Studio XPS 1340 Hangs/Locks Up

I picked up a Dell Studio XPS 1340 just under 2 weeks ago and as soon as I got it home, I loaded Windows 7 Professional x64 from MSDN on it. I was able to find all the drivers and it seemed to be running fine.

But lately, I have noticed during simple tasks in programs such as Outlook '07, FireFox, Windows Live Messenger, and a few other programs, that the computer will just lockup for about a minute (where I won't be able to do anything) then it will seem to start working again.

During this time, the HD light is lit up (not blinking) and then once the lockup is over the HD light begins blinking again.

I also have noticed there are times when booting the computer hangs for a good 1-2 minutes on the Starting Windows screen (HD light solid).

In Event Viewer there is quite a few of these errors as well:

Help?

 

I'm not certain, but it may have something to do with the HD's data protection sensor. SXPS has the motion sensor thingy on their HDs, maybe that got activated. Did you update the driver for your HD?

 

Well I just installed the latest nForce drivers on my XPS to see if that fixes anything.

And in the "NVIDIA nForce Serial ATA Controller" properties, it has no checkmark next to "Enable free fall control".

 

I have had this same exact problem on my sxps 13. However I think it only began after installing the new win 7 x64 drivers that started becoming available -specifically the nvidia chipset driver. At times when the computer hangs, it does take a minute or two to come back to normal and at other times, it doesn't at all which then I have to manually hold down the power button. Any clues on whats going on??

 

Which AV are you using? How hot is the laptop (or the GPU, left hinge when open as you look at the keyboard) while this is going on? Are you using the SSD or a normal HDD?

 

Im not currently using an AV and have the 320gb 7200rpm hdd with nvidia 9400M G. The laptop does occasionally get hot but thats just how its always been - don't think its that excessive. When its hanging, it doesn't get that much hotter. All the drivers are from the dell site for win 7 x64.

 

Next time it churns, use Windows 7 to tell you what's going on. Hit ctrl+shift+esc to bring up Task Manager (this is easier to launch the app when the PC is busy doing something else). Then, go to the Performance tab, and click Resource Monitor. Next, open the Disk tab and see what's going on. You'll likely see the disk queue go to around 2.0 (which is long) but you'll see which process is doing all the dumping. When you know what it is, just come back here and I'll see what I can do (or someone else might have an idea).

 

Ok so I finally got the system to hang again today and I went to the resource monitor like you said (took a min to load it though). The disk queue went to 5 and the process that had the most activity was 'system'. However, I waited about 2 min and the computer went back to normal and the hd light was no longer solid but back to the usual. Does this help?

 

Sadly, no. With something as vague as "system" it's hard to tell what the issue is. It's likely something is requesting Windows to do a ton of I/O, but it's a pain to debug. Are you using snapshots? If not, have you disabled it for the harddrive? It's "System Restore," and I see that the "system" process also touches volume snapshots among other things.

Beware, if you disable it, you will get back storage space but lose the ability to recover files with "Previous Versions" and roll back to a previous snapshot. As for me, I use Acronis for my backups so this isn't an issue. Other things to look at could be indexing and seeing if your AV client has had issues reported on user forums.

You can also make sure that "Enable write caching on the device" is enabled for your hard drive. It might even be useful to enable the "flushing" option in case you have a process that has a huge amount of I/O causing periodic dumps.

 

I found the fix:
http://forum.notebookreview.com/showpost.php?p=5641963&postcount=28

fixed it for my m1340