HP Spectre 15-BL012DX Completely Freezes Momentarily

[pblanton]

The charging port issue should be under warranty.

Mine doesn't have that issue. It it does crop up, I'll get it warrantied then sell the laptop.

[shakthi16]

Thanks KC_Syd. Your steps fixed my issue. I can actually use this expensive paperweight without having to worrying about when it will freeze. 

[sgreen063]

None of that work so it went back to HP for repair. Heard from them today they replaced the battery and sending it back to me. Will see if that actually fixed the issue and update the group.

[Spacemanlou]

KC_Syd's steps worked for me thank you.

I also had an issue with a blackl screen with cursor after logging in.  The desktop would come up after about 10 minutes or so.  HP Support had be open msconfig, go to the services tab and then disable App Readiness. Figure I would mention that here incase people see the same thing.

[wahlsn]

Hi,

I also own an ac0XXng spectre 13", 4K, i7. Since the beginning I faced the freezing issues. Nothing helped. Linux, however, was working fine - also the automatic screen rotation. However, Linux is not using that heavy and specialized power saving options. As the problems only occur on battery this is a clear indication there is something wrong with power saving mechanism.

Since a few weeks the freezing is gone. I did not apply any of KC_Syd's fixes. I still have set power options to maximum battery life. I only have updated to drivers offered by the HP assistant (however, I also tried many other combinations before also using old BIOS etc).

However, since then I have a new issue. After my screen goes black after some minutes for power saving when not used, the screen is flickering when it lids up again. The flickering can somehow be controlled by the mouse. It starts at the bottom of the screen and affects only the parts up to where the cursor is at that moment. I can "heal" it by closing the screen again (no action taken besides turning black the screen) and open it again.

While on power cord I have not seen this issue.

So, it is similar to the freezing problem but affecting the framebuffer now. Does anyone have the same issues?

Best,

Simeon

[FrozenMario]

Big time thank you, Spacemanlou.    I was having the black screen issue, and started to troubleshoot it, when i got the notification from this forum and read your message.   The solution you put down, solved  the problem for me.     As an extra piece of info for my case, just before the black screen appeared, the laptop had done some windows updates.   Thanks again for taking the trouble to put down the solution.  

[Spacemanlou]

No problem! I was beating my head against the wall when nothing on these forums or what I searched for in Google helped. If I helped prevent anyone else from going bonkers with the black screen I have succeeded my goal!

Special thanks to the HP Chat Support Dilip for showing me the fix when I was able to contact them during office hours.  It is awesome and infuriating that it was a simple check box.  That crap should be on a notice or something in big blinking letters on this site.

Though searching for the black screen fix lead me to the solution for the freezing so at least I wasn't driven mad by that....

[JZ25]

I have a Spectre 13-ac033dx and was having the same momentary freezes (some decidedly less momentary, lasting a few minutes), with less than 3% CPU usage.  I tried KC_Syd's steps and those seemed to solve the problem of freezing.  I noticed another comment about updating the wireless card driver directly from Intel so gave that a look.  My computer has Intel Dual-Band Wireless AC-8265 and the current driver on HP's site is version 19.20.3.4, while Intel has released 20.0.2.3.  I updated to the drive from Intel and the problem seems to be gone, even using the original wireless adapter settings.  So it seems like Intel has a fix for the problem, but it boggles my mind that HP doesn't acknowledge this.  As many of you have said, this problem makes an otherwise very well equipped computer useless - so why hasn't HP adopted the fix Intel has provided and passed that onto their customers?

[TheNJM]

I started getting the 1 to 10 second lock ups every 10-20 seconds or so about 2 hours after getting the laptop.

I rebooted and it went away.

People mention updating the bios, how do I know which bios my laptop is running?

[Eric_Mtl]

I had successfully resolved the freezing issue by applying the KC_Syd instructions back in mid-July and had no issues since... until a couple freezes last week that had me looking back at the power configs and exploring drivers. 

The JZ25 post above gave me the idea to update Intel drivers directly from them. I used a tool they supply and it updated the WIFI card and also the Bluetooth adapter. 

I will update the thread to document whether this has helped.