If the Scanner Freezes With Your HP Laptop - Come On In

[Aaron407]

For the last few years, I have often struggled with VCM Scanner often freezing up while scanning. I would connect to my car, start the log, close the display so it wouldn't flop around, go for a drive, then find that only a short portion of the drive was actually logged. It was very frustrating to say the least. After seeing that the 'busy' light on the interface would go from the extremely fast flashing to a slow blink when this freeze-up happened, I figured it was due to a loss of communication. However, I recently found that it didn't happen if the display was open on my laptop. When the display is closed, I also noticed that there was an orange hard drive light that would light up if the laptop was bumped or jostled, even just lightly.

After some research, I found out that there is a feature in HP laptops called "ProtectSmart". This will lock the hard drive's read/write arm if the display is closed and it senses movement in order to protect the hard drive from impact damage. Unfortunately, it's way too sensitive, and would often lock the hard drive if I hit a bump or jammed on the noise pedal, which obviously caused the logging to stop. After disabling this protection, I haven't had any issues scanning, even with the display closed.

So, for anyone else who fights with this, consider disabling this protection in control panel.

[Chris@HPTuners]

We had a similar issue in the early days of Windows Vista, certain laptops had some periodic housekeeping tasks that would hog the CPU every 20-30secs and cause havoc with interrupt processing and other time sensitive tasks.

[schpenxel]

Vista was a disaster

[richsoucie]

mine loses info or freezes up and crashes if its not plugged in on version 3

[schpenxel]

I would bet there is something switching it to a more power efficient mode which slows the processor down, which is making it unable to keep up and causing issues. I can't think of any other reason it being plugged in or not would make any difference.

[richsoucie]

yeah im sure worked fine in version 2 i think 3 requires more processing power

[Keith@HPTuners]

yeah im sure worked fine in version 2 i think 3 requires more processing power

I believe VCM Scanner 3.x scanner is actually more efficient than version VCM Scanner 2.x

[rico996tt]

To Aaron407 i will check on any of those settings as I've been fighting this for many years and just recently run into this again on a vehicle. None of the earlier versions will scan and even 3.xx doesnt work. Sometimes its a minute others its 2-3 seconds and just freezes. I normally use a Toughbook laptop but on this vehicle i have tried 3 different PC's to no avail. Car not running=scanner runs indefinately, car running=crap shoot! A friend came over and he can scan this particular vehicle with no issues as of yet on a short trial. The kicker is i can go over to another vehicle and it connects and scans with no issues. In the Device mgmt the A and B USB ID's never dissapear even when the scanner quits.....any help/sugestions would be appreciated.

[Aaron407]

That sounds like a different issue if it works fine for other vehicles, unless it is the hard drive protection kicking in from the first vehicle riding bumpier.

[rico996tt]

yeah i would agree only a few attemps were driving, most others were sationary idle connection...well thanks for the extra input for everyone who might encounter this.

[10_SS]

3.2.37 My scanner froze up today just crusing down the highway... it was 45mins into a log and just froze... no new data, record button is greyed out like it's logging but it's not. I can still switch between tabs and things in the scanner, but it's just not logging any data. I still have it open and did not hit stop yet, if there's something I an get from it.