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themusicalduck

Member

Registered: 2011-07-04

Posts: 123

[SOLVED] Thinkpad T510, freezes on battery power

My Thinkpad T510 will freeze after anything from a few seconds to a few minutes after boot. I cannot do anything except hard power off the laptop. Sometimes it freezes at the login screen, sometimes at the desktop. So far it hasn't frozen on boot. I'm using Gnome 3 and GDM. Laptop-mode which is enabled on battery and AC power. I'm using the nvidia graphics card with proprietary drivers.

I actually had a similar problem to this before, where it would freeze on battery power but much less often, usually anything from 10 minutes to hours after boot. It seemed like that problem had been fixed, but it has come back much, much worse.

I wonder if the updated Nvidia 302 drivers are to blame, but I have no idea how I might go about finding out.

Last edited by themusicalduck (2012-07-22 11:27:02)

ewaller

Administrator

From: Pasadena, CA

Registered: 2009-07-13

Posts: 19,785

Re: [SOLVED] Thinkpad T510, freezes on battery power

When it "Freezes" Do you get a kernel panic?  Are the LEDs on your keyboard blinking?  Anything interesting in the logs?

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themusicalduck

Member

Registered: 2011-07-04

Posts: 123

Re: [SOLVED] Thinkpad T510, freezes on battery power

Not a kernel panic.

I can't find anything obvious in the logs, but there are plenty to look at and I'm not entirely sure which one is most relevant or what I should be looking for in them.

themusicalduck

Member

Registered: 2011-07-04

Posts: 123

Re: [SOLVED] Thinkpad T510, freezes on battery power

Well, I decided to run my laptop using the Intel integrated graphics instead of the Nvidia card, and the laptop still froze after about 10 minutes. So that would rule out it being a problem with the Nvidia drivers.

I still have no idea on how I might go about discovering what is causing this.

themusicalduck

Member

Registered: 2011-07-04

Posts: 123

Re: [SOLVED] Thinkpad T510, freezes on battery power

EDIT: I found the laptop will still freeze once it had reached low battery power. To fix it properly, I backed up and then replaced the entire contents of /usr/lib/pm-utils/power.d/wireless with

#!/bin/sh

/sbin/iwconfig wlan0 power off

I ran the laptop down to critical battery level and had no freeze.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

After hours of trawling Google, I *think* I've found a solution. At least it's been running for a good half hour now without freezing.

To fix, open up /usr/lib/pm-utils/power.d/wireless

Find the section -

case $1 in
    true) wireless_powersave on ;;
    false) wireless_powersave off ;;
*) exit $NA ;;
esac

and change it to -

case $1 in
    true) wireless_powersave off ;;
    false) wireless_powersave off ;;
*) exit $NA ;;
esac

Last edited by themusicalduck (2012-07-28 04:59:01)

ayr0

Member

Registered: 2010-08-12

Posts: 94

Re: [SOLVED] Thinkpad T510, freezes on battery power

I've also had success removing and reinserting the battery every now and again.