S96J - Periodic Freezing

2 days without issue, now happened again.

Wasn't doing anything, totally idle. Moved the mouse from not using for about 10 min, mouse moved a few pixels and boom. Lockup.

WONDERFUL.


Logs= nada, nothing for the time that it froze on.

 

I've spoken to a few co-workers. They all believe it's an audio driver issue.
I removed the old drivers, updated with the ones direct from manufacturer. Will see what happens. If this doesn't fix it... time for the 'ol fdisk.

 

You guys are damping my enthusiasm(sp?) of getting my Z96Js today......

Has any one disabled or deinstalled the drivers for the audio and left it that way and see if the problem persist?

Jeff

 

On my W7j, I swear I disabled the CD-rom in the device manager and never had freezing again.

 

Well, I need the CD-ROM drive unfortunately - but what sort of freezes were you getting? This thing is so intermittent it won't happen for weeks then it'll happen 5 times in one night...very annoying stuff.

We're just trying to help each other to fin a fix for the issue Grandpa, sorry...I wish I didn't have to worry about it either . Hopefully we will and you'll never have to worry about it again

I actually posted this morning about the new audio drivers in a different thread, can't recall which now. Glad we agree on that hopefully it's the solution . I tried out some updated ones in November when I first noticed it as not being related to the applications I was running, but the new ones I downloaded last night only came out 2 weeks ago, so I'm hopeful they might have a fix. They're RealTek HD Audio Drivers version 1.61. I also uninstall ffdshow and all its video/audio codecs that were messing around with Oblivion. Hopefully one of those might do the trick...

Seems though like I'm the only one with a system that always recovers from the freezes/lockups without a crash...

Cat

 

You need to check your system logs when it happens, im sure something will be their.

Otherwise get a monitoring application like NHC with the graph logging and see what happens at the time of the lockup.

But when it locks up? Does it unlock or do you have to manually reboot?

Analyze patterns when it happens, take notes, what were you doing before that you didnt do they day before, ect...

 

Logs have no errors, Sound was my biggest concern.

I've un-installed all video drivers, all audio drivers, all codecs. Any software that could even remotely be screwing with it.

I'm minutes away from a format in my frustration.

The freezes are all at different times, but have all happened upon : Watching video, playing audio, unplugging USB device, Popping in DVD.

Possible bad memory? who the hell knows. There are too many things that COULD be wrong. I'm going to do some diagnostics in knoppix to see if this IS in fact a windows issue. I just don't have the energy to keep dealing with this, I got this lappy to replace an already dead/dying old dell hoping to finally be rid of a machine that sucks up all my time fixing it.

The gods frown upon me.

 

I formerly was the owner of a HP n8430 (2GHz Core 2 Duo, 1 GB RAM, x1600) that exhibited very similar symptoms to the one's you've described (the intermittent, random hangs that last ~5-15 sec).

I reinstalled every driver I could, disabled everything I could think of. I even tried disabling all non MS services and rebooting but that didn't help. HP took it back once, breaking it to the point of not really booting and then by the time they fixed that problem I was so fed up that I returned the damn thing when the original issue was never resolved.

I never thought to check the VPU recovery logs, but I never had any errors in my system log associated with the hangs.

I did at one point perform a restore to factory condition,but this didn't help.
Since HP doesn't ship Windows install discs, I was unable to do the full reformat/install I might have otherwise.

 

Been messing with it all day today. After deleting the modem drivers, and installing the latest Bluetooth/Wifi drivers i've gotten it to lock up once... but I got the lockup that went away after 10 seconds, which has NOT yet happened to me.

Interesting....

 

Interesting, I never installed the modem drivers because I've never used them since I got cable/ethernet in 1995. So it sounds like you're getting the same symptoms as me now...

I have two things listed with a yellow '!' in my Device Manager - The Modem drivers, and USB device - I currently have nothing but my MX518 Gamer Mouse hooked up, so I'm not sure what that is...

So far no lockups since I installed the new Sound Card drivers, but I haven't gotten to use it much lately. I have the new ATI drivers to try, but only if I see it happen again with my current setup...let's see...

Cat

 

OK, so it's my turn to contribute to this thread already

Here's what I've managed to do this week: I had my laptop replaced (actually, I think only monitor and motherboard were replaced, but hey - it's something). Sadly, it didn't last an hour at home - it froze on me again... but I read these post here and updated my audio and video card drivers. That didn't help either (crashed after working for half an hour) Now I have my cdrom disabled. Two days without a crash - that's good, but it's too early to tell if that was really the problem. Let's see if it lasts at least a week without freezes.

Oh, almost forgot to mention. I've installed Process Monitor, and all my actions are under surveillance now. Maybe this will help to grab one of these freezes by their a**

 

Sounds good

I actually had my DVD Drive changed while it was in for servicing, when they gave me someone else's system. Not sure if he was having this problem and my original one was clean...might explain why some models have it, even with other types of graphics cards. If it's something to do with the TSST 632D

We also found now that if you don't install the Modem drivers you should be able to recover from the freezes. So if you see it again let us know and try that .

So far I haven't had another freeze since updating to the latest sound drivers, and with the other ati drivers. Might be some conflict there with the modem and everything...I dunno.

Will update here when I see it again - as soon as it happens I'll get that other software and keep track. It seems when it happens I get it 4 or 5 times that same day so I should get some useful data too

Cat

 

since i removed the modem drivers i've had no freezes. It's been 4 days now and i'm hoping this keeps up for a bit.

I'm going to have to tinker with it unfortunately since after removing most of my drivers and re-installing them my blackberry software seems to be freaking out.

 

What I do when installing drivers is: install every device drivers and then disable such devices as modem, LAN, WiFi (and they stay that way until I need one of them). So modem is always disabled in my laptop (through device manager).

I tried once not installing anything but audio and video drivers (I guess CDROM drivers are also installed automatically with windows), but this experiment failed - laptop crashed and crashed and...

Still no crashes after disabling CDROM. If this is really the problem, then we could try updating CDROM firmware or something.

 

Just froze again about 10 seconds ago, it froze for about 5-6 seconds and unfroze.

And it's been doing that since I disabled the modem.

Hrmmmmm

Going to try disabling CDrom to see if thats really the problem

A little googling it seems that the Tsst Corp TS-L632D causes quite a few problems for people including lock up and freezes.

Could this be the culprit?

 

No new L632 DVD Drive firmware since I upgraded, unfortunately. Well from ASUS anyway, there is one from Dell that apparently improves performance and makes for quieter spinup and running modes - if anyone wants to try that one you can find it here DE04. Not sure if it will help with this tho. I had this problem with the old ASUS version installed as well as the new one. So far no freezes for me, though since installing the new sound and other ati drivers, though Oblivion did stick a couple of times I was half watching the hockey game and I think it's unrelated (standard game lag).

Krono, with the modem disabled you were still getting full unrecoverable system freezes? If so you might want to try deleting them completely and see if that has an effect - though if everything is fine now then leave it. It might be a conflict between the two, one trying to interrupt the other. If I'm never going to use it, I never install it. Like Bluetooth and the Modem for instance.

I'm almost wishing it'll happen again to get some logs to figure out what is actually causing this thing...

Cat

 

My S96J just froze twice today while playing BF2142, the sound would just loop over and over. I had to manually reboot and the event logs showed nothing.

 

Did you try disabling the cdrom in the device manager?

 

Not yet, its only happened twice.

All ive done so far is disable the modem and install stock audio drivers.

Ill try that next.

 

Froze once again today... for 7 seconds. The last time it froze it was for 7 seconds as well.

This time it froze while trying to access a webpage.

Wonder what would happen if I re-install the network adapter drivers.
Lets find out!

 

I also googled that around the same time as you and didn't see any real correlation...hard to know though, most ppl don't change their laptop drives. Especially when it being related to the problem isn't clear (like we aren't inserting dvds or trying to burn something when it freezes).

But did this recur for you while the DVD drive was disabled?

Either way get yourself hooked up like krono and I with Process Monitor and lets see if we can't get a log of this thing

Cat

 

been using NHC and have proc XP running most of the time too. This just isn't as frequent as it use to be. This is both good and bad.

Good = less headache no issues to worry about as much
bad = This brings me no closer to a solution! Gods be damned!

I feel bad for any average user that has to deal with this though.

 

Thanks for your reply but you didn't respond to the most important part. In your last message you said you would try disabling the DVD drive. Krono reported the problem went away when he did that, but you said it happened to you again so...

Repeat: But did this recur for you while the DVD drive was disabled?

I agree tho it's nice not to happen as much, but if there is something wrong..and there is potential here with a system freeze like that that something is being damaged and limiting the lifespan of our notebooks, as well as being annoying as heck when it happens. We shouldn't have to disable half the devices on our brand new notebooks just to stop them from freezing/locking up randomly...

Thnx,
Cat

 

Haven't read the entire thing, so I'll throw out a few suggestions that may or may not have been mentioned.

Have you been monitoring temps in the laptop?
Have you tried removing the battery and running only on AC power?

I've seen some weird things happen to laptops with bad batteries plugged in, even using the AC adapter.

 

hrmm.. I'm going to test the battery next! ... this actually makes me think of something that happened. A few days BEFORE the initial issue the battery was "unable to be recognized" by any of my widgets/meters. It said unknown battery and it took a few restarts for the battery to appear as normal.

 

Viking......

 

Haven't had a freeze in over a week after re-installing modem/bluetooth stuff.
If i get a freeze again I'm going to run it on AC only.

 

VikingBastich, so did you try disabling the cdrom or not? For me that solved the problem (I haven't had a single crash since I disabled it). But if your laptop freezes with cdrom disabled then it might be something else I've done (which I doubt).

 

Seeing as I use it almost daily I can't really do that. but I've been going strong so far with no crashes!

 

Thanks for clarifying that Viking (and thanks krono for the assist), you posted you would disable it, then that it wasn't happening anymore, then that it had happened again... We just wanted to know if you had or not, and you really ignored the question... I never would disable it either, was just asking you if you had in fact done as you said or not.

Anyway though - I too haven't seen the problem lately. Here's everything I did to result from getting the freezes to right now when I haven't seen one in 2 weeks (and let's hope that's the last time...):

1. Didn't install the modem drivers on initial XP install (Never have, Never will) - Still freezes, but you can recover from them.
2. Flash the latest ASUS firmware on my TS-L632D DVDDL-RW drive - Still recoverable freezes
3. Install latest network drivers - Still recoverable freezes
4. Install latest audio drivers <-- No more freezes

I can't be sure which of these steps are necessary or not, I also didn't have bluetooth drivers installed originally, then I did and I may have disabled them now (don't have the system with me to check at the moment).

It may or may not be related, but I've been doing heavy defragging over the past 2 weeks with DisKeeper. I only have 300mb-5gb free on the drive at various times over that time so it's been slow work but that's something I leave it to loop through every night...

Cat

 

I believe it was the bluetooth and Ethernet drivers that worked for me.
No freezes since. *knocks on wooden plank*

 

Hello guys, I'm also another affected, but I have a Compal HEL80 model.

 

My issue is back, it went away for a decent while but now that i've came back to using my notebook for gaming/design work. It's happening at least 3 times a day.

This has to be hardware related, i'm also guessing its my Optical drive as was mentioned before. The drive itself has been giving me a hell of a lot of trouble lately.

Ughh... can't things just work?

 

This problem reoccurred for me lately also... And my dvdrw was disabled in windows all the time when freezes happened. I enable it just when I need to copy something from a dvd and disable the drive afterwards I think I'll remove the drive completely some day.

 

how can we be sure its the dvdrw drive though? The biggest thing about this problem thats killing me is that none of us can figure out WHAT EXACTLY is causing it!

 

I'm still fine, in terms of the freezing. I never disabled my drive but did my own method from the past few posts, no problems so far - I have to schedule some time though to play around with the drive tho - I told it to burn a CD the other day, and it had to over burn by about 1 mb in order to make it fit. It spent 30 minutes in Nero as if it was really burning but in the end the CD was still blank. I burned that same project with that same CD without a problem with an external USB burner on my system a few minutes later. So I might RMA the drive...unless that's normal for TSST 632Ds. Will have to look into it some more...

Cat

 

I've got a LAN party to goto soon and I just hope this issue doesn't start up while i'm in the middle of a 3am UT2004 Deathmatch... Otherwise this thing is becoming a frisbee. lol

 

You can always try what I did before you start tossing it around though

 

if you still have warranty, you could consider rmaing your drive, or just picking up a slim drive from newegg.

 

So CC you had no issue's while the drive was disabled?
Also what kind of drive would fit the w7j?

 

Hey, today it has been freezing very frequently. like in ~10 minutes intervals...

Also, yesterday I was overclocking the graphics card (i even reached artifacts), but today it has been working at stock clocks. That's the only "different" thing that i did. So my guess is - vga card's fault

 

Hey, back when I posted last I had 8.36 drivers for ATI, I haven't upgraded at all and stuck with them...now they have much newer ones, I'm not sure if it helped me or not but it was part of my solution, and I still haven't had a freeze once. Be careful overclocking, it's very easy to damage the card and very hard to get that much of an improvement, especially now that it's summer time and hotter ambient temps...

Thanks ejl - I did some more testing and confirmed the drive would play CDs and DVDs fine (most of the time) and would burn DVDs with no problems, but could not burn CDs. I called up support, within 3 minutes I had an RMA number, I took a 5 minute drive down to my local ASUS service centre and within 15 minutes they replaced it and I now have a fully operational one I asked and the tech told me it seems this sort of fault is rather common, and was some defect in the hardware - the new one works great, and everything to do with the drive runs a lot faster now, I'm very happy : )

Thanks,
Cat

 

My S96J has started doing this. I have the 1.8ghz proc. 1Gig RAM... I'd have to double check the speed I got, it's been awhile.

No led lights are on at all when this happens. No laptop sounds, just a frozen image on the screen. I have to hold down the power button to get it to shut off.

Earlier today it did this twice on boot... locking as I was typing in my password. I removed the battery, booted and it came up fine, but then it locked again later. Actually it seemed to lock when I moved the computer, twice. But of course the third time when I tried to test if it was an issue with pressure in a certain area, or from tilting, it wouldn't lock up again

Krista

 

The drivers for the S96J on the intel site are pretty old (majority 2006). Where are most of you getting yours? The ASUS Z96 site?

Krista

 

Ouch, that sucks. If it happened on boot though, that's even worse as if the system overheated.

I haven't had the problems on my new system, I installed fresh XP one month ago with all the latest drivers I could find everywhere and it seems fine now. Note that some of the Z96J stuff on ASUS is old, I think I may have gotten a couple of drivers from the G1 area, and others from Intel.

I haven't installed the Bluetooth drivers ever though.

Cat

 

Well of course after the last freeze yesterday I couldn't get it to duplicate. I brought it into work with me again today. I'll try to boot it up and see what happens. Hmm, I'd scheduled a scan disk and it's completing that... not sure if I can consider this a standard boot... and it's taking Forever.

Maybe this is a voltage issue? It doesn't make a lot of sense that removing the battery (when it was plugged in anyway) would allow it to boot without a freeze, but that's happened more than once now.

As to happening on boot... if that's a sign of a hardware driver issue rather than actually hardware overheating issue... I prefer the driver issue

Krista

 

Sorry for bumping this and being kinda late, but this is my theory, which hasn't been proved wrong:

Everyone who has a Samsung L632D optical drive and Windows XP installed will experience this freezing problem, regardless of the laptop model/maker. However, if there is a CD/DVD inside the drive, freezing will not occur.

Can you test it, i.e. try to prove it wrong?

 

My problem was the motherboard, I think. Got it RMA'd and now I have a S96Jm. I think it is running hotter than my old one, but no more freezing / problems.

Krista