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HP Elitebook 8560p has a constant pausing issue

I'm coming to the Experts Exchange because I'm at my wits end with an HP Elitebook computer that is pausing/hesitating/becoming unresponsive temporaily (about 3-5 seconds each time), every 30 seconds, throughout the entire Windows 7 session. Diagnostics have been ran - thorough testing - on the laptops hardware components - everything from the disk drive to the memory, and all other tests it has. Everything "passes". The computer has been restored twice back to factory default, which wipes the drive clean and reimages it back to a fresh Win 7 Pro OS with all the HP software reinstalled from factory. Weird thing is - the unit was fine and has worked fine since we bought it in 2012. Now it exhibits the pausing behavior immediately after a factory reset!! Without changing anything - just simply logging into it after the factory rebuild - it pauses every 30 seconds. I called HP support desperate for help - even though it's out of warranty. The tech checked for any known issues for this series laptop and said he couldn't see anything. His thinking was that maybe something is wrong with the OS somehow in the factory image, and to run a CHKDSK on the drive. Ran that today for an hour, to no avail. So - what could this be? I do notice that whenever its pausing, the hard drive light comes on solid. Seems to be something with the drive. but yet it passes the disk check. Any ideas are appreciated.

ASKER CERTIFIED SOLUTION

Network Zero

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Natty Greg

Sometimes you have to zero the disk and start over use a formatting program other than windows, to zero the hard disk ( meaning to format the disk by writing zeros and ones

szichen

Have you tried updating the firmware for the BIOS, board, NIC, etc from the HP support site for that particular model? Did this laptop recently have the mainboard changed?
You can also:
* Try and swap the hard drive and see if the same issue happens.
* Try downgrading the OS with the current hardware to see if the same issue happens.

Gerald Connolly

it sounds a bit like you have a disk error, and that what you are seeing is when the drive tries to access a certain part of the disk it goes into deep dive recovery

Run full surface diagnostics or try another drive

nobus

chances are that either your image, or the disk are corrupt
what i would do is use another disk - and put an os on it for testing
if you put the image on this other disk - - and it still happens - - then it's clearly the image is at fault

to do this - use an imaging program, and transfer only the recovery partition to tyhe new one
you can use the free Paragon software for this :
http://www.paragon-software.com/home/br-free/download.html

rindi

What tools did you use to diagnose the disk and the RAM?

The only recommended tool for the disk is that of the disk manufacturer. For the RAM the best is memtest86+. Both of those are included on the UBCD. So I suggest booting the PC with the UBCD and running the disk manufacturer's diagnostic tool.

http://ultimatebootcd.com

Damian Gardner

ASKER

sorry for the delay here. I ran Acronis Drive Monitor and it's finding problems with the drive - early SMART detection, indicating drive failure is imminent. bought a new SSD drive and going to put it in this week. standby to see if this resolves the issue. thank you

Network Zero

There you go.

I hope it will let you get things off the drive I waited on an old laptop while the drive was at 40% could not get anything off the good news was that I stored things somewhere else

nobus

what was the reason for the factory reset? it may then already have shown this problem

Damian Gardner

ASKER

Factory reset was in desperation when nothing else resolved the pausing issue. Assumed this would work, but didn't. the really goofy thing though is that even the HP diagnostic test (full 1 hour test) failed to find anything wrong with the drive, when an Acronis utility did. So - I have not put in the new drive yet - other pressing things at the moment. but will let you all know if the new drive indeed resolves the issue. hopefully it will. thanks again

nobus

you can run Burnintest on separate devices, and see when the problem happens :
http://www.passmark.com/download/index.htm

Damian Gardner

ASKER

Thanks everyone. it was a bad disk drive.

Network Zero

Thanks man! I'm glad you got it fixed!