Hi all, I’ve run into an issue that has escalated over the past month or so, with very few changes to my operating environment. Please bear with me, as there are some interesting things to note here, but none of it makes sense to me.
Also, I could only either say this was Linux or something else, so I put it in Linux because I haven’t experienced this in Windows, though I don’t use Windows really at all except for troubleshooting purposes, and also because I’m looking for help with logging for Ubuntu.
First, this is my current setup:
Laptop 16, AMD 7040 Series
Ubuntu 20.04 LTS
The behavior that’s bothering me is random freezing after a few minutes of being on. There seems to be no correlation to processor load (judging by either the fan sound or the system metrics). Could just be that whatever is triggering the issue doesn’t tend to occur during startup.
When the freeze happens, I’ve come to learn that the best way to know it’s occurring is that the keyboard backlight turns off. If the process or website or whatever is just slow to respond, the backlight is fine. When the issue occurs, nothing is responsive - can’t move the cursor with the touchpad, can’t get the keystrokes to register. At first, I was just waiting for things to respond again. It could take anywhere from a few seconds to long minutes. Eventually, it got to the point where I killed the computer with the power button to reboot it.
It started, happened occasionally, and then got progressively more common, and when I finally hard booted it, upon restart, I was shown a screen prior to the normal bootloader or encryption password prompt for Ubuntu, that told me that the keyboard was not present. Instead of just saying the keyboard wasn’t present, though, it was flickering between present and not.
Then I remembered that I had had a cup lid pop off a soda a couple of weeks prior, and some drops got on the keyboard. I had cleaned it up the best I could, and didn’t see any fallout immediately, so I forgot about it until that moment. So, I need a new keyboard, I thought. I bought a new keyboard, installed it, and… then the touchpad stopped working. I bought a new touchpad and installed that, but it didn’t change. It was only then that I started real troubleshooting. I booted a copy of Windows 11 on an external disk, and didn’t see the issue - touchpad worked, keyboard worked, and for a short while using the OS, I didn’t experience the freezing.
So next, I rebooted to Linux, and suddenly the keyboard and touchpad were both fine. But after some time using the PC, it froze again in the same way. I figured I’d finally update to 24.04 LTS, but had some issues downloading the updates, to where I couldn’t actually perform the regular upgrade.
I continue to experience the freezes, but somehow figured out that, by pressing the small bridge betwwen the keyboard and touchpad, I can instantly stop the freeze and return to normal functioning. I have the touchpad at the far left, two spacers to the right, and in this configuration, by pressing gently about where the touchpad connects with the keyboard underneath (somewhat directly below the “C” and “V” keys) the keyboard will suddenly light back up and unfreeze.
This is some really weird behavior, and I’m at a loss to explain what could be happening. I want to try to capture some data to try to figure out what may be going on, but I’m still a Linux noob after all these years. So… my questions:
- What can I do to try to get some logged data to see about the timeframe that one of these freezes occurs?
- There’s a system icon that shows up near the Wi-Fi icon in the upper corner when things come back up, but I can’t move fast enough to really see what it is. I want to get a screenshot to post here (oddly, as I’ve been typing this up, no freezes for the past 30 minutes or so).
- I want to do a clean install of Ubuntu 24.04 LTS, in hopes that something in my current operating environment is causing this (but then I can’t explain why pressing in that space does anything).
If you made it this far, thanks for reading. I was once a pretty good PC tech, but am way out of practice. I hope someone has some interesting ideas to try.
THANKS!
