with XP preloaded system). I also encountered the freezing access connection problem. I suspect that it has something to do with the initial file indexing, prefetching, and other (both xp and vista save a lot of data). I followed the instructions on the OCZ forum to disable file indexing and prefetch. I also placed swap file and the temporary internet folder to a ramdisk. The problem disappeared after a few days and nerver resurfaced during the last two months of day to day use.

[shfawaz]

I had similar random freezes with my X301 (128GB with XP preloaded system). I also encountered the freezing access connection problem. I suspect that it has something to do with the initial file indexing, prefetching, and other (both xp and vista save a lot of data). I followed the instructions on the OCZ forum to disable file indexing and prefetch. I also placed swap file and the temporary internet folder to a ramdisk. The problem disappeared after a few days and never resurfaced during the last two months of day to day use.

Do you have a link to those instructions?

[bluewale]

@ http://www.ocztechnologyforum.com/forum ... .php?f=186, you will find the following sticky " Vista 32/64 SSD Windows Registry tweaks ". I did not following all of them since some of them sound a bit too extreme to me.


Hope this will help. Do not forget to disable automatic disk defragmentation in your vista.

[shfawaz]

Thanks. I'll check it out and try it. I just had another freeze after going 3 days without one.

I'm also getting an error message when I try to launch power manager. As soon as I try to launch I get the dialog box telling me that the Power Manager has stopped working with options to look for online solutions or close the program.

Anyone else getting this and or have a solution?

I'm almost ready to give up on Vista. I know there was a reason why I never upgraded any of my machines before now!

[shfawaz]

Thanks. I'll check it out and try it. I just had another freeze after going 3 days without one.

I'm also getting an error message when I try to launch power manager. As soon as I try to launch I get the dialog box telling me that the Power Manager has stopped working with options to look for online solutions or close the program.

Anyone else getting this and or have a solution?

I'm almost ready to give up on Vista. I know there was a reason why I never upgraded any of my machines before now!

I managed to fix the power manager by updating it to the latest version. Now it launches.

I've also turned off auto defragment & indexing on all drives.

We'll see how this helps.

Oh, and I removed the swap disk (page-file) With 4 Gb of Ram I figure this should help isolate the problem even more.

[bluewale]

Hope you won't see system freeze anymore. Photoshop may complain about the missing swap file. You can put it on a Ramdisk.

BTW, I also turned off system restore.

[shfawaz]

I haven't turned off system restore, it comes in handy sometimes. I don't use Photoshop, so there can be no complaints there.

Now we see if these TWEAKS work. I found most if not all the suggestions on OCZ forums pretty well thought out and logical, so I implemented most of them, except turning off System Restore.

I even removed the Service Partion that was taking a whopping 16Gb of hard disk drive space, while using only 25% of it. I never restore to factory defaults so I don't need it.