Netbook freezes randomly

How to make your A0751h Acer Aspire One freeze with firefox

Open up your Firefox browser to...

http://www.playtool.com/pages/prime95/prime95.html

Make sure all your other programs are closed. On my machine, (since it's a fresh install) the McAfee pops up on the bottom left hand corner and says...
"Your Computer is not fully protected. Please check your protection status in McAfee SecurityCenter and fix any problems."
Make sure you "Close" this also. If you don't close this, it will NOT freeze.

Now stroll 'up' and 'down' the page with the 'up' and 'down' arrow button on your keyboard. Do this and it should freeze within 1 minute. When I say stroll up and down, you have to continuously press either the 'up' or 'down' button so the screen is actually scrolling until it freezes.

 

I ran the Prime95 for over 30 hours. No errors reported.

 

Steve,
Did Acer actually repair your netbook correctly?

 

Not got it back yet - will hopefully find out tomorrow!

 

How to make your A0751h Acer Aspire One freeze with Prime95

On my previous post, I stated I ran Prime95 for over 30 hours and it did not report any problems. Well I just did a second round and my A0751 netbook froze in 11 hours. There is something I did different to make it freeze. Let me explain.....

First, I need to summarize something I posted earlier regarding.....how to make your netbook freeze with the Firefox or Opera browser. One thing I stated when making your netbook freeze is to make sure your that if you get the McAfee pops up on the bottom left hand corner that says...
"Your Computer is not fully protected. Please check your protection status in McAfee SecurityCenter and fix any problems."
Make sure you "Close" this also. If you don't close this, it will NOT freeze.

When you run Prime95, this McAfee pop-up like to reappear consistently. So I had to totally remove the whole McAfee program so this pop-up won't come back. I then ran the Prime95 and my netbook froze in 11 hours. I ran it a 2nd time and it froze in 11 hours also.

UPDATE: I ran the Prime95 a 3rd time and it doesn't freeze anymore. However, the netbook still freezes in all my other applications. Therefore the Prime95 isn't the best indicator of the netbook freezing.

 

Guess I"ll try running Prime 95 when I get a chance. Of course if it freezes before then I"ll be calling Acer back!!

villasbill

 

Re: How to make your A0751h Acer Aspire One freeze with Prim

I've never been a fan of McAfee (or Norton/Symantec). My guess (and it is a guess) is that McAfee is grabbing too many CPU cycles for Prime95 to run quickly enough to force the error to be seen.

It's an interesting observation though, and perhaps the advice should be to run Prime95 with as little else running as possible.

Cheers,

Steve.

 

MY netbook has just arrived back from repair today. The diagnosis and repair details are as follows:

"The unit was fitted with an old revision mainboard which was found to have a weakness regard system stability under extremely heavy loading. A new revision mainboard has been fitted to the unit and has been tested with a program called Orthos (based on Prime95). The unit now works fine."

I guess that acknowledges there's a potential fault on a particular revision of mainboard. I guess the question is how to determine the revision without having to take the machine apart, or suffer potential data lose with a freeze?

I'm running the Prime95 test again, and will report back my findings once it has been running for a while.

Cheers,

Steve.


[UPDATE]
The machine froze after a few hours whilst running Prime95. I was messing around pairing a new Bluetooth mouse at the same time, so I'll give it the benefit of the doubt for now, and chalk that one up as a "glitch". I'm running Prime95 again now, and will simply leave it to get on with it, and see how it gets on.

 

It's been many months and problems still occur in this model.

Best solution - REPLACE or SELL them if you can

 

That's just passing the problem on to somebody else. It's Acer's responsibility to ensure that these machines are reliable, despite the hassle that it's causing to us as owners.

Cheers,

Steve.

 

Orthos does not cause my Netbook to freeze. However, it still freezes in all my other applications.

 

I've just completed 24 hours of Prime95 blend torture test without any errors which would have been impossible prior to the repair.

Hopefully this now spells the end of my freezing problems.

Good luck to everyone else.

Cheers,

Steve.

 

That really is good news for you.

I for myself have not been very successful so far. Mine has gone back to Acer (2nd time) and come back, supposedly "repaired". The repair report is completely ambiguous and really does not tell me what was done. I called Acer to see if they could tell me but the upshot is that it was diagnosed to have a driver problem and the unit was set back to factory settings, tested for 5+ hrs (no mention on how) - and then mailed back to me.

So, a driver issue - hmm.

So I look at the drivers that are now on there and there are updated versions available on the Acer Web page for almost all key components. Nevertheless, I run Prime95 on the "fixed" computer with the drivers that supposedly don't cause any conflicts - and it does not take long for the first error to be reported. Just to make sure I spool back an image from before I sent it to Acer recently - and I get errors as well.

I really don't want to spend many hours taking Acer's factory reset version, download all the updates, update all the drivers (after all, that is what one is supposed to do when the manufacturer releases new drivers, right?), uninstall all the games and other stuff that the the 751 comes loaded with, then install the software I actually use on this machine - only to then end up with the same settings and drivers that I had on there before I sent it off - and most likely with the same freezes.

I will now need to find another way of getting this issue resolved. I have given going through Level 1 support and the official channels a fair go and hit a brick wall.

Steve, do you mind PM'ing me the reference number of your last repair claim, I may need to pull that card out of my sleeve during my inquiries. Did I read you are in the UK?

 

I would have thought the easiest thing for you to do would be to switch the hard disks over. If the problem follows the hard disk then it's either drivers or a faulty hard disk, if it sticks with the machine, then it's pretty much got to be a hardware problem.

I am in the UK, and a copy of my Acer repair report is available from http://www.marzens.com/files/AcerRepairReport.pdf - it includes my case number, and the part they replaced.

Cheers,

Steve.

 

Steve,
That is awesome. Did you run the prime95 without any anti-virus? My computer is at Acer for the 3rd time. I should get it back sometime next week and I will post the results. I'm so tired of sending it to them even though they are paying the postage.

 

Yes, no anti-virus installed while Prime95 was running.

Cheers,

Steve.

 

I was looking at this thread the other day and thought the same thing, how many of you are running these tests with the Acer-provided anti-virus systems running? I'm under the impression that a lot of you are still using Macafee as per the factory settings. It's a well known problem causer. I'd suggest anyone who's got this issue and is running the Prim95 tests to uninstall or at least disable any antivirus systems while running it. Then there's always the standard nugget of wisdom that states when diagnosing this sort of bug that you must not have anything else running in the background at all.

If you are bypassing your A/V systems to run the tests then I appologise for stating the obvious

 

Thank you so much for that, Steve.
I have done the swap over with the RAM modules but had not done the HDDs yet. Mainly because I don't think it is a HDD problem. Nevertheless, I just swapped them and the two of them are sitting there now busy calculating prime numbers.
The surprising thing was that one of them had a Hitachi HDD, the other one a Seagate. They were both bought at the same shop, maybe 4-6 weeks apart.
I'll report back on the results.

In the meantime I am working on climbing the hierarchy tree inside Acer's support. Until now I had no problem with using the official channels of support. I think I have exhausted this avenue and I will need to try something else now. I wish myself good luck there
I'll keep you posted.

 

Ran Prime95 blend test two different times.The first time I disabled as much coverage as possible in Mcafee and closed out Mcafee processes in Task Manager but they kept popping back open by themselves. CPU usage was about 65-70% during the test and I found it locked up after about 17 hours,although the Prime icon in taskbar was still green and there were no errors indicated in the main window.Prior to the freeze was getting Mcafee popup windows every couple of hours and I would close them.
The second time I ran it in SafeMode,there were only 2 Mcafee processes running instead of the normal 6 or 7,and about 10 Windows processes instead of the normal 30 or so.This time the CPU load was 100%--I was still getting Mcafee popups but not as many and the load was still 100% during the popups.Ran it for 27 hours with no errors or freezes.
In a few weeks when I change over to NIS I"ll try running Prime95 again when I uninstall Mcafee but before I install Norton.

villasbill

 

Quick report back. I swapped the HDD on my two 751. Same result. The one that has the freeze problem still shows errors in prime95, the other one does not. So its fair to assume the HDD is not the culprit.

As far as Prime95 is concerned, this is quite a nice page about it: http://www.playtool.com/pages/prime95/prime95.html. Answers a lot of questions. The main thing I got out of it was this:

"Note that on some computers running some versions of Prime95, the blend test allocates more memory than can fit into the physical RAM in the computer. When that happens, Windows has to use virtual memory and the test ends up accessing the hard disk a lot. That ruins the test because the CPU isn't doing anything while it is waiting for the hard disk to access the data whereas the test is really supposed to be keeping the CPU busy at all times in order to stress it. You can tell that the test isn't working properly if the hard disk activity light is on most of the time. When the blend test is running properly, the hard disk is only accessed occasionally."

When I run the blend test on my machines in the default setting (I have only 1GM RAM in them), Prime95 allocates 759MP of memory by default. That seems just a little bit much as I see one of the two CPU threads is always running sun 100% and the HDD light flashes a lot. So I reduced the Allocated RAM to 700MB and from that moment on the CPUs sit it 100% with hardly any HDD activity.

As to the AV discussion I can only say that one of the first things I did when unpacking the new 751s was uninstall a lot of the bloatware it came with. The MA AV and security pack was gone before it even had time to properly pop up for the first few times asking me for my credit card . I replaced it with my preferred AV software which I have never disabled during the Prime95 testing. One 751 keeps reporting problems, the other one does not - identical (truly identical) setup as far as drivers and main software are concerned. It all points to a hardware problem, at least on the one that I have problems with.