Windows 7 crashes with STOP 0x101 ("A clock interrupt was not received..") every time the laptop tries to sleep

Question

I have an HP Compaq nc8430 with a new install of Windows 7 (32 bit).

Every time I sleep the laptop, it crashes. It also crashes sometimes just during normal use. It does hibernate properly. The only reliable trigger I've found to crash it is sleep mode.

It's not overclocked, and only standard drivers are installed.

It seems to always be the following error:

A clock interrupt was not received on a secondary processor within the time interval.

And the following STOP code:

STOP: 0x00000101 (0x00000061, 0x00000000, 0x80DBF120, 0X00000001)

I'm not sure it's always the same parameters exactly, but always seems to be error 101.

Given the text of the error message, I've disabled the Dual Core option in BIOS, and this appears to have fixed it - no crashes so far, and it sleeps ok now.

However, I'd love a solution that doesn't involve cutting processor performance in half.

Any suggestions?

Answer 1

For reference, the symbolic name of this is CLOCK_WATCHDOG_TIMEOUT. There are two known causes of this:

• Per KnowledgeBase article 955076, a race condition in the code of Windows NT 6.0 could cause it. You are, however, using Windows NT 6.1.
• Per KnowledgeBase article 975530, some Intel CPUs have an error in how they generate interrupts, that causes this problem. This affects Windows NT 6.1 with Hyper-V. You don't mention running the server edition of the operating system, though. As you can see, there's a hotfix for the server edition of the operating system.

Answer 2

Try updating your BIOS and running HP diagnostics (http://h10025.www1.hp.com/ewfrf/wc/document?docname=c00849402&lc=en&cc=us&dlc=en&product=18703).