Lads, help me out with some troubleshooting as I'm at a bit of a loss. I've not been able to get to a professional repair place for months and when I tried a local place a few months back they told me to fuck off because of Covid.
Issue:
Laptop seems to be suffering from some mysterious process causing it to often slow to a crawl and then sometimes it will freeze, fan runs into overdrive and I have to unplug it and put it away for the battery to discharge.
Hardware?
Assumed initially that it was poor internal cooling causing it to overheat so I cleaned the inside and later bought an external cooling pad but no joy. Speccy does not show anything unusual on temperature when it slows.
Software?
Nothing unusual on task manager, have done a reset to see if any apps were causing it, issue seems to be system-wide from testing different apps. Disabled dogshit Lenovo plugin.
I guess I will have to buy myself a new laptop soon which is annoying as I'm looking to get a mortgage in the new year and want to show my life as boring. Plus if I can fix it but still buy another laptop then I can give this to my mum who will just use it for facebook.
>>27677 Tech threads are hilarious. Imagine you went to the doctor and said 'I have a cough, but only after meals, and my poo is bright yellow, and there's pain in my right leg, and when I wake up in the morning I have blurry vision' and the doctor goes 'well, have you tried transferring your consciousness into a clone?'
Fortunately computers are not people, so there's very little practical or ethical dilemma in a bottom up, time-saving diagnostic process. With humans, the fact that you can't just swap bits out until you find the culprit is why diagnosis can often be such a time consuming and troublesome process.
That said most people who give tech help online are completely amateur and the way they advise you to troubleshoot is backward. YouTubers are horrible for this too and they're who a lot of people learn from. I used to work on a tech support phone line and it taught me that you have to think outside the box to look for the simplest culprits, and ways to rule them out, before you go fucking about with anything else- That's the real reason the tried and true "Have you tried turning it on and off again?" exists.
Plenty of phone calls went "Okay, first of all, is it plugged in?" "Yes, of course it's plugged in, I'm not thi- Oh. Sorry. Yeah, that'll be it."
>>27681 Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. Either way the laptop will be unresponsive to switching back on until the battery is fully discharged.
That may indicate something fundamentally wrong but I'll be dammed if I can align the symptoms and what works. The clock is correct and stays in-sync for example which I think rules out the CMOS battery.
Probably just the background Windows Update process fucking you. You get the option to defer the installation, but it still does all the prep work whether you tell it to or not, and it typically caps the CPU/HDD activity on mine for a good half hour or so when it's doing it.
Could try disconnecting battery and just running off A/C.
Disable any other bollocks in taskmgr startup.
I wouldn't want to totally rule out temps. If the processor is getting fuck hot and aggressivly throttling back, and Windows is going wonky, then perhaps Speccy doesn't get a chance to update the temps. Since fans are working, I'd be inclined to redo the thermal paste just in case it's a bit crusty.
Those specs look very recent - are you still under warranty? I wouldn't bother troubleshooting anything weird if I can just get an RtB.
Failing that, my first course of action would be to open up Resource Monitor and wait to see if anything weird happens; any runaway process that is using up all of your CPU should make itself known. If that reveals nothing, I'd use msconfig to reboot into minimal Safe Mode to see if the problem still occurs. If it doesn't, then I'd use Device Manager and msconfig to disable every non-essential driver and background process, then re-enable them one by one.
Caveat: I admin Linux boxes in a professional capacity, but am very much a non-expert when it comes to Windows.
Is there no warranty or what have you? Have you tried bitching really hard about it to customer support? Looks like a newish laptop so I'm sorry if that's not an option.
In case anyone was wondering: the issue was with the power setting, I ran it on high-performance and that meant that both graphics cards were running despite common sense.
