AMAZING! Strangest hardware problem ever???

[AmigaHeretic]

Ok, a relative gave me this laptop to look at because it was having problmes.  They said the touchpad and keyboard would stop working.  So what did they do??  Bought a mouse to plug in to it??  Of course when the computer would "freeze" up and touchpad stops working and they plug the mouse into the USB port, guess what their new mouse doesn't work either.  

Ok, so they bring it to me. Turn it on and works fine.  Touch pad seems fine.  Play with it a little and the computer freeze completely.  Keyboard doesn't respond, CAPSLOCK key won't light up.  So I turned the laptop over real quick just to see if the CPU fan was spinning to see if maybe it was overheating and that was causing the lockup.

After setting it backdown though the computer was no longer frozen.  Works just fine?  WTF?  Play with start moving it around.

So, if you move it... Twist just slightly really, the whole system locks up, all programs, disk activity, Clock, sound, internet, everything, twist it back, and everything resumes perfect!!

You can PAUSE the entire computer.  Left it "Paused" for and house, then twisted it back and the clock was behind almost exactly an hour, and all progams, music player started right back where they were.  

Everything stored in RAM just like it was.

Tried defraging the HD.  "Pause" it for a while, resume, "Pause", resume.  Defraged fine!!  

Downloaded large files.  "Paused"  download just stayed sort of paused, twist the laptop to resume and download keeps going.

Had to make a video of this as I thought it was amazing!!


From this I think you could make a BIG RED pause button on your computer.  Say you are in the middle of a game, doing whatver, just hit "PAUSE", then when you get back you can un-pause you computer instantly!!


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ixGIfBrW5wM


(Yeah, that's my daughter in the background, that's me laughing as I'm making the video as she keeps asking for me, so I had to kill the vid at the end cause I felt bad ignoring her!!  :-D )

[terminator4]

Kinda funny although not surprising - seen similar laptops.  It's time to crack open the case and do some repairs
and when you do you'll know why you have to pay $100 and up for repair (removing a case, may sometimes even take 30-60 minutes giving all the screws)
well, thats what you get, today for "made in china".
good old days of Commodore-Amiga made in USA/Taiwan/Hong Kong were better than some of the stuff we see today. :lol:
I know older generation, electronics people that say the same thing also.

[Jope]

The weird thing is, Commodore were notoriously cheap quality computers.. They were bottom dollar at everything. It's a miracle that so many still work to this day.

They had huge yield problems with the C-64 in the first years of manufacturing.. A very large percentage of new machines were returned DOA.

[Hodgkinson]

Have a look at the flexi-track headers, make sure none of the flexi-tracks have come out and that any securing leavers are fully locked into place ;-) They're notorious for problems...

EDIT: I see a boing ball :-D Is your relative an Amigan, too?

[DBAlex]

@AmigaHeretic

Hehe... cool "problem"...  :-P

Also... How did you get those OS4 Icons on OS3.x? Are they downloadable somewhere & do they come with an installer?

Cheers, Alex.

[AmigaHeretic]

@all

Yeah, thanks for the help.  Not sure if it was some loose chips or cracked motherboard, but does seem like it looses then makes a connection.


The thing is that if I came to problably ANY forum or talked to anyhardware "exper" and said, "Hey, I have this idea.  I want to make a hardware "Pause" button on the front of my case that just puts everything on hold inlcuding dowloads and HD activity." I bet anything people would say I was crazy and that is impossible!  Well, I guess it is possible.   :-D  :-D

@Hodgkinson

Have a look at the flexi-track headers
EDIT: I see a boing ball  Is your relative an Amigan, too?

Thanks that gives me a place to start. It's my mother in laws.  No not a fellow Amigan. :-( Where do you see a Boing Ball.  I'll have to watch my own video again to search!

@DBAlex

Also... How did you get those OS4 Icons on OS3.x? Are they downloadable somewhere & do they come with an installer?

No, I just downloaded them from http://www.masonicons.de/  Mason makes some pretty nice icons.  These are the actual Dual State 32bit glow icons, so just have to AFA_OS installed to use them.

[Hodgkinson]

>Where do you see a Boing Ball?

Background, right in the middle (Well, it sure looks like one...)

The thing is that if I came to problably ANY forum or talked to anyhardware "exper" and said, "Hey, I have this idea. I want to make a hardware "Pause" button on the front of my case that just puts everything on hold inlcuding dowloads and HD activity." I bet anything people would say I was crazy and that is impossible! Well, I guess it is possible.  

Yeh, you've found something rather special there ;-) Only thing I can think of is if it's somehow holding an interrupt line or clock signal somewhere in a particular state that just happens not to affect screen refresh...And that any downloads that are being attempted just keep retrying the data block until the laptop is “unpaused”…

Hodgkinson.

[ZeBeeDee]

CTRL, ALT & DEL to bring up the task manager ... see if there's any process hogging the resources.

[AmigaHeretic]

Hodgkinson wrote:
>Where do you see a Boing Ball?

Background, right in the middle (Well, it sure looks like one...)

Oh, well, that is AmigaOS3.9 running there.  I put WinUAE on it to test it out. :-D
 

[AmigaHeretic]

ZeBeeDee wrote:
CTRL, ALT & DEL to bring up the task manager ... see if there's any process hogging the resources.

No, maybe I can explain what is going on in the video a little better.

CTRL, ALT, DEL won't bring anything up as the the computer is completely locked up.  No mouse input, no keyboard input (i.e even pressing CapLock won't make the light go on by it) all HD activity stops instantly, everything on screen, stops, and all sound stops instantly.

But when you touch or move it (twist it a little) everything goes back to normal.

Here is why I think the whole system is "Paused" and not something like screen is not just being drawn to.

1. Sound stops too ;-)

2. Render a fractal as seen in video.  It takes maybe 10 second for fractal to render. So if it was just an issue of not being drawn to the screen, then fractal would continue rendering, but I can let it render 10%, "pause" for 5 minutes, on pause and it just continues where it left, let it render another 20%, then pause it for 5 minutes, then unpause, and it will keep going from (this is 10 minutes later now) right where it left off.

3. Real time clock.  If it was also something like a screen drawing issue, the when unpaused the clock would jump back to actual time.  I have "paused" the computer for 1 hour and then unpaused.  Did this last night after making the video.  Laptop said it was 9pm which threw me, checked the other clocks in the house and it was after 10pm.  So the clock in the computer is paused too.

4. Also, HD activity stops instantly when you pause it.  Example, when Windows XP is booting, the screen where the Windows logo is on the screen and the blue thing is going across the screen over and over, I can pause it on that blue bar going across, HD stops, leave it paused for however long, unpause and the blue continues (HD begins to load again), pause, unpause, I can do this over and over.  Can make Windows take even longer to load!!  I/O gets paused.

5. Internet Downloads.  I have only done this with smaller downloads.  WookieChat for example.  But did a download that took about 30 seconds.  Paused the computer about half way through the download for about 2 minutes.  So if computer was running in background DL would have finished in 15 seconds.  Unpause, dl just kept going right at halfway point like nothing happed and took about 15 second.  That this was awsome.  Now I'm sure this wouldn't work for very long as the server would probably time out on your download or something, but would be intereting to test with IRC and see what happens too. But was having trouble getting on last night.

[quarkx]

Kind of looks like any pressure on the "deck" brings the thing back to life. That would lead me to hypothesize that there is some sort of loose connections somewhere under the deck. Might even be a cold solder, or something simple as the touchpad plug is not seated properly. My recommendation is if you can, take the outer shell off and carefully check all of the connection points and any plugs to make sure if they are seated properly.Even the cards might have become a little out of alignment, with the normal movements that a laptop might take.
This, of course might be easier said than done, as it looks like a Toshiba laptop, and Toshiba's can be a real pain to take apart. the "nice" and only good thing is that the CPU is usually socketed, and easy to upgrade, but a real pain to put back together.
You can always try the "Apple3" trick and drop it straight down on the table and see if that re-seats the components. :-D

[ZeBeeDee]

Ahhh ... Now I see!

I think quarkx is right and there has to be a loose connection. I'd get somebody professional to have a look at it and advise/repair.

[quarkx]

ok, upon re-watching, I see that it is an HP pavilion. HP's are a BIT easier to take apart, but not by much. If you attempt to remove the outer shell, my best advice is to be careful,slow and patient, don't force things, once you do one, it is pretty straight forward, and much easier to put back together. In doing many laptop repairs, I can honestly say, I have not seen this particular problem (usually, I am replacing screens, replacing drives and burners, and taking them apart to custom paint the shells), but it is not all that complicated to see how everything fits together.

[darksun9210]

not only would i like this fixed, but i'd like to find out what it is thats the problem

sounds like the "pause" button on the old action replay carts that interrupted the cpu clock pulse. and the "slow mo" feature that was a turny button thing which increased the clock speed from nothing back to normal operating speeds iirc...

curious how it even stops the realtime clock though... :-?