jd0gg

I figured I would save some poor saps still on XP SP3 some time by posting what I just dealt with. Any time I run into some serious issues and find a fix from a web forum I usually register to post my fix and what I did. I work as a laptop repair tech and through my troubleshooting narrowed down this exact problem to hardware interrupts and DPC's with a donor laptop for a customer. Long story short, his laptop went the way of the dodo bird and we just so happened to have a nearly identical model in the boneyard. So instead of spending hours troubleshooting his machine (and running up a nice labor bill) I just swapped his drive with his permission. But of course, it was too good to be true and I noticed the lockups. I kind of had an idea it was a hardware issue, I've been doing this since the 98 days so I have a little experience under my belt but I ran his Kapersky and a rootkit tool anyway and found nothing, which is not surprising because it appears to be almost a fresh XP install with only 27-29 processes running in the background. Unfortunately the poor guy is on an XP machine and NONE of the aformentioned fixes work in XP, unless I missed something. So, here's the rundown, so it turns up in a search engine. Compaq Presario 2100 2178CL 2178cl Athlon 2400 mobile, 512 ddr XP SP3 with updates I had tried re-installing ALL of the drivers to no avail. I used the ProcessExplorer tool to verify it was a hardware DPC issue of sorts. The old drive that was in this laptop did the exact same thing, and it would freeze every 5 seconds and the interrupt / DPC usage would spike to 18-25%. Through one measure or another, I tried installing the SDK tools mentioned earlier but of course those are for 8, it still wanted me to bump up to .NET framework 4.0, so I did. In the midst of grasping at straws I also did a BIOS flash in Windows from the HP website, rebooted and all seems to be well. So I think it's safe to say one of those things fixed the problem. Also new friend. I do a bit of case modding and I'll be posting my current project here in a week or so, it's a server case I've cut up and I'm putting in a Xeon dualie.