Studio XPS 16 freezes after a few minutes on battery

Recently (first noticed on March 15), my Studio XPS 1640 has started freezing after switching to battery power. The first time is always within seconds of unplugging the AC. At this point all is completely frozen, and the only solution is to hold power button down.

After starting it up again, it will run for 7-10 minutes and freeze again. This cycle seems to repeat indefinitely. When frozen, onscreen activity is stopped mid-motion, pointer cannot be moved, and caps lock does not toggle light.

Same scenario has happened when booting from an Ubuntu live USB, and with two different batteries. Both are 9-cell Xtend brand, with one stating the manufacturer as Simplo and the other Panasonic.

Other things I have tried with no change:

- setting ATI Power Play (in advanced power options) to Max Performance for both batt and AC
- Win 10 system tray batt performance slider set to any position
- turning wireless button off (disables Bluetooth and WiFi radios)
- physically removing internal Bluetooth & WiFi cards (one was failing, but has been replaced and both are now functioning normally)

There are two conditions under which issue does not seem to happen:

- when in Safe Mode
- when using ThrottleStop turned on, and set to 8x266 MHz and 1.00 volts (Core 2 Duo P8800 CPU).


Any ideas on how to determine cause or fix this?

 

Hopefully no one minds, but I’ll likely be posting this case to another forum site as there have been no replies here in a couple weeks. I’ll still continue to monitor this thread. Interested to find the source of this issue.

Aloha

 

Are you using throttle stop to undervolt the CPU? It could just not be getting enough voltage when it underclocks (what it sounds like to me). Sadly CPUs degrade and it may just need a little more voltage to be stable. You can always try manually setting the cpu multiplier to a lower one and then running the build in throttle stop bench. If it locks up at lower multipliers and stock voltages, then it's probably just a degraded CPU...

 

Thanks for the fast response; will try to reply quicker.

Actually, it locks up without running ThrottleStop and doesn’t lock up when it is running. I’ve went as low as a multiplier of 8 and 1.00 volts with no problem, both on battery and AC. (This CPU is a P8800 and has a range of 6-10.5).

Also, it only locks up on battery, but it does not do so if TS is running. When on AC, it runs fine without ThrottleStop running at all, or just in monitoring mode.

 

Usually you notice the more stressful voltages first. Sadly CPUs are made to be power efficient at lower speeds which means they are kind of on the brink of being erroneous at those voltages. My guess is stock it's hitting lower voltages than it can deal with at lower multipliers. You can see what the voltages are by running TS but not setting it to enabled and looking as it downclocks.

 

Interesting. So perhaps it’s attempting to be “extra” efficient when on battery, and that’s putting over the line of not working.

Will test and see what I can observe and report back my findings.