Thinkpads Forum

Hi all,

First time poster here and already have a big problem and some questions.

My wife has a Thinkpad E530C running Linux Mint on an 80GB SSD-drive, bought it second hand and worked flawlessly for a few weeks. After these weeks all the sudden it started to freeze-unfreeze every second until all the sudden, after 10-15 minutes the system decides to start working normally or not and it takes ages... rebooting doesn't help in this case.


What happens so far:

- Going into BIOS all is normal, no freezing whatsoever. After POST it starts to freeze/unfreeze like 7 out of 10 times I power up the computer.
- Laptop may boot normally into Mint/Win7 but after resuming from standby (let's say after 3-4 hours work) the freezing/unfreezing kicks in.
- Everything is freezing; mouse pointer, screen, hard drive. The system just stops.
- System has low tempurature, no overheating issues.
- It's also very hard to reproduce this error.
- Mint logs tell me everything is running fine...


What i tried so far and didn't work:

- Update BIOS to latest.
- Normal HDD with Windows 7.
- SSD with different versions of Linux Mint.
- Boot from Live USB with Ubuntu.
- Cleaned the fans inside.
- Reseated the RAM / Memtest86.
- Booted into windows 7 and turned of the HDD-protection.
- Removed the Wifi-card.
- Disabled the touchpad and tried different pointing devices.
- (Update) tried running with and without battery/AC power


I'm out of ideas, maybe it's a faulty motherboard but how to test this? Anyone experienced this type of freezing/unfreezing before?


all tips are welcome and appreciated,

kind regards,
Davy

Welcome to the forum.

Looks like the only thing you haven't checked yet is power.
Remove the battery, then boot/run from AC only.
And remove AC, then boot/run from battery only.
Just in case, have you got another power supply?

Thanks for the suggestion;

Forgot to add to the list I already tried running without the battery plugged in to no avail

I'm afraid i don't have any spare battery or adapter to test.