BSOD on new R61, Atmel TPM driver related?

My R61 is about a month old and for the past day and a half i've been getting these random Blue screens of deaths. (for my questions, scroll to the bottom, for a semi-lengthy story/rant, read on)

The first one occurred when i was trying to connect to my 56k internet provider while watching an episode of boondocks. The error message was pretty non-descriptive as it didnt have any error code or specify which device failed. it only listed some random memory address and hinted that it might a device or driver failure. On the next restart, windows tell me that a sound card/sound card driver is not detected so i won't have sound. surely enough when i went to the audio properties in control panel, there are no sound cards for me to select when i go to hardware. then i went to systems and then device managers to see if i can update the drivers but there were nothing with a yellow exclamation point in which i can update the drivers to. i scan for hardware change and nothing popped up so i decided to try to restart the laptop.

ok so its shutting down... and the screen goes blank. i thought i choose shutdown by accident so its actually shut down so i press the power button to start it back up... but its not starting up. i realize that the fan on the laptop is actually still on so that means the laptop is actually still on. i hold down the power button for 10 seconds, but it refuses to shut down. i tried the power button a few more times and nothing. i unplug the AC adapter, and now i know its definitely still on because the battery/AC light is still on despite the fact that I pulled the AC. This just tells me that the laptop has completely froze, including the bios.

so the options that were available to me were wait the 4-5 hours that it takes to drain my battery or take out the battery. by that time the laptop seems pretty hot and the fan doesn't seem to be kicking in so waiting for 4 hours doesn't really seem like a option. so i decided to go for the latter. now i had a friend who decided to pull his battery from his laptop while it was shutting down because "it was shutting down too slow" (he didnt know about holding down the power button for 5 seconds trick) and it ended up screwing up his installation of windows, which isn't the end of the world since i can do a reinstall.

so i pulled out the battery and stuck it back in and everything boots as normal. my sound card is working again. everything is fine. well my laptop was on for half the day and i was usually using it during that time and it didnt crash on me. coincidentally, later that night, when i was watching boondocks and connecting to my 56k internet provider again, it BSoD on me again with the same screen. so i figured that its probably a driver conflict between the sound card and the modem, lightning doesn't strike twice right? but this time when i restarted, my sound card didnt go out, everything seem to be normal.

and still later that night, i was playing some game on a psx emulator and it BSoD on me again after an hour of playing on it. Again i had the same generic BSOD screen, but at least now i know that the modem-boondocks combination isn't it. i go to device drivers and notice that theres a yellow exclamation point next to Atmel TPM driver so i figured thats probably what failed and caused the BSOD. i tried updating the driver but it didn't work. i noticed that theres actually two Atmel TPM driver installed so i just uninstalled the one that wasn't working. the reason for the long story, is that i figured that this might of been caused by me pulling out the battery (even though i have no clue what Atmel TPM does).



heres my question, are there supposed to be two Atmel TPM device/drivers in your device manager's list? i seem to remember that i noticed there was two when i first did the clean install and finished installing the drivers. Have anyone experience a problem/situation like this before? Right now my laptop has been on for a few hours now and i haven't been hit with a blue screen so far, but then again the laptop have been on for half the day in between the first two blue screens so it can mean anything.

also when the laptop is about to bsod, the audio suddenly slows (well thats the first thing that is noticeable) to a halt and when i see this, i hit a few keys on the keyboard with no response, and then it bsod in about 5 seconds.

one of the common answer to the bluescreens on thinkpad is the turbo memory, and i don't have that on my laptop. i have a R61 with the x3100 graphic card and currently windows xp.

if it happens again and i can't figure it out, i'll probably send it to the depot and see what they can do. with my last laptop, i was getting these Non Memory parity errors but i just ignored them since they seem pretty common when i checked on the dell's forum and they weren't that frequent. but eventually it became more and more frequent and the laptop died within a year and a half i just dont want to want and let the same thing happen again. oh and sorry for the long story

 

A hard power down will always set your computer to "Mechanical Off" as the ACPI folk like to call it, irrespective of the state, locked or not, of your computer. It probably just wasn't held down long enough (even though it felt otherwise).

I would sincerely doubt your TPM would be crashing your computer. The TPM's sole purpose in life is to store keys and spit out pseudo-random numbers, and it could care less about a PSX emulator. In fact, you could probably disable the TPM drivers and not notice a thing.

I would check the Event Viewer (easy to find, quick Google if you've never heard of it), and see if it returns any juicy information on the matter. It's likely a driver or hardware issue with your sound card, in my opinion.