W7J often freezes now and then...

Just recently my W7J freezes now and then for about two seconds. Does anyone experiencing the same problem as I do? What may causes this to happen? Thanks

 

Well the key would be to help figure out what's going on would be to know what you're doing at the time and what software and drivers you've installed since you got it and exactly when this started happening. The end all would be to format it and start over because it's more than likely a software issue, however if you can't figure out what's been put on, you're likely to install it again.

 

mine seems to do that occasionally too. Seems to correlate with a disc in the drive spinning up, even if it just spinning up a little bit.

 

Mine does that too sometime. I didn't notice it was related to the drive...

I will notice that next time as well.

 

That is likely the issue here.

 

I don't have anything in the DVD-Rom so I don't think that's the problem. I might reformat it this weekend and hopefully it will solve the problem.

 

I find a Linux LiveCD is often useful in eliminating hardware as being the cause of a problem.

 

I have an Asus S96J, and I've been experiencing the same problems. Since I've moved to college though, I can't afford to get it replaced. So I've just coped with the problem. I haven't had the freezing problem in a week or so now.

 

My W7J will also occasionally freeze for a second or two. However, it always unfreezes on it's own, and this only happens once every few weeks. Considering I use it for many hours every day, this doesn't seem too bad.

Since it's so infrequent, I haven't been able to determine any pattern in what causes the momentary freeze. However, there are a couple of ways that I can get it to reliably freeze more often.

One way is to use it on top of a pillow or a bed (with the bottom vents completely blocked). This is obviously heat-related. But these days I always use it on a flat surface with the back propped up and the very infrequent freezes seem somewhat random.

The other way is to run NHC and cap the CPU clock. For some reason, that seems to make my W7J a bit unstable. I also tried RMClock and it seemed to cause fewer problems. However, I eventually decided that the slow performance caused by capping the CPU was too annoying and it wasn't really helping much in terms of heat. So, at this point I don't use either NHC or RMClock anymore.

 

Alright, this is getting really annoying. First the laptop freezes now it burned my cds/dvds but it can't read it. I'll call Asus tomorrow to get this fix and I hope they're paying for the postage.

 

i have the same problem with my Z35f (little brother to W7J). i noticed it happened most frequently with rmclock. since i switched over to nhc, the occurrence has reduced but still happens. i don't know if its the whole undervolting or not. i am somewhat disappointed with asus despite all the mad ravings on this site.

 

About freezes, check first for a number of things, at least including:

About the CD/DVDs, I wouldn't be so eager blaming the writer. The DVDs or CDs themselves might be at the fault. There are a lot of them substandard out there... Try another brand, try Verbatim or TDK, those are the most reputable by what I know.

 

Maybe worth noting, when the DVD drive is spinning up, the computer does become unresponsive for a few seconds. And that _does_ happen with all ASUS notebooks, at least it did with those that I've seen.

I don't know what is the cause, either drivers, or deeper down, IDE bottlenecks. On notebooks which place the HDD and the DVD on the same IDE channel, it's probably the second cause. I haven't tried reading DVDs in Linux, but I might just to see if it works there.

I assume this happens with other notebooks as well, though I might be wrong.

 

Honestly, I've had desktops do this as well, even with separate IDE controllers. My dual core desktop is a bit better, but it *still* happens.

My theory: The Windows/Explorer scheduling routines that load up what is on CDs and Autorun it are seriously b0rked. They give full system resources to something that is Autorunning that hasn't even been loaded yet, and the system hangs waiting for it to be loaded. Maybe turn autorun off?

I find it funny this has not been fixed since Win95.

 

Autorun theory invalid. I have autorun disabled and it does the same thing... something is poorly written, that's clear, but I don't know if it's software or firmware.

 

I'll definitely stay away from Asus on my next buy. Sometimes I feel like all these ravings are BS and overrated because of the price we're paying for.

 

On what do you base this statement? Do you believe/have you seen other brands of notebooks which do _not_ freeze upon spinning up the DVD?

I think the general idea that seems to arise from the discussion above is that the fault is with the OS and not the ASUS-specific hardware or drivers.

 

CD stopping computer, it's WINDOWS fault..

On my desktop where HDD are SATA's and DVD-burner is only PATA it still freezes...
And I even have autorun totally disabled.....

 

I think it freezes because of the cheap HD that they use.

 

If you want to test if it is the OS or hardware, a really good test is always a Linux Live CD. If you want to try that I can post more details. I do that all the time to test peoples computers, it usually tells you alot.

 

Most unlikely. You could better blame the DVD drive, or the IDE controller. But I rather think it's a combination of poorly written Windows software, and designed targeting power-conservation on the DVD drive, which means a less powerful motor, longer spinup.

I actually haven't tried running Linux this weekend, I was quite busy with other things.

 

Actually no. I tried disabling the DVD drive but no avail. Every time my laptop freezes, I can tell the hard drive freezes as well, when it gets back to normal, hard drive usually make a noise.

 

Ok, then you're not sufferring from the common problem of "spinup delay" that we were discussing over the last posts (or rather, that is not your main issue).

If you didn't already, you should try eliminating the possible issues listed on the prior 2 pages of this thread (i.e., software eating up resources, conflicts etc., see the posts).

 

It's not softwares related because I reformatted my laptop and still occur. I didn't install any software before it happen.

 

Then it's hardware. To make sure of that, you could try booting linux from a flash drive. I have posted a guide on how to make a linux-bootable USB key, in the Guides forum (it's under the XP installation guide if I remember correctly).

If it does the same stuff under linux, then it's pretty clearly hardware.

 

After booting from Linux, what's next? How do I get online with Linux? Thanks

 

if it's "pretty clearly hardware", then bennetvu was right about voicing his concerns regarding asus hardware earlier then!

 

I used to have a little bit of a "hitch" freeze sometimes while the Z33 spun up its HD. It usually happens when the drive has gone to sleep (time for that to happen depends on your power management settings) and a program has been stored to swap. Windows goes to get stuff from swap and the HD has to spin up (hence the noise) and you have to wait.

Upgrading to 1 GB of RAM mostly stopped this...

My older desktop would do the same thing sometimes if I let the hard drive go to sleep.

If you are using a LiveCD like Knoppix, you should be able to plug in an Ethernet cable to a router or available port and the internet will just work automatically.

I've had several different computers act like this and it was always a software issue. There is nothing wrong with the quality of anything Asus uses. Depending on the default had drive spindown times, it could even happen on a clean Windows install...