Win7 hanging since I replaced HD — HD or laptop problem?

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I have a 2+ yr old laptop (HP dv7-6199us) that had been very reliable. Over time it got more and more sluggish, until it was nearly unusable. I tried re-installing win7, and it wasn’t much better. (!? Maybe the disk was getting flaky?)

I tried swapping in an SSD, specifically a WD Black2 SSD/HD hybrid, with another fresh win7 install. Shazam! My old workhorse turned into a fire-breathing hot-rod. Performance was awesome. All was good.

But then I started noticing problems. I got a few BSODs shortly after installing the Black2, but that hasn’t happened in the last 2 months. But lately I’m having a bigger problem: hangs.

The laptop occasionally (unpredictably) slowly hangs. I’ll notice that one app has hung — it quits responding and gives a spinny-circle mouse sprite. Usually the app screen grays out. Hung apps like that can’t be killed or anything else. I can continue working with other apps — shutting down, writing out data, media files are still playing, etc — but usually within 2-3 minutes EVERYthing is hung. I have to kill the power. This has been happening every few days for the last 2 weeks.

I suspect it’s temperature-related. The laptop has been running significantly hotter than it used to. The left palm rest gets extremely hot. Ambient temps are generally 75-85°F but it hung several times in the middle of the night when it was pretty cool.

I’ve been running Open Hardware Monitor to watch the temps, and the CPUs typically run in the 70-90°C range. Temps will jump 5° or more just by opening an app, even if the app doesn’t stress the CPU. It’s almost like just having the app in RAM makes it run hotter. When apps start hanging, it seems like the Monitor has already hung so I can’t see what the current temps are. (Then I reboot and put the laptop on an ice pack. :))

I’m not real confident in the Black2 SSD/HD. The logical next step is to replace it with a different SSD that hopefully runs cooler. But before I throw more money at this old laptop, does it sound like the Black2 is the culprit?

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Try blowing out you laptom by using a can of compressed air directed into the vents.

Jerry

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70 is the absolute top temperature you want to see, 90 is shut down territory. Check your CPU fan is running and as jw said, clean it.

cheers, Paul

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I downloaded SpeedFan but it only sees “GPU Fan” sensors — and those both say 0.

If the fan wasn’t running at all, I would assume the CPU would fry in seconds. That’s what would happen with a tower system. But there’s definitely a fan running. I can hear it, and it speeds up any time the CPUs get hot.

Unfortunately the fan is pretty inaccessible. I’m not sure if I can get to it to shoot air at it, but I’ll try.

It does seem very odd, though, that this was never a problem until I put in the SSD/HD. Maybe I dislodged some dust and clogged the CPU fan, but it seems more likely that the SSD/HD is just running really hot and adding to the case temps. The SMART data says it’s just running at 65°, but I have it on an icepack right now.

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70 is the absolute top temperature you want to see, 90 is shut down territory.

So I guess it’s not surprising that my system gradually locks up when it gets up around 90.

Coochin, no doubt a cooler like that would help, just like the icepacks do. But I travel frequently with this laptop, and I’d prefer to solve the root problem rather than using an external band-aid like that. Plus it doesn’t explain why I’ve only had a temp problem since I replaced the HD. I suspect either the SSD/HD is running hot and causing the whole system to overheat (but the SMART says it’s only running at 47°C right now), or maybe I knocked some dust into the fan when I installed the SSD/HD.

This morning it’s about 80°F in the room, and the CPUs were running at 60°C when I came in. But as soon as I started doing ANYthing (like opening Chrome to post this) it jumped over 70°. I don’t know why it keeps rising up to 90° as the day goes on, because the room never gets much higher than about 83°.

Schedule hasn’t allowed a blowout yet. I’ll try to get to that tonight.

EDIT: BTW there is one other counfounding element here. At about the same time I installed the SSD/HD, I also upgraded RAM from 8GB to 16GB. So I suppose it’s possible the RAM is running hot too, but that seems unlikely. Before, I regularly ran 15-20 apps or more, and I frequently ran out of RAM. So now I’ve got plenty of RAM, but I can’t run more than a few apps before it starts overheating. I just loaded a large app I **always** run, and the temps instantly jumped up around 90°. The system was only running at about 18% CPU usage, with the big app fully loading one of my 8 cores, but that was enough to drive it into the overheating range. Never had a problem with that before, even with many more apps running.

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Please stop mixing Celsius and Fahrenheit, one or the other please.

cheers, Paul

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I really, really hate cases that require arcane knowledge, 4 passwords, and a genetic test to open up. I removed every screw I could find and I couldn’t even pry any corner of the case open.

So I just shot the air in through the cooling intake/exit ports. A fair amount of dust blew out and I could hear the fan spinning.

That may have done the trick. It was running under 50°C when I started it up. I started several apps that were driving it over 90C before, and it was coasting along at 60C. I started running some CPU-burners (bash shells in a loop) and temps got up around 90C at 30% CPU or so. But I kept adding burners and the temps topped out in the low 90’s even with 90% CPU load. (For some reason core #4 ran about 12-15°C cooler than the other 3. Go figger.)

I didn’t leave it running at that rate very long but the case didn’t seem to heat up much. Apparently the cooling fins just got dusty. Why it suddenly started being a problem after I installed the SSD is a mystery to me.

Hopefully the hanging problem is solved. If not, I’ll be back… Thanks the suggestions, and THANKS for pointing out the should-have-been-obvious, jwitalka!

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Fair enough. 🙂 My wall thermometer reads in F and the CPU monitor reads C.

I am somewhat less certain this is a heat issue. The laptop just crashed again (for the second time today, grrr). The CPU monitor froze up at some point before I noticed the problem, and it was reading in the low 70’s C when it froze. The app shouldn’t have frozen if it was only 72C or so. I rebooted and immediately restarted the CPU monitor, and it was only reading in the high 70’s. The case felt pretty warm but not as hot as it’s been.

So now I’m not sure what to think. Time to open it up and try to reach the fan so I can blow it out.

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You’re welcome. Glad to hear its running cooler now

Jerry

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Crap. It was cruising along in low 60’s. I started flipping through facebook, watching a few videos, and… oh crap, it’s hanging again. When the CPU monitor hung it was only in the high 60’s. I rebooted and restarted the CPU monitor, and it was in the 60’s. Case felt only slightly warm.

So it’s running cool now and it’s STILL hanging. :(:

Time to run memtest86 on this new RAM…

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Ran memtest86 for 8 hours and no errors. So if it’s not heat and it’s not the RAM, what’s causing it??

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Run Chkdsk /F followed by sfc /scannow from an elevated command prompt. You could have corrupted the OS while it was overheating.

Jerry

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AAMOF the system ran CHKDSK automatically after several of the crashes, but I haven’t run it recently.

CHKDSK ran very quickly without the usual long file-verification pass. It found a few lengths that were wrong, but the bigger concern was that it said something about being unable to write out the file table. (It flashed by pretty quickly.) I rebooted and ran it again, and that time it ran the whole pass and there were no errors.

SFC /scannow didn’t find any errors.

I’ll let you know if it helped….

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No joy. Came into the office this morning and several apps were hung. The CPU monitor indicated temps in the 50’s when it hung. Interestingly Task Manager was also hung, and it showed a LOT of CPU activity for several minutes before it hung. Hm.

So I rebooted and started doing a few things. Tried to get a screen shot using Snagit, and for some reason now Snagit hangs for about 40 seconds (with high CPU usage) when I hit the capture button. Or at least it did when I tried it 3 times. Then I made my capture and now it seems normal. NOW what….

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The problems seem to have started after you installed the WD Black2 SSD/HD hybrid. There may be a problem with it. Do you have another HD you can try in its place? I know this means another OS reinstall, but it would eliminate one more possible culprit. Also – do you have defrag set on automatic? I’m not sure but this might be a problem with a SSD hybrid HD.

Being 20 something in the 70's was far more fun than being 70 something in the insane 20's

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Good news! That laptop is easy to disassemble and work on.

http://support.hp.com/us-en/product/HP-Pavilion-dv7-Entertainment-Notebook-PC-series/5082216/model/5173116/manuals

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WLQ98LwNUKI – not the best

That is a powerful (120W adapter) heat generating behemoth. So I can see overheating being an issue.

The WD Black2 has kind of been problematic though overheating has not been an issue I am aware of. Check to make sure firmware is up to date. I do not know if you can update the driver safely. I’d back up both drives before proceeding. Run the WD diag app too.

You can swap in a SSD or the old HDD to rule out the Black2.

If HWMonitor or similar is not showing your temps or fan speeds then you need to open up an locate the fans and make sure they are working. Obviously blow >4 years worth of accumulated dust out while in there. If all fans seem to be working then consider cleaning up and replacing the CPU thermal grease which may be dried out or the heat sink may be knocked ajar due to laptop abuse.

http://support.hp.com/us-en/document/c02638953 – not a big fan but …. may not work on your laptop anyway.

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Sorry, was out of town for over a week and forgot to check here.

CEScott, I do definitely suspect the Black2. (Unfortunately I didn’t notice problems until after Newegg’s 30 day return window, and WD says “you didn’t buy it from us, not our problem, go away.” Great support.) With my travel I haven’t gotten a chance to replace the HD, but I plan to replace the Black2 with separate SSD and HD. The only other suitable HD I have on hand is the old HD I replaced, and it was also showing problems so I don’t want to go back to that one.

Recently it’s been doing other weird behavior — I can often hear the HD seek and park, seek and park, seek and park, when nothing should be accessing it. And Windows tends to freeze up for a few seconds while it’s doing that.

Very strange: I was out of town for the last week on a business trip. During that whole week I never had a problem with the hanging issue. Got back late Friday, and on Tuesday morning it hung again. Hmmmmmm.

No, you shouldn’t defrag an SSD. I had never set a schedule to run it, and I understood Win7 was smart enough not to defrag SSDs. I just checked the defragger and it was scheduled to run once a week, but I believe it was turned off on the SSD. (I turned off the schedule before checking to see what drives were selected, but I’m pretty sure the SSD was off.)

FN, the dv7 product line covers a lot of very different models. I looked at that video before and decided it was different enough that the video probably wouldn’t help. But it’s easy to get at the HD/SSD. The power adapter is external so it shouldn’t cause an overheating problem.

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Replacing the HDD in your laptop with an SSD should, if anything, reduce operating temperatures.

Don’t be mislead by common advertising which typically shows an attractive chick sitting in bed with a laptop on top of the bedclothes, or on her lap. Reality is that almost all laptops draw cooling airflow from the underside, so placing the laptop on bedclothes, or any other soft fabric-based surface will reduce airflow leading to overheating.

You could check the temperatures using a monitoring program such as SpeedFan: http://www.almico.com/speedfan.php

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I understand the airflow. The laptop is sitting on a hard surface. Temperature (measured with SpeedFan and OpenHardwareMonitor) hasn’t been a problem since I blew out the vents.

Now I’m just dealing with the mysterious gradual-grind-to-a-halt hanging problem, even when the temps are fine. (Which just happened again.) This behavior never happened with my old HD, so I suspect the Black2. I’ll be replacing it with an SSD when I get a chance. Work travel &etc is making it difficult to get to it.

I wonder… when I put in a new SSD, do I have to re-install Win7 from scratch again? I was hoping I could just make an image backup from the Black2 and dump it onto a new SSD (hopefully expanding the partition to the larger drive size) and save myself the braindamage of installing everything again. But at a minimum the current image contains the Black2 hidden-HD driver, and possibly other contamination. I suppose it would be safest to start from a clean slate. Bleah.

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…I wonder… when I put in a new SSD, do I have to re-install Win7 from scratch again? I was hoping I could just make an image backup from the Black2 and dump it onto a new SSD (hopefully expanding the partition to the larger drive size) and save myself the braindamage of installing everything again. But at a minimum the current image contains the Black2 hidden-HD driver, and possibly other contamination…

You shouldn’t need to re-install from scratch, and you should be able to restore an image to the new SSD (provided the SSD has larger capacity than the Black2).

If the hanging problem remains then you could do a repair-reinstall. See: “Win7’s no-reformat, nondestructive reinstall” ( http://windowssecrets.com/top-story/win7s-no-reformat-nondestructive-reinstall/ ) or “Non-destructive reinstall of Windows 8 and 8.1” ( https://www.winhelp.us/non-destructive-reinstall-of-windows-8-and-8-1.html ).

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Heh. Hopefully the repair-install would work better than it did for me the last time, when I still had the HD. It rendered the system totally unbootable.

http://windowssecrets.com/forums/showthread//165274-Win7-nondestructive-reinstall-gt-black-screen

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…Hopefully the repair-install would work better than it did for me the last time, when I still had the HD. It rendered the system totally unbootable…

Ah! So far this year I have worked on three customers’ laptops that were failing to boot normally. One of them would halt with a black screen after the Windows logo disappeared and before the Welcome screen, the other two would BSOD before the Welcome screen.

In all three cases the cause seemed to be a conflict between the installed anti-virus program and the display driver. The laptop that was black screening also restarted if I tried to F8 boot into Safe Mode; I ran “Startup Repair” after booting from a Windows system repair disk and was then able to get into Safe Mode.

To fix the problem I had to find and download a removal utility from the AV vendors’ support websites, then run the removal utility in Safe Mode. I was then able to get into Normal Mode and sort out the remaining problems.

Whenever I have performed a repair-reinstall I always uninstall any resident AV program.

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Hm. If I remember right, I didn’t have any AV when I did that repair-install. Just MSE. The system booted but it wouldn’t turn on the screen. I even had some success connecting to the system with TeamViewer, so it was definitely alive, but the TV display was too messed up to do anything with the system.

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Somewhat related… I’ve still been running OpenHardwareMonitor to watch the temps. Generally around 50-60°C when idle, up around 70-80 when working.

But there are consistent differences between the CPU cores. This is a 4-core (8-thread) CPU. Core 4 basically *always* runs cooler, especially when the others are running a bit hot. For example right now I’m running Handbrake, which fully utilizes all the threads. Looking at Task Manager, all 8 threads are very nearly fully loaded. But Core 1 is running at 93-94, Core 2 is at 91, Core 3 is at 88 — and Core 4 is at 81. This is very consistent. Even when the system is idle, Core 4 generally runs a degree or 3 cooler than Core 1.

Why? Is this just an artifact of the CPU design? I assume there’s nothing I can do about it, to try to get the other cores running cooler. They’re all in the same chip…

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