Hello All,
Some of the people that have installed Win2K on their PCG-FX210 or FX215 laptops have been reporting mysterious system freezes. The system freezes seem to happen for no particular reason.
Initially after installing Win2K on my system I encountered some freezing problems but with the addition of the Service Pack 2 and all the new drivers all of my freezing problems went away. In addition, I have a second FX210 that also behaves perfectly with Win2K, Service Pack 2, and all of the drivers.
The following information is from Ryan, regarding his solution to the system freeze problem under Win2K.
Brad,
SP2 did NOT fix the freeze problems (which would ocurr randomly about every hour - when working with the notebook). After troubleshooting several areas, I concluded that it was an IRQ issue.
Following the hunch, I disabled ACPI...and my hunch turned out to be fact. All freezes stopped upon disabling ACPI...and what's more...BOTH card bus's are now fine....I can use both PCMCIA slots...no problem...all system devices have the green light!
The system is much faster than before (IMHO, ACPI really slows things down). The only down side is that you lose the power-down/sleep features. I'll take the trade-off! I thought you would like to know in case you would want to share on your website or to any other poor soul who continues to have freeze problems post W2K.
Thanks Again For Your Help,
Ryan
Here is another potential solution for those people dealing with Win2K freezing problems. Again I have not had a freezing problem on either of the FX210s that I have. However, I have heard from multiple people who have. Anyway this solution comes courtesy of Chris.
When I installed Windows 2000 on my Sony Vaio FX215, Windows would freeze at certain points, usually when I was installing software. It would always freeze when I tried installing SR2. I tried over and over. Thinking I did a bad install of Windows 2000 (clean as it was), I reinstalled Windows 2000 and the problem continued.
The fix that worked for me was to go into the bios with F2 on startup. I turned off PnP (plug and play). When the computer rebooted, it let me installed SR2 for the first time. I've since had just 1 other freeze, which is a big improvement. I haven't tried the ACPI disabling routine that Ryan sent in.
July 15, 2001
Ryan has provided the procedure to disable ACPI power saving if your laptop is erratic under Win2K. Keep in mind that if you do this you will not be able to use any of the power saving feature built into the laptop or Win2K. Below is the procedure as provided by Ryan.
1. Open the Device Manager (Control Panel -> System -> Hardware Tab -> Device Manager button)
2. Expand the Computer tree.
3. Right-click the "Advanced Configuration and Power Interface (ACPI) PC node and select Properties.
4. Go to the Driver tab and click the Update Driver... button.
5. When the Upgrade Device Driver Wizard appears...click Next.
6. Select "Display a list of known drivers, etc." and click Next.
7. Select "Show all hardware of this device class" and from "(Standard computers) select "Standard PC".
8. Install the driver by clicking Next.
9. After the driver is installed, press Reboot.
10. When Windows2000 restarts, it will re-detect all of your hardware and installs device drivers for them again. This will take a few minutes.
11. After Windows finishes re-installing the device drivers, open the Device Manager once again and expand the Computer tree as well. If you have two "Standard PC" devices present, check the Properties of both...and remove the one which displays "driver not installed" in the Device Status screen.
12. Once this is complete, ACPI is disabled in Windows2000.
If you have any questions, please let me know. BTW - still no more freezes...and the laptop performs exceptionally. -Ryan
I have not tried this procedure. I need the power saving benefits of ACPI and my FX210 has been extremely stable under Win2K.
