dv6000z issues

I've noticed a few issues with the new dv6000z that I received.

The most disturbing thing is that certain programs sometimes just simply lockup:

1) I have noticed several times that when navigating thru my file system with windows explorer--which should be a rock solid program, right?--that I will click on a folder in the left pane, and instead of immediately popping up the contents in the right pane, the mouse pointer turns into an hourglass and nothing happens for a while. At first, I freaked out, and killed explorer, but the last few times that it happened, I was more patient and eventually the contents did appear in the right pane. I have measured wait times in the 10-30 second range.

Its not like this problem happpens a lot, but the fact that it has happened a few times already in just a week of limited use is disturbing to me

2) I have seen Firefox (1.5.0.7) freeze a few times, and nothing kills it, not even task manager. Have to reboot the machine to kill it. Cannot remember this ever happening on my desktop (same browser, but xp pro).

Note: for both of the problems above, there was no other substantial program running at the same time that might have, say, been using up a lot of memory or something.

Has anyone else seen problems like this? Does the amd turion x2 chip (or associated chipset) have any known flakiness like this? Are the intel core 2 duo chips more reliable? Or is it perhaps something else? I am still within the 21 day window, and if I lack confidence in this new machine and think, say, the dv6000t might be more reliable, then I will return it.


Lastly, this is more of an annoyance issue than anything else, but I was able to delete most of the bloatware that hp contaminates new systems with simply by running their uninstallers from the add/remove control panel.

If all the bloatware was so politely behaved, I would have little issue with it. But a stubborn subset of the bloatware appears to have no deinstallers, in fact, all such programs are in the
C:\Program Files\Online Services
folder.

Is it safe to simply delete that entire folder? Or is there additional registry detritus?

 

Well first of all YES the dv6000t with the Core 2 Duo is a LOT faster than the Turion X2. The Turion X2 isn't very good, I was using a dv6000z with a Turion X2 1.6 GHZ with 512 L2, and I noticed that it was actually SLOWER than my old HP dv5130us with a Turion 2.0 GHZ with 1 MB L2 cache. I have a dv6000t now and I must say it blows the AMDs away espescially when I am working with audio and video editing/encoding applications, and Photoshop.

As far as your problem I think that it's probably less the systems fault and more to do with the software. Windows probably just got messed somehow as it does from time to time, try downloading Crap Cleaner it's my favorite little free application that I wouldn't be able to use Windows without. www.ccleaner.com

Best of Luck

-Aaron

 

A 2GHz singlecore CPU will outrun a 1.6GHz dualcore CPU on single-threaded tasks, and if that was a TL50 like I think it was its 256KBx2 L2 cache is really not what you want for performance-sensitive applications. Every other TX2 has 512KBx2, which is about right for an AMD chip. A properly configured TX2 notebook is only going to have a slight disadvantage to a same-clocked C2D.

But yeah, I'd bet on bloatware and/or the usual virus/worm/spyware infection. Or... how much RAM do you have? If it's 256MB or even 512MB you may be hitting virtual memory hard, especially with all that bloatware. If it's bloatware, the first thing I'd do is rip out the Symantec stuff.

 

Yup. A lot of people forget that.

I wanted the TL-52 with the larger cache, but the saleslady misunderstoof me; see my woes here:
http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?p=1595898#post1595898

When I did my original research, I concluded the same thing; see some of the later posts on this thread:
http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?p=1579405#post1579405

Manually removed most of the bloatware.

Is it safe to simply delete the C:\Program Files\Online Services folder, which contains all known remaining bloatware, since there are no deinstallers for these?

Will try an AVG scan of the machine this evening. Hard to imagine that I picked up anything, given the short amount of use and limited internet connectivity with it, but ya never know.

The max stock you can get: 2 GB. Hard drive is 120 GB. This should not be the problem.

Already done.

I should have mentioned in my original post that I first made backup DVDs, then wiped the hard drive and reinstalled from those. If the DVDs were somehow burned corruptly or reinstalled corruptly, then that might explain things. But I noticed that HP was intelligent enough in their backup burning software to carefully do a slow verification stage, so this is not too likely.

Thanks. Will try that after run AVG.

 

Is it possible bad RAM is the culprit? Perhaps run it with one RAM stick at a time for a week or two and see if it happens again. Also, since you have an AMD-based system, you can use a standard XP install disc if you want without any issues.

 

Great idea.

However, I think simply to save time at this point, I am going to return the unit to HP tommorrow and order a dv6000t. I cannot waste time dicking around with debugging this, and the end result would probably be the same (ship it back to HP). I need a working system ASAP. FireFox froze up on me again this evening, forcing a system reboot.

I myself initially wondered if the culprit was not a consistently bad ram chip, but maybe ram soft errors.

Few people know about this, but memory bits can randomly flip! (E.g. due to voltage spikes, cosmic rays, nuclear decay.)

This used to be a major problem, which is why older PC ram used parity to at least try and detect single bit errors. Ram subsequently got more reliable, and the bean counters got more greedy, so parity ram is all but nonexistent these days in consumer equipment. But as memory cells get smaller to achieve ever greater densities, soft errors are getting deadly again: it takes that much less noise to flip a bit than with a bigger cell.

Workstations, incidentally, typically use a vastly better solution: ECC ram, which can detect and correct single bit flips, and detect (but not correct) multi bit flips. If anyone knows of a laptop that takes ECC ram, please lemme know ASAP.

With my desktop machine, which unfortunately uses normal (non parity or ecc) ram, I see ram soft errors on, say, a weekly basis when I am doing massive computations (cpu 100% used for 10s of hours at a time). I know that ram soft errors are occuring because my program will bomb at say, parsing dates or numbers from stock data text files. When I look at the offending text, which might be something like "2006/10.02" for a date that should be in the format "2006/10/02", I will see that the offending character's ascii code in binary is but a single bit flip from the value that should be there.

I now tend to think that ram soft errors are not the explanation for what I am seeing with this particular laptop, as it happens too often for the usage that I am giving it (unless my previous experience is no guide).

 

Some more discussion of ECC ram (some of informed, some of it not!) may be found here:
http://forumz.tomshardware.com/hardware/Windows-Vista-reason-buy-ECC-ftopict174223.html

 

I hardly ever / never see RAM errors with my notebook, non-ECC RAM.