Netbook freezes

[cation555]

Hi,

I recently purchased a refurbished Gateway EC108h: su3500/3gb ram/vista premium 32-bit. Periodically the netbook freezes: the system becomes unresponsive, you cannot move the mouse or keyboard. Once the "freeze" begins it progressively gets worse---freezes occur more frequently, almost in succession one after the other. I have to reboot the machine to make it work. And then the problem repeats itself. The freezes occur randomly throughout the day and don't seem to be related to any processor intensive task or application. The system is running factory settings: I haven't installed or removed anything.

I dug a little deeper, and in event viewer the freezes seem to be correlated with the ACPI (event id: 13) errors:

"The embedded controller (EC) did not respond within the specified timeout period / Returned unexpected data. This may indicate that there is an error in the EC hardware or firmware or that the BIOS is accessing the EC incorrectly. You should check with your computer manufacturer for an upgraded BIOS. In some situations this error may cause the computer to function incorrectly."

I decided to change the startup in MsConfig to "selective startup" that seemed to fix the problem for a bit, but after 12 hrs the system froze again. More recently, I disabled a bunch of other services...will observe and see what the outcome is.

I'm interested in knowing if this is a software issue or a hardware problem. Also, I am eligible for a free Win 7 upgrade which I will be receiving in a few weeks time. I'm wondering if that will fix the problem? Otherwise, I can return the netbook within 10 days.

I would appreciate any help

Thanks in advance!

 

[mpilchfamily]

Recently purchased, then contact Gateway about the issue. This could be the very reason the unit was refurbished and it wasn't corrected. Odd for a netbook to come with more then 1Gb of RAM. Some you can get that are already maxed out at 2Gb but never heard of one that can hold 3Gb. These units tend to only have a sindle slot for RAM so i don't know how you would get 3Gb into it anyway.

 

[cation555]

I should've mentioned that I talked to Gateway. Their tech believes its an issue with a startup "service." However, they want it shipped away to fix it.

The ec103h is probably more of an light laptop than a netbook (specs: http://www.silentpcreview.com/Gateway_EC1803h_notebook).

Anything else I could try?
I'd like to fix it myself and keep the machine instead of returning it because I got a good deal.

Thanks in advance !