Cable Forum - View Single Post - Lockups with a 3 month old laptop

Virgin-Rez · 14-11-2007, 22:27

Folks,

Thought I'd sound you guys out for some advice regarding problems with my nearly new Amilo Pro V3515. Pentium T2080 Dual Core, 80Gb drive, S3 graphics (Yuck!) 1Gb RAM.

The laptop is an insurance replacement for the old one which my one year old daughter threw a glass of coke over. Had it about 3 months now. As an insurance job, is this covered by any warranty? Just wondering out loud...

It came with Vista HB pre-installed. Shame it wasn't Vista HP but there you go... I can update later if I really need the aero interface and media centre. Some of my programs don't work with Vista so I installed XP pro as a dual boot and added another 1Gb mem stick to bring the total to 2Gb with 256Mb robbed by the crap graphics chipset.

Anyway, onto the problems...

Recently the computer has been locking up if left untouched for about 20 minutes. Tried diagnosing but couldn't trace it down to anything specific other than no activity so I decided to try resetting the system back to factory defaults. I know there is a recovery partition on the disk, about 2Gb worth but how do you access it? I used the supplied recovery DVD but that's just a Vista HB installation disc. I ended up formatting C and re-installing Vista from scratch with no XP dual boot.

Now, with a clean Vista install and latest Windows Updates applied (No other software installed) I'm getting further, but different lockups.

In my attempts to recover the data over my wireless network (backed up to my desktop PC) I find that copying a large folder of data across the network will cause the system to lockup. However downloading a similarly large file from the internet is not causing a lockup!

When I try to copy data over the WLAN the wireless link seems to get dropped occasionally with the message "the semaphore timeout period expired"... this despite the fact that the laptop and the WRT54GS router (Latest Firmware) are sat no more than 2M apart and with line of sight to boot! The laptop's Atheros chipset has also been through a couple of versions of the driver and no joy there either.

Any thoughts or suggestions gratefully received!

Thanks in advance!

Rez

14-11-2007, 22:27	#1
Virgin-Rez Inactive Join Date: Oct 2007 Location: Derby Services: Ex NTL, Sky and Virgin Media, Now with BSNL in Bangalore Posts: 77	Lockups with a 3 month old laptop - Advice sought! Folks, Thought I'd sound you guys out for some advice regarding problems with my nearly new Amilo Pro V3515. Pentium T2080 Dual Core, 80Gb drive, S3 graphics (Yuck!) 1Gb RAM. The laptop is an insurance replacement for the old one which my one year old daughter threw a glass of coke over. Had it about 3 months now. As an insurance job, is this covered by any warranty? Just wondering out loud... It came with Vista HB pre-installed. Shame it wasn't Vista HP but there you go... I can update later if I really need the aero interface and media centre. Some of my programs don't work with Vista so I installed XP pro as a dual boot and added another 1Gb mem stick to bring the total to 2Gb with 256Mb robbed by the crap graphics chipset. Anyway, onto the problems... Recently the computer has been locking up if left untouched for about 20 minutes. Tried diagnosing but couldn't trace it down to anything specific other than no activity so I decided to try resetting the system back to factory defaults. I know there is a recovery partition on the disk, about 2Gb worth but how do you access it? I used the supplied recovery DVD but that's just a Vista HB installation disc. I ended up formatting C and re-installing Vista from scratch with no XP dual boot. Now, with a clean Vista install and latest Windows Updates applied (No other software installed) I'm getting further, but different lockups. In my attempts to recover the data over my wireless network (backed up to my desktop PC) I find that copying a large folder of data across the network will cause the system to lockup. However downloading a similarly large file from the internet is not causing a lockup! When I try to copy data over the WLAN the wireless link seems to get dropped occasionally with the message "the semaphore timeout period expired"... this despite the fact that the laptop and the WRT54GS router (Latest Firmware) are sat no more than 2M apart and with line of sight to boot! The laptop's Atheros chipset has also been through a couple of versions of the driver and no joy there either. Any thoughts or suggestions gratefully received! Thanks in advance! Rez