I have a Laptop 13 (Intel 13th Gen) and I have issues with the stability of the system:
Every day, once or twice, the system will not wake up when sleeping. The LED of the power button will blink, but neither pressing the power button nor opening the lid will wake the system.
Also, I have sporadic system hangs (not every day) where the whole system freezes and will not react to any input (also no connection over the network is possible).
In both cases there is nothing related in the logs and SysRq-Keys do not work. Therefore I’m suspecting a firmware issue. I performed a bios update to 3.05 a few weeks ago, but it did not improve.
Some remarks:
I tried different kernel versions.
I did a “reset” by holding the power button for >10s
I have the laptop ~1 year and the situation got worse. I believe it did not (or at least not that often) happen at the beginning.
In summer the battery was drained. Maybe this is related? There are some posts in the forum regarding problems after battery drains.
I’m not certain what you mean by “reset” via power button, but i have had similar issues (not resuming from suspend, e.g. the machine hard resetting after resuming from suspend). FW support advised me to do a “BIOS reset” via the following procedure, which appears to have worked wonders on my machine.
Please perform a full mainboard reset. This will clear up any states that are saved. Kindly follow the instructions below and see how it goes.
Plug in the system to AC.
Remove the Input Cover.
Press the chassis open switch in the center of the Mainboard 10 times, you must press it slowly, so press for 2 seconds. Release, wait for the red blink on the Mainboard LEDs. repeat.
Press the power button to boot the system
BIOS settings will be reset to defaults.
OK, I performed the mainboard reset (Hopefully correct, as there is no visual feedback?).
Afterward I did some tests letting the laptop sleep and wake, but after some time problems appeared again:
The screen froze, no connection over network possible, no kernel logs.
After power down and restart this happened again.
Next power down and restart, it was usable again, but after going to sleep it would not wake up again.
There are some other issues which happen from time to time (very seldom):
The bluetooth adapter is not detected. After an restart it works.
Sometimes the bios/uefi boot process takes a long time.
The special function keys (Fn key combos) are not working reliably.
Entering sleep state is not reliable: Happened this week while traveling. I closed the lid, put the laptop in a bag, after some time I took it out of the bag: It was hot and the battery drained.
This is getting out of hand, as I can’t rely on the laptop anymore.
I’m going to document the current situation here:
Today I had a really hard time to get the laptop starting up at all. Usually it would just hang in the BIOS boot process. There was a short flickering of the screen, the Charge LED on the side would flash ~13 times green, then once orange and then again several time green. After this nothing would happen until I power down the system.
Two times the system managed to boot at all, but then for example Bluetooth would not work. The log showed
kernel: usb usb3-port7: attempt power cycle
kernel: usb usb3-port7: unable to enumerate USB device
kernel: usb usb3-port9: attempt power cycle
kernel: usb usb3-port9: unable to enumerate USB device
kernel: usb usb3-port10: attempt power cycle
kernel: usb usb3-port10: unable to enumerate USB device
kernel: usb usb3-port7: attempt power cycle
kernel: usb usb3-port7: unable to enumerate USB device
kernel: usb usb3-port9: attempt power cycle
kernel: usb usb3-port9: unable to enumerate USB device
kernel: usb usb3-port10: attempt power cycle
kernel: usb usb3-port10: unable to enumerate USB device
kernel: usb usb3-port7: attempt power cycle
kernel: usb usb3-port7: unable to enumerate USB device
kernel: usb usb3-port9: attempt power cycle
kernel: usb usb3-port9: unable to enumerate USB device
kernel: usb usb3-port10: attempt power cycle
kernel: usb usb3-port10: unable to enumerate USB device
So, I guessed it could be a USB problem. I detached all expansion cards. For now the laptop is working.
In my opinion I’m hitting a problem again, I had a while back. This was never properly resolved, I just switched to an external HDMI adapter.
As a baseline test, try powering off the laptop each night, not sleep/standby/hibernate.
See if it is more stable then.
If it is more stable then, we can be sure that the problem is sleep/EC related and not something else.
I did a lot of reboots the last week (close to a hundred, I would guess). This did not improve stability. But by chance the laptop sometimes got into a workable state.
Thanks for the advice, nevertheless!
@BBreinbauer
I reboot is not the same as powering off overnight.
If you power off the laptop for long enough, the EC also resets. If you do a power off/power on in say 5 mins, the EC will not have reset, even though the laptop looks to be off.
The laptop has to be off for some period of time before the EC will reset.
OK, thanks for the details. I will try that.
Just as a side note: I usually shut down the device on the weekend. I do not expect, that a daily shutdown will have an effect.
If you have tested several distros and maybe even windows (should not be forced if this is not your normal work OS), i would say the laptop needs to go back for repair and more test by the company.
I don’t like that users are being asked to act as testers. I’m considering to buy the 13 or 16 myself so checking the forum on how good the laptop is and how good the support handles issues.
Have you contacted the customer support?