Tech Wave

I was recently able to purchase a T61p from Lenovo. Everything worked perfectly except for the Intel Turbo Memory 1GB hard drive cache. One of the main problems that I was experiencing with it was when on battery, if I bumped the computer it would unexpectedly freeze. This freeze was different as everything would get that vista whiteout look telling you that the program was no longer responding. If you clicked on anything it would soon become unresponsive. This eventually meant that the whole computer would be in that wonderful whitewashed color and you were forced to reboot.

After some investigation I was able to determine what was happening. It turns out that the Active Protection System (APS) for the Hitachi drives in the notebook were conflicting with Turbo Memory and a new windows power savings feature called ‘Windows Hybrid Hard Disk Power Savings Mode’.  What happens from what I can tell is this:

1. After some time windows enters its Hybrid Disk Power Savings Mode, essentially using the turbo memory as a hybrid hard drive. This also turns off the hard drive, allowing it to save energy.
2. At some point you bump the system when it is trying to write to the ‘hybrid hard drive’ telling the APS to stop the spinning of the real hard drive.
3. This is where it gets confusing, for us and the hardware drivers. Eventually one of the drivers is going to want to start up the drive again, but something has gotten confused and neither of the drivers ends up actually starting the drive up again.
4. This ends up preventing any and all applications from accessing the hard drive from this point on, causing the ‘white out’ look for any application you try to use from that point on, including the desktop.

The fast and easy solution is to disable the feature in the windows Power Options. Just follow these steps:

1. Go to Control Panel -> Power Options
2. Click on Change Plan Settings for the power plan you are using
3. Click Change Advanced Power Settings
4. Expand Hard Disk -> Windows Hybrid Hard Disk Power Savings Mode (fig 1)
5. Disable it for both battery and plugged in.

Repeat for all other power options you might use.

After changing these options you should be mostly freeze free. This is part 1 of an unknown amount of posts concerning this Turbo Memory. There are other problems that I am working with Lenovo to fix. I hope this helps some of you out there, I know one of my teachers was having the same problem and after changing this setting everything worked fine for him.