Vortex III Elite Processor Problem. Tried everything, please help

[Krayzi3Bon3]

Hello

I have a 14 months old Vortex III Elite, out of waranty. For a couple of days now after I start the laptop, following 20-30 seconds, it becomes very slow, freezes, the mouse hangs and even hovering over icons doesn't highlight them like it should. So I began testing.

Did Ram Test, Hard Disk test, read the event viewer and saw a Kernel Processor Power error number 37 that caused application to hang. After some research I
changed the Power Plan settings to 85-90% processor speed everytime, all the plans, I entered BIOS looking for SpeedStep setting but couldn't find it, maybe I'm wrong but pretty simplistic BIOS there

I also did a Processor Stress test to see if the cores work, they all reached 100% so I believe that that means the processor is fine?

Did some more research and heard that some users had their laptops cclogged with too much dust and a cleaning did the trick. But their temperatures were high, mine are 40-50 degrees for each core. I did a quick dusting and cleaning anyways, no result.

One more thing, after the 20-30 second from the start, the processor LED stays on all the time, without blinking, just ON. But the CPU usage is at 10-15%. And the temps are fine like I said. Checked with HWInfo Pro, CPU-Z, Speed Fan, AIDA 64.

For the life of me, I can;t figure what's wrong I hope it's nothing connection related from the motherboard because I'm out of warranty. Do you have any other suggestions please? I was at work for the last two days and didn;t have time but I am going to call PCS on Monday if I can;t solve it.

 

[ubuysa]

Two things stand out from your post.

1. Why are your Power Plan settings not set to 100% maximum CPU speed? What are you aiming to achieve by manually throttling them back? IMHO The maximum processor speed should be 100% in all power plans unless you are trying really hard to conserve battery power.

2. I'm not aware of any laptop that has a processor LED. I think what you're seeing is the disk access LED (check your manual). If that is on all the time then your problem is disk thrashing and it's a very common cause of poor performance (easily the most common cause).

Disk thrashing happens for two reasons: The first is that files become fragmented across the disk, this means the read/write head have to move across the disk many times to find all the fragments (this is called disk seek). Seek time is huge relative to CPU speed and this is why it's vital to defragment your disk so that all files occupy contiguous space, this of course reduces the number of seeks required and makes a big difference to performance. The second reason is because files that are regularly used become scattered across wide areas of the disk, some near the outer edges and some near the centre. The problem with this is that long seeks are required to move the read/write heads across the disk back and forth between these regularly used (but separated) files. This of course also severely impacts performance.

The solution is thus not just to defrag your disk (that's what the built-in Windows defragger does) but also to move the files around on your disk so that the regularly used ones are kept close together minimising seeks. I use Ultimate Defrag from http://disktrix.com/, it's not free but neither is it expensive and it does exactly what it says on the tin. You are able to identify your high performance files and keep them together (and defragged) on the faster outer tracks of the hard disk, your less frequently used data (archive data) can be kept together on the slower inner tracks of the disk. In this case "faster" and "slower" refer to the seek times required to move the read/write heads over these tracks. (Note: None of this applies to SSDs of course).

It's also possible that you have a problem with the Windows file system itself and before you run any defrag tool you should always run a disk check. I find the best way to do this is to open a command prompt and enter "chkdsk /f" (but without the quotes). You will almost certainly be asked to reboot and the disk check will run on rebooting. At the end it will tell you whether any errors were found and whether they were fixed. If any errors are found and not fixed you should backup your data, reformat the disk and reinstall Windows.

I'm pretty sure that your problem is that your hard disk is thrashing because the files are badly fragmented and scattered all over the disk surface. If running the Windows defrag tool helps a little then I strongly suggest you get hold of Ultimate Degfrag and do the job properly. Remember to run chkdsk /f first though. It's also worth copying data you very rarely use off the disk onto an external drive, this is especially important if you have less than about 20% free space left on the disk.

 

[Krayzi3Bon3]

Thank you for your extended reply, I'm speechless. I think you may be right but the fact that led me to believe it's the processor was the error in the Event Viewer which kept repeating. Bu the LED is in fact the disk access one, I don't know why I thought otherwise [stupid] ) I did do a malware scan with Malware Bytes and found a few backdoor agents and other stuff, removed them, restarted but still the same.

One strong sign that you are right is that Google Drive notices me that I have ran out of space on "this" computer, which I somehow ignored because I was too concerned to test the s**t of my laptop [stupid again]. And now comes the "best" part. After I posted this last evening and didn't see any replies before 12 am, I read on the Microsoft forum that the most common problem for this error was the chipset driver so I updated it with Driver Genius Pro along with the fingerprint reader and wireless adapter one, which also prompted out as outdated. And surprise surprise: now I get "really" hard locks where the keyboard and touchpad don't work, neither does the power button and when I unplugged the power cable to drain the battery so that the laptop could shut down by itself, the LED that's supposed to show I"m on battery isn't turning itself off :| So I had to take out the battery...

I hope it still turns on, I'm gonna do disk check and defragment the hell out of it, I have all the major defragmenters on the market (IObit, Auslogics, Defraggler, Perfect Disk, Diskeeper. Last I checked I think I had about 10-20 gb of free space on C/ Windows out of 250 GB on that partition.

 

[ubuysa]

Thank you for your extended reply, I'm speechless. I think you may be right but the fact that led me to believe it's the processor was the error in the Event Viewer which kept repeating. Bu the LED is in fact the disk access one, I don't know why I thought otherwise [stupid] ) I did do a malware scan with Malware Bytes and found a few backdoor agents and other stuff, removed them, restarted but still the same.

One strong sign that you are right is that Google Drive notices me that I have ran out of space on "this" computer, which I somehow ignored because I was too concerned to test the s**t of my laptop [stupid again]. And now comes the "best" part. After I posted this last evening and didn't see any replies before 12 am, I read on the Microsoft forum that the most common problem for this error was the chipset driver so I updated it with Driver Genius Pro along with the fingerprint reader and wireless adapter one, which also prompted out as outdated. And surprise surprise: now I get "really" hard locks where the keyboard and touchpad don't work, neither does the power button and when I unplugged the power cable to drain the battery so that the laptop could shut down by itself, the LED that's supposed to show I"m on battery isn't turning itself off :| So I had to take out the battery...

I hope it still turns on, I'm gonna do disk check and defragment the hell out of it, I have all the major defragmenters on the market (IObit, Auslogics, Defraggler, Perfect Disk, Diskeeper. Last I checked I think I had about 10-20 gb of free space on C/ Windows out of 250 GB on that partition.

Given all that you've just said about driver issues (as well as the hard disk thrashing problem) I think your best bet now would be to backup your data and do a clean reinstall of Windows rather than try to fix what sounds like a rather unhappy machine. Then you should install all the drivers supplied to you by PCS, I realise they may not be the very latest versions but drivers are only there to interface the OS with the hardware, as long as they do that job they're best left alone. I only ever update drivers if I need the functionality being provided by a new version or if I have a problem with the device, otherwise I leave them alone. The PCS supplied drivers should work ok, if they do I'd leave them alone.

Once you have Windows and the original drivers installed you can do some testing to be certain that all is working as it should be. To be honest Windows generally benefits from a reinstall now and then, I usually reinstall mine about once a year. Once you know it's working normally you can reinstall your third-party applications. Think carefully about what data you copy back though, only copy back data that you will be using, 20GB of free space on a 250GB drive/partition is always going to lead to long seek times and poor performance. It might be worth upgrading the hard disk or extending the partition.

There is a saying; "when you're in a hole stop digging".

 

[Krayzi3Bon3]

I blame AMD for all this ) I always do a clean install of Windows every year too but now I bought a Samsung SSD 256GB Pro last month and I wanted to reinstall Windows on it and pair it with my existing hybrid drive but I said to myself that I should wait for the new driver from AMD for my 7970ms which they promised to include all the new frame pacing fixes and it's been more than a month now since they first announced the final version and still nothing. And I became so cluttered with coursework for uni and at work and it's actually the first time my desktop is filled with random files and I haven't even noticed. Never had space related or organization problems before because my ÖCD" always kicked in ) Anyways, I'm going to install the SSD, new Windows and just in time for Uni holiday next week so I can plan all the games! Thank you for your help

 

[ubuysa]

I blame AMD for all this ) I always do a clean install of Windows every year too but now I bought a Samsung SSD 256GB Pro last month and I wanted to reinstall Windows on it and pair it with my existing hybrid drive but I said to myself that I should wait for the new driver from AMD for my 7970ms which they promised to include all the new frame pacing fixes and it's been more than a month now since they first announced the final version and still nothing. And I became so cluttered with coursework for uni and at work and it's actually the first time my desktop is filled with random files and I haven't even noticed. Never had space related or organization problems before because my ÖCD" always kicked in ) Anyways, I'm going to install the SSD, new Windows and just in time for Uni holiday next week so I can plan all the games! Thank you for your help

Your welcome.

The SSD will completely eliminate all the hard disk issues I mentioned too.