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It definitely seems to be associated with the external monitor somehow. I disconnected the external last night, and this morning I had no resized windows. Then I plugged in the external and the system went nuts for a while — displaying some apps in huge size, etc — and it took something like 20 seconds for it to quit tearing its hair out and actually display the proper stuff.

I suspect this happens because I’m not running the laptop display in its native size. It’s a 3840 x 2160 (why!?? who needs a 4k display on a 15″ monitor!?), but because it handled the two different size displays (2160p internal, 1080p external) badly, I set the internal display to match the external 1920×1080 resolution. So both monitors have the same resolution and the same scaling, but… something is not happy, somewhere.

Any ideas?

I think I’ll try running the internal at its native 4k resolution, but set its scaling to 200% …

Paul T wrote:

What happens to Windows when you “walk away”? Does it lock/sleep/do nothing? cheers, Paul

Usually it sleeps as it should.  I come back an hour later or next day, wake it up, and everything works as expected.  Sometimes (e.g. this morning) I come back and it is hung, and I have to kill the power to force a reboot.  I’d guess that happens maybe 5-10% of the time.

mn– wrote:

I’ve seen this too. Rarely, but still. Would appear to be related to display geometry changes – as in external display inactivity/powersave and wakeup with a GPU/drivers/display combination that causes a disconnect/reconnect when that happens, and dock/undock on a laptop.

That’s my suspicion too.  Especially since the problem originally manifested when I had different geometries (scaling) on my two monitors, and fixed itself (for a while) when I set them to the same scaling.

The question is, why, and how to fix it?  I have not yet tried experimenting with removing my external monitor to see if that’s a necessary component of the problem.  The last time I took the laptop with me on a business trip, I don’t *remember* it messing with the scaling, but I’m not certain.

Nirsoft also thinks it’s an HP battery. In fact it thinks it’s an LI4402a, which is totally the wrong type of battery. I’m guessing the battery lies, because it’s definitely not HP or LI4402a. There are no identifying markings inside or out, just a serial number.

46417-BatteryInfo

46418-Battery

Just tried it — uninstalled, Action/Scan, restart HWmon. No change.

Yes the battery is installed. 🙂 But I don’t have the “Capacities” section you have.

FWIW I ran HWMonitor and I don’t see any battery stats…

Try Passmark BatteryMon – it’s free for personal use.

I finally gave BatteryMon a try, and I discovered something interesting. The battery drained steadily down to 15%, then it dropped suddenly to 3% and hibernated.

2017-01-08, 15:21:53, OK, 16%, 1.32, 762, -42390, , 9.998, -42390, 16.0%, , , , , , , , , , , ,
2017-01-08, 15:22:03, OK, 15%, 1.29, 694, -47208, , 9.923, -47208, 15.0%, , , , , , , , , , , ,
2017-01-08, 15:22:13, OK, 15%, 1.29, 694, -45676, , 9.943, -45676, 14.3%, , , , , , , , , , , ,
2017-01-08, 15:22:23, OK, 3%, 2.85, 307, 0, , 10.022, 0, 3.0%, , , , , , , , , , , ,
2017-01-08, 15:23:13, OK, 3%, 2.86, 308, 5583, , 10.588, 5583, 3.0%, , , , , , , , , , , ,

That’s probably why I was seeing the “sudden death” problem. This time it dropped to 3% and was able to hibernate; other times maybe it dropped straight from 15% to “dead.” I had it set to hibernate at 7%, but it dropped right through that level.

BatteryMon thinks it’s a gen-you-wine HP battery, but in reality it’s a no-name. It’s only 18 months old — it did not age well. The original lasted over 4 years.

So I probably need a new battery. Or maybe just a new laptop. It’s 6 yrs old, and big and heavy to cart around the country…

Thanks Paul!

Try Passmark BatteryMon – it’s free for personal use.

I finally gave BatteryMon a try, and I discovered something interesting. The battery drained steadily down to 15%, then it dropped suddenly to 3% and hibernated.

2017-01-08, 15:21:53, OK, 16%, 1.32, 762, -42390, , 9.998, -42390, 16.0%, , , , , , , , , , , ,
2017-01-08, 15:22:03, OK, 15%, 1.29, 694, -47208, , 9.923, -47208, 15.0%, , , , , , , , , , , ,
2017-01-08, 15:22:13, OK, 15%, 1.29, 694, -45676, , 9.943, -45676, 14.3%, , , , , , , , , , , ,
2017-01-08, 15:22:23, OK, 3%, 2.85, 307, 0, , 10.022, 0, 3.0%, , , , , , , , , , , ,
2017-01-08, 15:23:13, OK, 3%, 2.86, 308, 5583, , 10.588, 5583, 3.0%, , , , , , , , , , , ,

That’s probably why I was seeing the “sudden death” problem. This time it dropped to 3% and was able to hibernate; other times maybe it dropped straight from 15% to “dead.” I had it set to hibernate at 7%, but it dropped right through that level.

BatteryMon thinks it’s a gen-you-wine HP battery, but in reality it’s a no-name. It’s only 18 months old — it did not age well. The original lasted over 4 years.

So I probably need a new battery. Or maybe just a new laptop. It’s 6 yrs old, and big and heavy to cart around the country…

Thanks Paul!

But I don’t WANT it to shut down. I want to be able to continue my work later.

Paul T, usually it DOES go to sleep when I close it. But I’ve seen it **wake up** when the lid is closed. The fan starts spinning, the outside light goes on. Waking up when it’s closed is OK — it should do that when the battery gets low. Wake up, dump the hiberfile, shut down. But it seems to be waking up and not shutting down — or maybe waking up too late, so it runs out of juice while it’s dumping the hiberfile?

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…

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.

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

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.

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.

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….