Dear boardmembers,
short introduction: Name’s Oli, 27 years old, near Würzburg, Bavaria, Germany. 
On my new ProBook I’ve installed a dual-boot-system with OpenSUSE 12.3 KDE and W8. Everything works fine so far (despite the hybrid-graphics on OpenSUSE, but that’s another issue…), if there were no system-freezes every once in a while. They seem to occur randomly and not very often. Maybe once every 5 hours. Sometimes I work for a day without problems, sometimes it freezes 10 minutes after the boot. Everytime Opera was active (Opera is always running on my systems), one time I was giving Wine and the 2D-game Spectromancer a try.
When frozen, nothing can bring the PC back to live, despite a hard reset. Mouse pointer doesn’t move, runlevels can’t be changed, nothing works at all. The screen keeps frozen (i.e. isn’t black).
Now I’m pretty clueless - in Windows the problem hasn’t occured so far, but I haven’t spent a lot of time with it either. The integrated memtest didn’t show any problems, a quick HD-selftest didn’t report any errors either. Right after I got the notebook, I replaced the 4 GB with 8 GB RAM (specs say only 2x 4 GB is permitted, I run with 1x 8 GB, but since the problem occurs so seldom I can hardly believe that this could be its cause).
I’m pretty new to SUSE, so could you maybe give me some hints where I should start to search for the cause? Any other hints? every help is very much appreciated.
I’ll test the CPU in W8 with prime95 or so soon.
So long
… I have just ordered a 2x 4 GB RAM-kit, so we can rule out a memory issue (or solve the problem ;)).
On 03/18/2013 02:56 PM, Kraligor wrote:
>
> Dear boardmembers,
>
> short introduction: Name’s Oli, 27 years old, near Würzburg, Bavaria,
> Germany.
>
> On my new ProBook I’ve installed a dual-boot-system with OpenSUSE 12.3
> KDE and W8. Everything works fine so far (despite the hybrid-graphics on
> OpenSUSE, but that’s another issue…), if there were no system-freezes
> every once in a while. They seem to occur randomly and not very often.
> Maybe once every 5 hours. Sometimes I work for a day without problems,
> sometimes it freezes 10 minutes after the boot. Everytime Opera was
> active (Opera is always running on my systems), one time I was giving
> Wine and the 2D-game Spectromancer a try.
>
> When frozen, nothing can bring the PC back to live, despite a hard
> reset. Mouse pointer doesn’t move, runlevels can’t be changed, nothing
> works at all. The screen keeps frozen (i.e. isn’t black).
>
> Now I’m pretty clueless - in Windows the problem hasn’t occured so
> far, but I haven’t spent a lot of time with it either. The integrated
> memtest didn’t show any problems, a quick HD-selftest didn’t report any
> errors either. Right after I got the notebook, I replaced the 4 GB with
> 8 GB RAM (specs say only 2x 4 GB is permitted, I run with 1x 8 GB, but
> since the problem occurs so seldom I can hardly believe that this could
> be its cause).
>
> I’m pretty new to SUSE, so could you maybe give me some hints where I
> should start to search for the cause? Any other hints? every help is
> very much appreciated.
> I’ll test the CPU in W8 with prime95 or so soon.
Faulty memory can cause random failures such as you describe. You need to run
the memory test on the distribution medium for 12 hours (at least). A 24 hour
run is better, particularly with 8GB RAM. The BIOS quick tests will pick up
solid failures, but they will probably miss any subtle problems such as using a
1x8 module when the manufacturer wants 2x4. Windows uses the memory very
differently than Linux, and it might never find a problem.
lwfinger:
Thanks for your reply. The prime95-test in Windows mainly tests CPU-stability, but I don’t think a negative result will very likely since a defective CPU is pretty unusual.
As for the memtest: I’ve had some defective RAM-modules in my IT-life, and the showed the errors within the first run of memtest. Still, I too think that the problem lies within the RAM, probably because of the 8 GB bar (sometimes I need to write a problem down to get to its bottom). I’ll skip extensive testing for now and report back when the ordered 2x 4 GB modules arrive.
Okay, I have run memtest86+ for >7 hours without failure (4 passes). Now I’ll see if the freezes still occur while working.
The problem seems to have vanished, so it was the 8 GB RAM bar, resp. the inability of the notebook to handle it. With 2x 4GB it works rock-stable. Thanks a lot for the support!