Everything about computers

[dreadnaut]

Uhm, with a small kid around, don't you need something more solid?

Slightly older Thinkpads are heavily discounted, and easy to maintain. For example T580.

[CTG]

My new Vostro 5590 just arrived... from China... nCoV pre-installed?

(Maybe I should clean it with hand fertilizer spray. At least 5 times.)

[dreadnaut]

(Maybe I should clean it with hand fertilizer spray. At least 5 times.)

The virus should not survive more than 24h outside the body, so you could just wait... you'll still have time to submit a replay tomorrow

[CTG]

(Maybe I should clean it with hand fertilizer spray. At least 5 times.)

The virus should not survive more than 24h outside the body, so you could just wait... you'll still have time to submit a replay tomorrow

My old Vostro is still capable to run Stunts (on better days), but I don't really want to use it.

[Cas]

If you're concerned that your computer might have a virus, you could just format the hard drive. No virus resists that, ha, ha XD
I do have a number of faithful computers to play my old DOS games, but they are all desktop PCs. I've had them for so long that I wonder how hard it may be to get one of them when I move abroad, as I don't plan on carrying my old desktop computers with me. Is legacy hardware still easy to find?

[Duplode]

Since Christmas, my laptop has been intermittently failing to suspend. About once every four times I close the lid, I'm greeted on reopening by a powered up but blank screen and a completely unresponsive machine. Have any of my fellow Linux users here seen anything like that? This sounds like one of those issues that are very annoying to troubleshoot...

[Daniel3D]

It can be a sensor malfunction. Have you checked the bios for fault codes?
I have a similar thing with the light sensor for adaptive brightness, it causes the hardware acceleration to crash.
So I have boot screen and DOS works fine, but as soon as windows starts it goes black..

[Cas]

I do have a laptop computer, but I don't use it very often. I mostly do everything on my desktop computer. With GNU/Linux, I haven't had anything like this. On the other hand, on my work computer, which was a ThinkPad and had a Windows, I did experience something kind of similar. Sometimes, if I left it for some fifteen minutes, instead of going to sleep mode, it would go to something like what you describe: the computer seems to be on, the monitor lights up, but it's blank and completely unresponsive. But this was without folding it... just leaving it alone. Anyway, there's a similarity, so maybe it's about hardware like Daniël suggests. In my case, this would resolve by forcing the computer off (holding down the power button for several seconds) and then turning it back on.

[Duplode]

@Daniel3D Good point -- the intermittence does suggest it could be something to do with hardware, so I'd better look for misbehaving devices in the logs.

@Cas Your ThinkPad does freezes in a similar way, and I also have no option but to force shutdown. (Which doesn't go very well with my habit of having tons of tabs and windows scattered all over the place.)

A little while ago, I tried suspending the laptop repeatedly from the command line, to see how easy it would be to reproduce the issue, and it didn't freeze even once. The only weird thing I noticed is that at some point I became unable to wake the computer with my external keyboard and mouse, which are connected through a USB hub. I had to replug hub for that to return to normal.

[Daniel3D]

I don't think the computer does suspend if you close the lit.
You can set the energy settings to change that for plugged and unplugged. That could help in testing.
Also you can check what happens if you remote login to the machine.

[Duplode]

Yup, it seems that the suspend procedure starts but gets stuck partway through (when it fails, I don't see the final "Filesystems sync" message in the system log). Trying to login remotely to the stuck machine is a good idea, but unfortunately I don't have a second computer at hand to test.

Poring over the logs, I noticed I'm sporadically (and inconsistently) getting weird messages about the initialization of some USB device, as well as a warning that "The lid device is not compliant to SW_LID". No idea yet if that's actually relevant. On the upside, after a few more rounds of testing it is beginning to look like that the problem only happens when I suspend by closing the lid, and not when I do it through the command line (systemctl suspend) or the desktop GUI. If nothing else, then, I might have a workaround until I find out what's going on.

[Daniel3D]

You could disable suspend by closing the lit and make it suspend on timeout (if you forget to do manually)