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My laptop often frezes
Şerban S.:
Hi!
I've been thinking again and again on this weird behavior.
When I had this kind of trouble, without any visible cause, the only cause proved to be the temperature.
In order to overrule this, you can test very easy the state of the laptop, by putting your hand on the back of it.
If after 10 minutes of uptime you sense an unconfortable heat on it's back, than this is abnormal.
Usually, after some three hours of uptime, you sholuld be able to keep your hand on the back, for at least three minutes, without feeling uncomfortable.
So, if the heat is over normal with this simple way of measuring it, that means that either inside it got cluttered with a lot of dust, or some part is old and coming to its end.
Usually, when I open a laptop for whatever reason, the CPU fan has a lot of dust on it. Also, you need to check the CPU anti-thermal paste. After some 12... 18 months, it wears off and you need to change that, in order to keep a good level of thermal transfer to the CPU fan heatsink. The video chipset, also gets cluttered with dust.
Cleaning those, will improve the air flow inside and reduce overheating significantly.
Still... If you are unfamiliar with this kind of maintainance, you should ask for someone's assistance.
Another approach, is finding YouTube tutorials (there are lots of them).
Study those that show you how to service your laptop.
Cleaning it, is the most common maintainance task.
You can also improve the cooling by using a laptop external cooler (heatsink), USB powered usually. Some have two fans, some other three, or even five.
Years ago, I used such a cooler and it helped me a lot. The reason was the same: I've experienced lots of freezings and it took me some time to figure out what was happening.
What caught my attention was the fact that those appeared mostly during summer.
Best wishes, Șerban.
stevef:
Thank you for the response.
Checking the journal was not intended as a solution - just to see if anything of interest was logged prior to the freeze.
As nothing was recorded it seems to confirm whatever happened was a sudden, critical error.
In a home environment, the only suggestion I have is trying to identify a pattern which leads to a freeze.
Thanh Tùng ??ng:
--- Code: ---Welcome to Linux Lite 6.6 tungdt
Thứ sáu 19 Tháng 4 2024, 09:09:40
Memory Usage: 711/3305MB (21.51%)
Disk Usage: 22/219GB (11%)
Support - https://www.linuxliteos.com/forums/ (Right click, Open Link)
tungdt ~ journalctl -b -1 --since 09:06
-- No entries --
tungdt ~ journalctl -b -1 --since 09:05
-- No entries --
tungdt ~ 1 journalctl -b -1 --since 09:04
-- No entries --
tungdt ~ journalctl -b -1 --since 09:03
-- No entries --
tungdt ~ journalctl -b -1 --since 09:02
-- No entries --
--- End code ---
I tried your solution when my laptop froze, but it didn't work. I waited for the same problem to happen again, and today it finally did so I can send you the error report.
--- Quote from: stevef on April 05, 2024, 03:20:43 AM ---Thank you for the response.
It may be useful to check if anything got logged around the time of the freeze.
Even if nothing was logged that adds a bit of information about your problem
Operate the system as normal until it freezes.
Make a note of the freeze time, then power off and on.
When the system has booted, open a terminal by pressing 'Ctrl' 'Alt' and 'T' together.
In the window that opens enter the command below followed by enter.
Replace the HH:MM after '--since' with a time value.
If your system froze at 07:10, using a value of 07:05 will show the logged events for 5 minutes before the freeze.
You may need to adjust the time period you use.
--- Code: ---journalctl -b -1 --since HH:MM
--- End code ---
The output should be a list of time stamped events recorded for the previous boot with an indicator of where you are in the listing.
Press space bar to scroll down the list a page at at time.
Use up and down arrows to move a line at a time.
Once you are at the end of the list you will see something like 'lines 390-410/410 (END)'
Pressing 'Q' will exit from the listing.
Post back with anything that looks suspicious
--- End quote ---
trinidad:
You say using mainly for Internet things like Facebook, browsing, Zoom etc. I wrote a post explaining why (got blocked) but now I'll give you the simple answer and what to try to resolve the freezing issue. Nowadays immersive Internet usage will run you out of memory for several reasons on a 4G memory system. The simplest reason is to many concurrent small memory requiring processes that starve bigger processes for memory. The oom-killer does not recognize the memory pressure of the many concurrent smaller processes and just lets the system run out of memory and freeze, instead of killing the bigger process like it used to. Now Ubuntu uses a systemd oom-killer set to auto-swap but you must have a big enough swap file to handle it. Try increasing your swap file to 4G and see if that solves the problem. The truth is not often reported about this situation but nowadays 8G of memory is actually neccessary for immersive Internet usage.
TC
stevef:
Thank you for the response.
It may be useful to check if anything got logged around the time of the freeze.
Even if nothing was logged that adds a bit of information about your problem
Operate the system as normal until it freezes.
Make a note of the freeze time, then power off and on.
When the system has booted, open a terminal by pressing 'Ctrl' 'Alt' and 'T' together.
In the window that opens enter the command below followed by enter.
Replace the HH:MM after '--since' with a time value.
If your system froze at 07:10, using a value of 07:05 will show the logged events for 5 minutes before the freeze.
You may need to adjust the time period you use.
--- Code: ---journalctl -b -1 --since HH:MM
--- End code ---
The output should be a list of time stamped events recorded for the previous boot with an indicator of where you are in the listing.
Press space bar to scroll down the list a page at at time.
Use up and down arrows to move a line at a time.
Once you are at the end of the list you will see something like 'lines 390-410/410 (END)'
Pressing 'Q' will exit from the listing.
Post back with anything that looks suspicious
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