T420 Freezes with flash installed

Title says it all. I have no idea why, but my dad's T420 freezes arbitrarily with adobe flash installed, regardless of whether or not he is using a web browser or playing back flash content. Uninstalling flash seems to make the issue go away. I've never had this issue on any other computer I've owned, any ideas?

 

I'm not really sure what, but there has to be something specific to that machine that's causing this problem. I've not seen anything like it. I installed flash on a T420 and T430 without issue.

There's some others having flash issues that can be found via google. Perhaps you can glean something from them.

 

I'm assuming you are trying the newest version of Flash player? Which browser are you installing Flash for?

 

Google results point that the problem could be caused by ANYTHING. this is a fresh install of windows 7 with all up to date drivers. Note it is a core i3, not a core i5 machine, though I doubt it has anything to do with the problem.

 

Well, one of those anythings has to be the problem. It might be worthwhile check the more common ones. An Adobe or flash specific forum may be of more help if there's one available. You're the first person I can recall having this issue. Did you test the memory?

 

I installed flash for internet explorer and firefox, as well as reader. Other installed applications includes MS office and google earth, really nothing out of the ordinary. I tested RAM using the extended lenovo provided memory testing utility, and also tested the hard drive; neither returned errors. Other people have issues and have posted on the Adobe forum, but no solutions have been presented.

Really a strange issue, I have no problems on my X220 tablet running the same exact setup. Could it be a hardware fault with the motherboard? I don't get any problems in Mac OS X though....

 

I would doubt that it's a hardware issue, especially given the last sentence...you could also boot a "live" Linux CD/DVD/USB and check how the machine behaves in that environment...

 

Machine behaves fine in Linux and OS X. I just have no idea what could be causing this fault in windows. I tried disabling active protection system, but that had no effect. I'm running out of ideas here...I don't know what resources flash could be accessing that would cause the system to freeze, other than the GPU since it uses hardware acceleration?

 

My guess would be the CPU, not GPU.

A couple of questions:

a) How much RAM?

b) HDD or SSD ?

c) When the machine freezes, is the hard shutdown the only option of getting it back into "normal" state?

 

Well in this case, CPU is the GPU, it runs intel hd 3000 off the core i3 chip (there is no dedicated card)

RAM is 8GB 1333mhz
320gb 7200rpm Hitachi HDD
Shut down is not required to get back to normal. Usually waiting 30-60 seconds allows the machine to resume normal state.

 

I understand the configuration in question perfectly well. With that said, it's the processing aspect of the chip that I suspect is getting taxed, not the graphics one...

All of the above sounds as a quite sufficient configuration to me.

Can you open the Task Manager while the machine is freezing? Or install one of those little sidebars that monitor CPU and RAM usage?

My guess would be that there's a process - or several of them - that max out the CPU usage and render the laptop temporarily useless.

Finding out which ones - followed by what one could do about them - is the key.

Good luck.

 

The entire computer is useless when the freeze occurs. No task manager, no nothing. I don't know of a way to log what processes hike up CPU usage? Does task manager have a built in logger? I suppose I could activate the built in widget for cpu/ram monitoring .

 

I'd give it a shot. If it confirms my suspicion that it's the CPU that gets overwhelmed for whatever reason, we can troubleshoot further from that point.

If it doesn't - since I've been wrong before and will most certainly be again - we're back to square one, but at least with one suspect ruled out...

Good luck.

 

Ok so the freeze happened again. The resource monitor was frozen too, but it froze it only went to 25% usage with 21% RAM usage. Froze for a whole minute before the cursor turned into that spinning circle thing for about another 30 sec, then the system resumed normal state.


EDIT
Task manager reported 100% CPU spike on all 4 threads. Now what?