Frequent freezes on Centrino (Samsung X20)

English Hardware
1

I have had this laptop (Samsung X20 with integrated gfx) for some years now and there never was any problem with it. I could do an infinite number of suspend-to-hdd cycles without any problem.

Alas the laptop has become very unreliable since I updated to opensuse 11.1 (or perhaps since an online update after the update to 11.1, I don’t know). If I let the laptop idle for some time I can be sure to find it frozen in an unrecoverable state half an hour later. No magic sysrq work, no nothing. When I make the computer suspend to harddisk, it will wake up okay but the CPU is always at 100% even though there is no process demanding full CPU power. The fan starts to spin and the computer seems to be even less reliable than after a clean reboot. In addition to this I cannot send the laptop to a second suspend-to-hdd, this works only once after a clean restart.

In twelve years of linux usage on laptops I have never had that severe problems. In fact the past years were such that I actually have given up looking into low-level stuff of my linux installations a long time ago (I believe the last time I used vi on some config files or compiled a kernel was at the time of the 2.2 kernel series…) as everything used to work out of the box. Now I have no idea where to start. I have reinstalled the original 11.1 kernel but this hasn’t changed anything.

I appreciate any help.

2

the problem can be solved but we need some info, what is the model# and what is the processor,ram and hdd size. and are you running KDE or GNOME

Also what is the graphics card and is it itegrated.

some of the updates might cause this problem, post your info and we will help.

3

There is always the dreaded ‘Beagle’ indexing that hogs CPU. I always delete it entirely, though actually my Laptop will run just fine with it.

4

Samsung X20 with 1.7G Pentium-M, 1G RAM, 80G hdd (does this really matter?), Gnome, Intel GMA 900 (I thought that “Centrino with integrated gfx” gave this away). Indeed there have been some problems with X that seem to have started around the same time. I had to reinstall the xdrivers that came with 11.1 because the recent upgrade caused the X server to error out with “no screens found”. Another problem with X I observe since an online update of the remaining parts of the X server is the fact that the gdm login window is only 800x600 on a 1400x1050 screen (i.e. the gfx are in the top-left corner of the screen and seem to assume there is only space for 800x600 pixels rather than the 1400x1050 that get displayed).

5

No, it’s not that, I have checked that with “top” and there is no process requiring the CPU. (And yes, I don’t like Beagle either).