Laptop hard freezes in video calls

Framework Laptop 13 Linux
1

Hello all,

I want to start by saying that I am not a techie. I’ve had my Framework laptop for about six months and have been using Ubuntu on it since then, which is my first time using Linux. Prior to this, I’ve been a Windows and Mac user.

I’ve been noticing a recurring problem, which seems to happen frequently in video calls (very consistently with Discord, and often enough with Zoom as well), when I’m running or switching between multiple apps at once, and/or when the laptop overheats. The laptop hard freezes, meaning that it becomes completely unresponsive (ctrl+alt+del, which I’ve set to open system monitor, doesn’t work) and the mouse cursor gets stuck. However, the audio typically continues to work–I can effectively continue the call as if it’s a phone call, I just can’t do anything on the screen. And then I end up having to hard reboot.

As I understand it, hard reboots are not great for computers, and certainly this is a frustrating issue to keep recurring for me as a user. Any advice on what might be going on here? Hardware or software issue?

Thank you all in advance for the help.

2

Hey @Sarah_Eppley Please give our support a shout if you haven’t already. We may need our Linux team to take a look for you.

3

Thanks, I’ve sent in a support ticket.

4

Can you monitor the processor speed the next time you’re in this situation? Sounds very much like a PROCHOT throttling issue (which isn’t traditional thermal throttling). You’ll probably see it drop to 400 or 500mhz, and somehow teams and zoom are sure fire ways to make this happen.

No known cure unfortunately.

5

Here is a link to a similar thread. About midway down, there is a link to the Framework GitHub tracker. In those comments, they describe this exact issue. Further down I reply having an issue identical to yours.