Laptop freezing every few minutes

[Ruggerbugger]

I'm having a weird freezing problem with my Samsung x20 laptop. Every few minutes the system will freeze completely, and then carry on as normal. This seems to happen more often when running on battery power. I've noticed some error 51 disk messages in Event Viewer, but they seem to relate to the external freecom drive I use.

Is there any way to check if this problem is due (as I suspect) to page file usage? I'm starting to think a reinstall might be useful, not a road I want to go down.

Checking task manager shows seven instances of svchost running, three as SYSTEM, two as LOCAL SERVICE and two as NETWORK SERVICE. There are 43 processes in total. I'm using a wireless connection to a Freecom fsg router.

"Commit charge", which I'm assuming is virtual memory, is running at 398M/1226M. Thanks to shared video RAM (I assume) I have 504MB system RAM.

Any ideas appreciated.

[Budding]

Do the freezes happen during disc accesses to your external? The svchost thing is normal, so you shouldn't worry about that. I trust your machine is virus free? I don't think that paging would freeze your whole system for a period of time, unless you were paging to a damaged drive. Are you experiencing CPU spikes during the freezes?

[TiG]

You aren't running into the system going to low speed mode to preserve battery power are you?, and as you require more speeds its just taking a few seconds to kick back in?

TiG

[Ruggerbugger]

Do the freezes happen during disc accesses to your external? The svchost thing is normal, so you shouldn't worry about that. I trust your machine is virus free? I don't think that paging would freeze your whole system for a period of time, unless you were paging to a damaged drive. Are you experiencing CPU spikes during the freezes?

I did notice CPU spikes last night, I'm monitoring it now, but I've noticed something already. I had 3/4 freezes during the first half of this sentence, but none since. Is it possible that flaky power is the problem? How could I diagnose battery defects?

I also have suspicions about my FSG router, as I don't seem to get this problem at work. Is there a program that will monitor changes in transfer speeds/connection properties?

Thanks for the input

PS: Just had 9 spikes of 100% CPU activity with seemingly nothing happening. Is it possible to track which programs are using that capacity. If it's as simple as killing a process, that's be ideal.

PPS: CPU currently running at 798MHz out of a possible 1.6GHz, doesn't seem to fancy stepping up to the full 1.6GHz no matter what power management profile I choose. This is on mains power.

[kalniel]

Watch task manager? Labourious I know, but if you sort by CPU during the load peaks you might catch it.

[mycarsavw]

To check if it's a battery problem, remove the battery completely and run it on mains power.

[Ruggerbugger]

Well since it's been running on mains for the last 1.5 hours I've had no freezes at all. I can only conclude it's likely to be battery related, task manager's been up for that long and shows no exceptional activity I can spot.

Event viewer only shows the following as an error, at 18:06 and 18:25

TCP/IP has reached the security limit imposed on the number of concurrent TCP connect attempts.

Doesn't this suggest a hardware, rather than software issue, or does Event Viewer miss things?

[mycarsavw]

Disable hibernation?

Are your power saving options too short when using battery power?

On mains power usually these settings are overridden. I had similar issues with an HP NX9xxxx series notebook.

[Ruggerbugger]

I think the problem might actually have something to do with hibernation, or at least the way resources are freed after it. Performance was extremely sluggish today when I got home, but seems to be OK now. I've disabled hibernation to see how that goes for a while, and I'm looking trim boot software and background processes to see if that helps.

When I finish work for the Summer I might try a reformat spring clean. I'm going to check out memory as well, this is running on 2 x 256 at the moment, I think a gig would do well.

[Ruggerbugger]

Right, there are two problems, both of which seem to be connected to using my Freecom FSG-3 router. The first is the freezing, which is also accompanied by the odd refusal to boot. The second is an apparent loss of power/connectivity to the USB ports. My external USB hard drive will flash a couple of times and then disconnect. I can only get it back with a reboot.

This is very weird.