[gicsun]

Hi All,

I'm looking for help with a frustrating Mini 12 lockup problem. I've seen some posts here on the issue. However, I've not found a satisfactory answer so I am trying top start the discussion again.

The basic issue is that my mini 12 will just lockup. It happens frequently. Total freeze. I have to power it off by holing down the power button for a few seconds, then reboot.

The lockup happens most frequently when doing something with movies or music. For example, streaming a movie from Netflix or transferring songs to my iPod. I only use it for those sorts of tasks and email.

A suggestion I found here was to disable Speedstep in the bios. This seems to clear up the problem. The downside it that this makes the system intolerably slow as it seems to lock it in the low speed state.

I have flashed the BIOS to A04 or whatever the latest available is from Dell. In one post I saw, someone simply mentioned "flash." Was that poster referring to the BIOS? Is there something else that can be flashed other than the BIOS?

My mini 12 has Vista Home Basic (with all the latest updates) on it. I would consider taking the time to upgrade to Windows 7 if anyone seriously thinks this will solve the problem.

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks
Bill

[dragonmule]

Originally Posted by gicsun

Hi All,

I'm looking for help with a frustrating Mini 12 lockup problem. I've seen some posts here on the issue. However, I've not found a satisfactory answer so I am trying top start the discussion again.

The basic issue is that my mini 12 will just lockup. It happens frequently. Total freeze. I have to power it off by holing down the power button for a few seconds, then reboot.

The lockup happens most frequently when doing something with movies or music. For example, streaming a movie from Netflix or transferring songs to my iPod. I only use it for those sorts of tasks and email.

A suggestion I found here was to disable Speedstep in the bios. This seems to clear up the problem. The downside it that this makes the system intolerably slow as it seems to lock it in the low speed state.

I have flashed the BIOS to A04 or whatever the latest available is from Dell. In one post I saw, someone simply mentioned "flash." Was that poster referring to the BIOS? Is there something else that can be flashed other than the BIOS?

My mini 12 has Vista Home Basic (with all the latest updates) on it. I would consider taking the time to upgrade to Windows 7 if anyone seriously thinks this will solve the problem.

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks
Bill

The only method I have found to completely avoid lockups is disabling 3D support. I set up an option at boot for 3D or not, but I am using linux and would not know how to set up a similar boot choice for Windows.

However, I have noticed that the machines which appear to lock up the most are Vista Basic, if that means anything. I am not sure how often Windows 7 locks up in comparison, but have not read many people talk about this.

[gicsun]

Thanks for taking the time to reply dragonmule. I don't know how to turn of 3D in Windows Vista. I did turn off all the fancy graphics options that I could. It didn't help. I also tried using the power options settings to prevent the OS from throttling back the CPU from 100%. That didn't help either.

Finally, I tried upgrading from Vista to Windows 7. It was no better. It still locked up if Intel Speedstep was enabled. I did this as an evaluation only since I did not buy the Windows 7. I figured I would buy Win 7 if the test worked. It didn't. So I downgraded back to Vista.

I think I have two options:
1. replace the little CPU/Memory memory board, which I can get on eBay for $59.
2. throw it in the trash because with Speedstep turned off, it is too slow to be worth using.

[dragonmule]

Originally Posted by gicsun

Thanks for taking the time to reply dragonmule. I don't know how to turn of 3D in Windows Vista. I did turn off all the fancy graphics options that I could. It didn't help. I also tried using the power options settings to prevent the OS from throttling back the CPU from 100%. That didn't help either.

Finally, I tried upgrading from Vista to Windows 7. It was no better. It still locked up if Intel Speedstep was enabled. I did this as an evaluation only since I did not buy the Windows 7. I figured I would buy Win 7 if the test worked. It didn't. So I downgraded back to Vista.

I think I have two options:
1. replace the little CPU/Memory memory board, which I can get on eBay for $59.
2. throw it in the trash because with Speedstep turned off, it is too slow to be worth using.

There must be some way in windows to explicitly set the clock speed without speedstep. In linux it is the cpu monitor, I can set to different megahertz at will. If speedstep is off, the "automatic" option doesn't work.

However, from my tests I have found that it is not speedstep that causes the lockups. It is definitely the video driver for the GMA500 and from talking with others, it is not isolated to the dell mini 12. Any GMA500 machine will experience the occasional lockup, some more than others.

I would try a different video driver.

[gicsun]

Thanks for the tip... I know of no way in Windows to explicitly set the CPU frequency. However, using the advanced power options, I can set CPU performance as a percentage. I assume that is referring to percentage of maximum frequency.

I can set the minimum and maximum that way and I tried setting them both to 50%. With speedstep enabled in the BIOS, it was only minutes before the system locked up.

Your thought that it is the video driver is interesting. Tonight, I will set it back to the standard VGA driver, renenable Speestep and see what happens.

I do appreciate your ideas and I'll let you know how the experiment turns out.

Thanks
Bill

[gicsun]

dragonmule,

I tried every version of the GMA500 driver I could find and I also uninstalled it completely and tried the standard VGA driver. It appears as if disabling speedstep may be the only solution. Not a good solution by any means, but it will prevent lockups.

I think the problem is all hardware, not software.

I give up. Thanks for the ideas.
Bill

[dragonmule]

Originally Posted by gicsun

dragonmule,

I tried every version of the GMA500 driver I could find and I also uninstalled it completely and tried the standard VGA driver. It appears as if disabling speedstep may be the only solution. Not a good solution by any means, but it will prevent lockups.

I think the problem is all hardware, not software.

I give up. Thanks for the ideas.
Bill

Well...

laptop:~$ uptime
19:57:11 up 5 days, 6:15, 3 users, load average: 1.07, 0.64, 0.49


I don't think it is hardware.

[teatimest]

Before you through it away, you might want to consider giving linux a chance. If that gives you same lock-ups, then you are sure that it is software problem.

[dragonmule]

Originally Posted by teatimest

Before you through it away, you might want to consider giving linux a chance. If that gives you same lock-ups, then you are sure that it is software problem.

So, I take back what I said about the 3d driver. I rebooting with Jolicloud the other day and I have over 2 days uptime again.

I honestly don't know what causes the crashes anymore. Possibly it is flash? I am using flash 10.1 beta 1. I have found it works better than beta 2, go figure. Hoping 10.1 works best.

I have seen posts by other windows users that everything works fine. I really have no idea there. I do run a (very old and legitimate, stripped with xpite, slipped-streamed with SP3) retail copy of Windows XP Pro to do some connections such as RWW for clients who lack any VPN capability... but I run this in VirtualBox.

I really think it is software. There is no way that my hardware just became more stable with time. I had exactly the symptoms of the freezing screen with mouse frozen or not and could not remote into the system from my phone to kill the process. I also had the suspend not working at times. All newer distros work now, even Dellbuntu's crummy updates seemed to fix these problems.

My only problem now is jolicloud's version of network-manager is the same one that is awful with wifi. I have tried connecting with a command line and by with the suspend.d and resume.d scripts as well as fixing the timestamp so it doesn't try to connect to the previous network. All of this is solved in karmic, yet Karmic's brightness function is broken unless backlight=vendor is passed to the kernel which breaks the 2d.

I have very high and likely false hopes that the upcoming 10.4 will fix all of this. If I were to go on what has happened up to this point, all of that will be fixed... but then some other software will break.

This shouldn't be a big deal forever. With the amount of computers that have been released with similar hardware to the Dell Mini 12, things should work out. Dell Mini 12 just happened to be the first major release with this configuration.

On the linux issue, I use this computer for multiple boots and have a few configurations that use the same partition to store files on. I don't see why a linux install dual boot would not work fine with Windows on these machines. If you installed the latest jolicloud with the slow network-manager (it is truly painful after you have used the fast karmic one) and run the updates to where you have kernel 2.6.32-6, I highly doubt your system will crash even with 3d and speedstep enabled. Mine has not crashed in nearly 3 days

laptop:~$ uptime
18:49:14 up 2 days, 19:49, 3 users, load average: 0.01, 0.06, 0.07

[gicsun]

Hi dragonmule,

I've been following a very long and interesting thread on a website for Acer netbook owners.

Acer Aspire One User Forum • View topic - Netbook freezes randomly

There seem to be lots of Acer owners with similar problems and it seems that they have tried everything under the sun to solve it.

My current solution is to disable Intel Speedstep in the BIOS. I dislike this because it makes the system run at half speed. The Acer guys don't have this option in the BIOS.

On your system, do you have Speedstep enabled or disabled in the BIOS? You had said that in Linux, you can explicitly set the speed of the CPU. Where do you set it and does it stay fixed at that speed?

My thought is that the freezing occurs at the moment the speed is changed.