HP System "feezing"

[riscem]

Hi All,

I need some help.

We have a HP PRO 3400 Series MT PC, when we add usb HUBS with GSM devices the system runs fine for about 3 hours, after this the screen goes black but you can still see the mouse cursor and the keyboard seems fine.

Its all fine with 3 HUBS and 21 gsm devices but more than that the system goes all wonky.

I hare replaced the CPU, PSU, RAM and motherboard with luck

6x USB 7 port hubs
42x gsm devices

 

[smorizio]

it not the pc this time it how it being uses and how it set up. usb ports have a set max voltage and with all those usb hubs and devices you pushing that one mb usb chipset to it limit. I would suggest someone toss together a hptc type pc and put some of the devices on another pc or put in one or two usb pci cards in that pc.

 

[riscem]

We added additional USB PCI cards and it still deos the same

 

[tsnor]

What software are you using?

Does "GSM devices " = cellular ? or something else?

Adding USB hub cards was a very good idea. If that didn't help its less likely its hardware and more likely its a software bug.

To do a quick check for hardware problems, can you configure with more than 3 HUBS and 21 gsm devices BUT run a diagnostic load (like ultimate boot CD checking memory or CPU) and see if the system still hangs? guessing not given all teh parts you have swapped.

Very little PC software is tested against configurations similar to the one you are testing. It's very possible there is a bug in the drivers or application software that you are exposing in some error path.

You can test this by (1) loading a Hypervisor to create two virtual machines on your single physical PC then running two virtual systems each owning half the GSM devices. If this type of partitioning is OK for your application then you may be able to avoid the > 21 USB GSM devices problem you are hitting.

Also contact the support staff at the SW product you are using and see if they want to debug using your test environment. They might be happy to see it.

edit: what is your OS environment? Windows ? a Linux distro ? something else ?

 

[riscem]

Hi,

The system is running Windows 7 Pro and there is no specific software running. The mother board is a Foxconn 2A8CH 1.0 Mainboard with 4 USB ports. We are using cellular devices (gsm)

We have tried adding power to the HUBS but still has the same issue. Unfortuantely the VM option will be a bit difficult but I will ask our dev guys as there might be some routing problems.