I've been struggling with my laptop freezing unless I set specific power management options. On Windows 10, I have my power plan set to never sleep, never turn off the hard disk, maximum performance for my wireless adapter, USB selective suspend disabled, link state power management off, and the minimum processor state set to 100%. I'm using an HP Pavilion Gaming laptop with a GTX 1650 and a Ryzen 7 3750H. I also had Game Ready NVIDIA drivers installed on Windows. Now, I've tried both Arch and Mint on Linux, but my laptop still freezes if I don't adjust the power profiles. Any suggestions on how to replicate these Windows settings on Linux?
5 Answers
It might be an overheating issue. What's your CPU temperature when it's idle? Getting high temps could lead to freezing problems.
Have you thought about just trying out Linux without messing around with power settings initially? Linux Mint is a good option to start with, and it might work for you straight out of the box.
I've tested both Arch and Mint, and unfortunately, they still freeze if I don’t tweak the power profiles. I did manage to fix a boot device error by updating the BIOS, though.
Both KDE and Gnome have built-in power management options that you could use. Mint has great capabilities as well, so you should be able to tweak things for more stability. Just a heads-up, the driver situation on Linux is different from Windows, so no game-ready downloads here! You'll likely be using terminal commands for most of your updates.
The GPU drivers probably aren't the issue; I'll just stick with the latest open-source ones for now. The BIOS update did help me switch to Windows temporarily.
After a freeze, have you checked the system logs for any useful error messages? If you're using a desktop environment, you might find a Logs app helpful for this.
I checked Windows logs, and it reported a kernel power 41 error. I haven't looked at logs in any Linux distro yet.
Switching from Windows to Linux can sometimes solve freezing issues since a lot of those problems can come from Windows drivers. Just be cautious if there’s a hardware fault; that’ll follow you to Linux too.
I've tried both distributions and the freezing issues persist. The boot device error was an easy fix, but I'm mainly trying to address these power-related problems now.
My CPU sits around 50-67 degrees when idle.