I’m very frustrated. I just got a new T480 16gb ram and installed the latest 4.1 version of qubes on an ssd. Everything seems to run fine except this strange crashing issue. I have run all updates and can’t figure out what causes it. It seems random. The screen will suddenly do a weird distorted flashing and everything will sort of move upwards for 3 seconds then the screen just goes black. No rebooting. No error message. Nothing. The laptop appears to still be on at this point and I have to manually power it off and back on. It’s happened about 7x within a couple hours. When I was running updates I left the laptop alone for 3-4 hours. When I came back to it it was fine. Within 20 minutes of me being active on it it happened again. The only things I’ve changed are the wallpaper, changed color of panel, and some custom dpi settings.
Here is a clip of it happening.
https://imgur.com/gallery/tcA1v99
Update. This is very strange but I hope someone can help.
I plugged in a 27" external monitor to my laptop to see if that monitor would sketch out when the laptop screen does… And for a whole 30 minutes I couldn’t get it to happen… Then within 15 seconds of unplugging the external monitor it happened. Sitting at the black laptop screen I re plugged the external monitor in and the qubes is just fine on the external but still black on the laptop. What the heck? Something about having the external monitor plugged in prevented this whole glitch thing from happening.
Why would simply connecting a 2nd monitor to my laptop completely prevent this crash from happening?
When there are hardware problems crashes are pretty random, memory errors especially, but also other problems.
It runs windows 10 pro in 1080p with no issues. I’m running windows memory diagnostic right now. I don’t have a spare flash drive to try your method. I feel like if this was a wide spread issue there would be a lot of posts about it. T480 is a popular laptop. Maybe I got a dud.
There are ways for you to test the integrity of your hardware using qubes. Just be proficient with your available time and find a way.
I personally believe you have a software issue (which can be resolved by just installing qubes again… btw, which version of qubes are you using?), but it isn’t a bad idea to rule out hardware issues.
If your PC is fine, you could share with us the specifics of your notebook; so that someone who knows better than us can pitch in.
My experience with Qubes has been weird too.
Whichever version is listed as the latest stable one. I just downloaded it onto a usb, and installed it onto the external ssd yesterday. 4.1.2 or something I think. It’s very frustrating. I have a 2nd T480 arriving tomorrow so I’m curious to see if it happens on that one as well. This laptop came with windows 10 pro 16gb ram. It’s the i5 3650U model.