OK, so here's a question...

My sister has an Acer Aspire 5000 laptop. It used to work just fine, but 
recently it has developed some disturbing symptoms - basically random 
freezing.

The utterly weird thing is, it behaves perfectly under [several 
different variants of] Linux, but continues to randomly freeze when 
running under Windows. [I have reinstalled Windows several times now. 
Interestingly, it always seems to hang at the same places in the 
installation sequence.]

The symptoms:

- Laptop no longer responds to keyboard or mouse. (Mouse pointer won't 
move, Ctrl+Alt+Del is no-op, the capslock light doesn't function when I 
press the key, etc.)

- On every laptop known to man, holding down the power button will 
forcibly power down the laptop. This does not work while the laptop is 
frozen. (Fortunately the battery typically dies after ~5 minutes or so.)

- The laptop *does* respond to some things though. Unplugging the 
Ethernet cable still pops up that retarded "a cable is unplugged" message.

- The fans seem to spin up while the laptop is hang, suggesting an 
infinite loop in the software somewhere.

- I am reasonably sure the laptop is not overheating. It seems cold to 
the touch, and it repeatedly hangs at *exactly* the point in Windows, 
and has never done this even once under Linux.

- Repeated memory tests reveal no problems of any kind.

- I have reinstalled Windows multiple times, without any Internet 
access, so I'm downright certain it's not a virus or a software 
configuration issue.

To reiterate, when the laptop was new, it had none of these issues. 
(Although it was dissapointingly slow.)

Does anybody have the slightest clue what the *hell* is causing this 
frustrating behaviour?

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Invisible wrote:

Are they any devices/gizmos/etc that don't work on Linux? WLAN?
Bluetooth? Card reader? Anything?

-Aero

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Invisible wrote:
> - On every laptop known to man, holding down the power button will 
> forcibly power down the laptop. This does not work while the laptop is 
> frozen. (Fortunately the battery typically dies after ~5 minutes or so.)

Wow. I was under the impression this was built right into the power 
supplies. Maybe not on a laptop, tho.

I have a friend who was designing motherboards for specialized systems like 
disk array servers. He told me he spent three days trying to figure out why 
the system would power off seven seconds after he plugged it in each time. 
Turns out it took three seconds to initialize the board enough that the 
signal from the power supply could be read, and he'd wired that wire 
backwards, so four seconds later it would turn off again.

-- 
   Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   Why is there a chainsaw in DOOM?
   There aren't any trees on Mars.

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Invisible wrote:
> - On every laptop known to man, holding down the power button will 
> forcibly power down the laptop. 

Here's a thought. See if you can configure the BIOS to turn off APCI stuff? 
The "advanced" power control? Linux tends to handle this differently, and 
perhaps Windows is confused by some problem being caused by this.

No idea why it would crop up after a while, tho.

-- 
   Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   Why is there a chainsaw in DOOM?
   There aren't any trees on Mars.

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On Wed, 07 Jan 2009 16:52:51 +0000, Invisible wrote:

> - Repeated memory tests reveal no problems of any kind.

What are you using to do the memory tests?

Jim

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>> - Repeated memory tests reveal no problems of any kind.
> 
> What are you using to do the memory tests?

memtest86

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

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On Wed, 07 Jan 2009 22:16:52 +0000, Orchid XP v8 wrote:

>>> - Repeated memory tests reveal no problems of any kind.
>> 
>> What are you using to do the memory tests?
> 
> memtest86

86, or 86+?  ISTR that 86+ is more thorough, but 86 should be sufficient.

Jim

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> The utterly weird thing is, it behaves perfectly under [several different 
> variants of] Linux, but continues to randomly freeze when running under 
> Windows. [I have reinstalled Windows several times now. Interestingly, it 
> always seems to hang at the same places in the installation sequence.]

Sounds to me like it is one particular piece of hardware/driver 
malfunctioning.  Under Linux it either has a different driver or is just not 
used at all (as already mentioned).

I would try booting Windows in safe mode and seeing if that is stable.  If 
so then I would reboot normally and disable all non-critical hardware in 
device manager.  If it is still stable then selectively restart hardware 
until it you find the culprit.  If you are really lucky a driver update 
might fix it...

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scott wrote:
>> The utterly weird thing is, it behaves perfectly under [several 
>> different variants of] Linux, but continues to randomly freeze when 
>> running under Windows. [I have reinstalled Windows several times now. 
>> Interestingly, it always seems to hang at the same places in the 
>> installation sequence.]
> 
> Sounds to me like it is one particular piece of hardware/driver 
> malfunctioning.

This is my feeling also. It used to work just fine, and now it doesn't, 
despite multiple reinstalls, which suggests a hardware issue. (But I 
have no idea which bit of hardware.)

I did think perhaps it was the audio - my sister mentioned the sound 
suddenly stopped working a while ago, and sure enough the machine locked 
shortly after I installed the audio drive.

...but then I reinstalled without the audio driver, and it still 
randomly hangs. *sigh*

> I would try booting Windows in safe mode and seeing if that is stable.

Ah, the joy of intermittent faults. Is it *really* gone? Or is it just 
not happening right now? :-/

> If so then I would reboot normally and disable all non-critical hardware 
> in device manager.  If it is still stable then selectively restart 
> hardware until it you find the culprit.  If you are really lucky a 
> driver update might fix it...

Well, currently I have installed Windows plus every update that Windows 
Update will give me. I haven't *seen* it crash since that time, but.....

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> Well, currently I have installed Windows plus every update that Windows 
> Update will give me. I haven't *seen* it crash since that time, but.....

Ah, the joy of *extremely* intermittent faults :-)

Have you looked in the Event Viewer (I think it's called that in XP too) to 
see what happened when it crashed?

It seems from your comments that the laptop is still running, just not 
responding to user input.  Is this the internal mouse and keyboard? Try 
plugging in an external USB mouse next time it "freezes".

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