L412 Freezes

[BarnBurner]

My faithful T40 served me well for many years, despite some rocky beginnings, but the old beast was just not cutting the mustard anymore in regards to its performance. I needed something faster and more capable. So enter a new Thinkpad. I was on a tight budget, so I went with a L412 because it met my requirements and it was affordable.

Now I'm having buyers remorse due to an issue I've been having lately. The issue is that the system will completely and totally freeze. No cursor movement, no response at all. If there's audio playing, it will stick, nothing moves on the screen. You get the picture, total lock up. The only way to recover is to press and hold the power button to shut it down and reboot it.

Unfortunately, I'm not sure what exactly causes this issue, but it behaves like it's a thermal problem. For instance, I watched several YouTube videos. It was fine after about 5 videos. On the 6th video, about midway through, it freezes. I reboot, resume watching the video (after checking the event viewer, to no avail) and maybe 30 seconds later, it freezes again. I reboot, go back to the video and try to watch it again. Same deal as before, it freezes. I reboot again, this time with speedfan open so I can monitor the temperatures, and it freezes again like before. But the temperatures didn't seem too high to me, around 50C or so. Maybe 55C at one point, but never above that.

But the experiment isn't repeatable. I can watch several videos and it won't freeze. Sometimes, I'm not watching videos at all, but simply working inside a VM. Recently, all I was doing was playing KNetWalk inside a fedora VM (VirtualBox) and it froze. The only other thing I had open was a Firefox instance.

My system is fully up to date with the latest drivers, BIOS updates, etc.

I'd appreciate any light anyone can shed on this issue. Since this was an eBay purchase, I think a warranty claim is out of the question. The seller claimed it's still under warranty, but I wouldn't have thought that was transferable.

If you need any more information, just ask. The specs for the machine can be found in my signature.

[mariol90]

Check your warranty here: http://support.lenovo.com/en_US/product ... fault.page?
warranties are transferable.

you can try some stress tests, if the computer freezes that may be the culprit.
this is a good GPU stress test: http://www.ozone3d.net/benchmarks/fur/
and CPU: http://www.xtremesystems.org/forums/sho ... -interface
the computer may get very hot, but it should not freeze during either.

memtest may also be good to try: http://www.memtest.org/

does the computer ever freeze when you're only doing very light work like web browsing (no flash) or using office programs?

[BarnBurner]

Thanks for the warranty link, I didn't think warranties would transfer. Apparently the machine is still under warranty.

I've run Prime95 on the machine for a few hours and it didn't freeze. I've also run memtest86+ for several passes and it never freezes or reports errors. I'll give furmark a try next.

does the computer ever freeze when you're only doing very light work like web browsing (no flash) or using office programs?

Not normally, no.

[mariol90]

I would try removing the video drivers and removing flash, rebooting, and reinstalling both. flash probably isn't the issue but it's worth a try. since it doesn't sound like a hardware issue, i'd say it would have to be a driver problem or some other setting.

if you can't figure it out still, you may have to back up all your data and do a complete restore. if the problem continues you could send it to lenovo then, or send it to them so they can restore/test it. hopefully someone else here comes along and finds another thing to try.

[BarnBurner]

I would try removing the video drivers and removing flash, rebooting, and reinstalling both. flash probably isn't the issue but it's worth a try. since it doesn't sound like a hardware issue, i'd say it would have to be a driver problem or some other setting

I've already tried all that.

I ran Furmark for a few hours and it didn't freeze. Then I tried running Furmark and Prime95 at the same time, still didn't freeze. Really stuck at this point. I'd like to narrow down the problem before I make any warranty claim.

[mariol90]

have you tried a linux live CD? also try enabling/disabling virtualization in your BIOS and see if you have the same problem watching videos (even in a VM).

this may be a bit concerning and you may have better luck than i'm having, but lenovo seems to be having a huge lack of parts for the SL series. i've been waiting nearly 3 weeks for an SL400 LCD (14.1" WXGA, not very rare...) and an SL410/SL510/L412/L512/L410/L510 DVD burner.

[BarnBurner]

I haven't had it freeze under Linux (I have it installed on a USB drive), but I also haven't had it freeze under Windows for a few weeks now. Since I don't know exactly what causes the problem, testing for it is difficult. It happened frequently when watching YouTube videos one time, but how many videos seems to be part of the equation. I've watched several videos since then and had no issue at all.

[Khavvie]

If you are suffering freezing issues, none of the above is causing the problem. It seems that a lot of OS installs that were done by the recovery media are deemed dodgy. I'd recommend using CCleaner just to clear out any remaining invalid registry entries after reinstalling.

The system you have isn't the only sufferer, I have an SL510 that had the issue. I tried swapping RAM sticks around, worked until the other freeze. I did a clean install of Windows 7 Ultimate, turns out it didn't freeze. Up until 6 months ago I discovered the OS Lenovo preinstalled was riddled with registry errors. So running CCleaner to delete the invalid ones made the issue disappear and there was no freezing.