OQO 02 lock up

[Guest]

[kyone]

Lately my OQO has been locking up.  It locks about 3 times a day. 

Lately I've added BT keyboard and mouse that I have not used in a while.. online with Satellite internet access... using a BENQ 17" monitor.. etc but nothing out of the ordinary.

It only seems to lock up at work and not back in the accommodation.  Both locations use satellite over wifi.

I assume that computer lockups are hardware related.  If it was software I assume windows would be able to catch it and report a problem.  With this problem I have to press and hold the power button for 5 sec.

What makes it worse is that Excel 2003 does not autorecover properly.  I have it set to every 2minutes but it simply does not work.

[Bungee]

kyone, I'd perform a factory recovery to determine whether it's software or hardware related is. Hopefully, it's the former. Cheers!

[charlieboy]

My best guess is that you are overloading the processor with the Bluetooth Mouse and keyboard, especially if you are running the 17" Monitor as a 2nd extended desktop. I found that Toshiba Bluetooth stack can use a lot of power when talking to multiple peripherals. Try using a USB hub and plug a USB mouse and keyboard in. If that works OK then try a USB keyboard and a BT mouse if that is stable stick with it. This will be made worse by the amount of power used up by Vista.

Also you do not mention how many apps you tend to have open when it freezes? I would guess a minimum of Excel, Outlook and a web browser but if you are doing graphics editing this might mean you are using up all of the system memory and paging to the HDD, this will make any strees form the BT worse. I would guess you are not doing spreadsheet manipulation on the OQO native screen at home and highly likey to do graphic work (if you do this at all any way)

If you have no luck with that then try making a system restore point, then run a few more of the VISTA tweaks to free up some of your system resources. Especially things like superfetch prefetch indexing etc. If these still dont help then you can always go back to your restore point.

Good luck and let us know how you get along.

[kyone]

To put it into perspective I have in the past really put the OQO through its paces with a heavy demand workload and it usually handles it ok. 

Just today I had open a couple of excel files and surfing the web when it locked up... hardly pushing it..

I cannot do a system restore from scratch as my configuration and installed software would take days to get back to where i am now.

I dont think i will ever know what is causing it.  I have managed to find some software that enables you to have autosave in Excel.  Apparently there is a difference between autosave and autorecovery... but it hasnt crashed over the past 4 or 5 hours so.. fingers crossed.

One thing I have noticed is that my keyboard no longer gets locked on some key presses.  I havent used BT keyboard in over 6 months now.

I will say that the OQO is perfect for where I am now.. on an industrial site that is being built.  I am going around testing (commissioning) the site.

[Ronc]

Lately my OQO has been locking up.  It locks about 3 times a day. 

I had a problem with freezing when I installed SP1 for Vista.  Had to do a forced power off shutdown and reboot every so often.  MS support suggested I start trouble shooting with msconfig by turning off everything in the startup tab, and under services, turn off all non-Microsoft services.  To my surprise, I discovered all I needed to keep on was OQO Services, the WWAN service, and OQO Manager.  I was still able to use and control all 3 radios! Even though it looks like you may be turning off BT or IDT, you really are not.  All you lose is the systray icons.  My BT keyboard and mouse work just fine, connecting and disconnecting when appropriate.  (Since I don't use the tablet feature, I don't know the effect of turning it off.)

[kyone]

Since I started this post it has not happened again.

To solve my excel issue I installed 3rd party software and also since then i enabled update of all installed software as opposed to just windows.  This installed office 2003 sp3 and a few other standard windows updates...

Touch wood it'll keep running ok.