karlr Posted October 19, 2011 Posted October 19, 2011 We have been rolling out Windows 7 Enterprise on Toshiba Tecra A10 laptops to certain members of staff. In general this has worked out very well, our build seems to be running smoothly and there are very few complaints about the system itself. However, one particular member of staff is suffering a reoccurring problem whereby the system will very much freeze; the mouse cursor will still move, but the UI will not respond at all. Ctrl+Alt+Del doesn't do anything either. The hard drive light is constantly on, which is why I suspect the system may be badly thrashing. To try to resolve this problem initially, we simply swapped out the laptop, and then tried swapping out hard drives (we have some spare laptops/drives with identical builds ready to go). This freezing was apparently happening daily and could only be resolved with hard power-off, which of course could further damage the state of the laptop. We've had to give this member of staff their old Windows Xp based laptop back for the time being as the problem was so severe. We have deployed several of these laptops, with identical builds. No-one else appears to be suffering a problem of this sort. We have also tried reproducing the freeze ourselves on the build and the specific laptops used by the staff member. The only method we have discovered to put the system in this state is by running prime95 and testing "lots of ram". prime95 attempt to allocate about 1.5gb (system has 2gb). This causes the system to grind to a halt before it can even start stressing the CPU. When starting up scores of applications however, the system seems to cope quite well. We opened everything we could think of/find on the start menu, including the entire office suite, adobe reader, serif photoplus, various MMC consoles, a few educational applications, starboard, and a lot more. Ended up with two whole rows of applications on the taskbar. To top it all off I even ran prime95 in it's CPU stressing mode (only tests some ram), and starting playing animations in PowerPoint 2010. The system remained perfectly stable and even far more useful than one of our old Xp laptops. Note that we are running the x64 version of Windows 7, and I understand that this might not be the best thing for a machine with only 2gb of ram, but we are keen to try to standardize on x64. As I've mentioned above however, it doesn't like it would impact a generous workload. Does anyone have any experience with otherwise happy systems thrashing like crazy? It seems as though this teacher must somehow be allocating massive amounts of ram, but we can't figure out how this is possible with the applications they are using. It seems all we can do is give the teacher another freshly built laptop, but with various performance monitoring/application logging configured to try to discover where and when the problem manifests.
irsprint84 Posted October 19, 2011 Posted October 19, 2011 Got sccm? what does taskmgr say? hibernation one?
bodminman Posted October 19, 2011 Posted October 19, 2011 has a virus scan been run on the users files?
karlr Posted October 19, 2011 Author Posted October 19, 2011 We don't have sccm sadly. In terms of taskmgr it doesn't help us much after the fact and there's nothing out of the ordinary prior. As far as I know the staff member uses the laptop in a static location and thus I don't think it will be hibernated as a matter of course (not sure if you're speaking about special sccm functions or bog standard windows functionality). We indeed have run a virus scan on the user's home drive, and nothing is found. Although it appears that we do now receive some false positives regarding a bunch of PDF files from a specific vendor only while they're in the CSC (Offline files) directory. I'm assuming it's just a something dodgy in a recent definitions update (We're using AVG Anti-Virus Business Edition 2011). I am logging on the laptop with the teachers own credentials as well as my own in an attempt to reproduce the behavior. Don't think differing chipsets or drivers could be an issue, as we are testing this out on the same physical laptops with the same build that the teacher experiences the problem with.
irsprint84 Posted October 19, 2011 Posted October 19, 2011 Just sccm can be known for thrashing Is task manager showing anything? does it just happen when their logged in?
User3204 Posted October 19, 2011 Posted October 19, 2011 Sounds like dodgy RAM, take one of the sticks out, or swap it. If it's when they're trying to open 100mb powerpoint(s) AND SIMS with loads of tabs AND 50mb Publisher(s) it'll get to the dodgy sections quite quickly....
karlr Posted October 19, 2011 Author Posted October 19, 2011 Have run memtest86+ on the laptop as well as a disk surface scan; it happens on multiple different laptops too.
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