Laptop stability issues - Page 1
Forum section: electronics / projects

author: Rachie5272
author_rank: Regular Contributor
timestamp: May 13, 2020, 04:57:11 pm
content: I have a Dell M4800 laptop with weird hardware stability issues. Occasionally it will hard freeze, turn on the fans to maximum, and require a hard reboot. Other times, it will fail to suspend properly. Or rather, it suspends, but then immediately wakes itself up again. This has resulted in it waking up in storage, where it tries to cook itself from lack of airflow.Does anyone have an idea of where to begin troubleshooting? I know this is beyond economical repair, but I can't find a suitable replacement anywhere. I'm not giving up my three touchpad buttons and non-chiclet keyboard without a fight.

author: Vovk_Z
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: May 13, 2020, 05:36:57 pm
content: I don't know what's wrong, first I would google how to take it apart and check CPU cooling (clean CPU cooler and fan, paste new termal grease etc).

author: chriva
author_rank: Regular Contributor
timestamp: May 13, 2020, 06:22:26 pm
content: Read the revision history of its bios updates and see if it's a known issue. (and just google for the problem in general. Check if it's a known flaw of this model)Could try and update to the latest bios version but I fear it's the usual thing. -It's dying.Had more than one laptop go a little wonky with age, be it failing ram slots, intermittent booting, random freezing, crashing at the bios screen if one of the USB ports are plugged in etc etc. They live a hard life so it's not unreasonable for them to develop bad solder joints or other failures.Given how you explained the problem I don't think it's a cooling problem. I'd expect it to go full cyclone for a while BEFORE crashing. Not after it has already crashed

author: Mr. Scram
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: May 13, 2020, 06:51:03 pm
content: Quote from: Rachie5272 on May 13, 2020, 04:57:11 pmAre you using Windows? Looking at the Event Viewer could be a good start. If the laptop is aware of any issues you should be able to find some hints. They can be rather cryptic but it could serve as a starting point.

author: wizard69
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: May 14, 2020, 04:08:40 am
content: No mention of the operating system, power supply or the GPU if any.For example you described an issue that was common on Linux recently with AMD's GPU drivers. This is something I have not seen since the move to the latest Fedora distro and kernel. In fact I believe I had a very early Ryzen mobile based laptop that had similar suspend / wake up issues. I'm not sure what happened there, that laptop died of battery related issues.Which brings up another issue, batteries commonly used in laptops suck! On old hardware you could easily have a flakey battery.

author: Rachie5272
author_rank: Regular Contributor
timestamp: May 14, 2020, 05:52:18 pm
content: I'm on Linux, and the video card is Nvidia. The power supply is a beefy 180 Watt unit, and I hacked the DRM "sense" line to a hardwired chip, so I'm reasonably confident it's not a power supply issue.I opened it up last night and redid the thermal paste. I started reflowing the RAM sockets, but it was taking a very long time. Already it seems to run much cooler. Previously the CPU was running over 80 °C just watching video, and now it seems to hover around 60 °C.I wonder how hard it would be to hack a better keyboard into a newer laptop. This one looked like it was using some sort of serial bus, rather than a straight matrix. Hmm...