Driving. Me. Bugshit!
Jan. 7th, 2006 08:34 pm![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
taleya.livejournal.com posting in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
techrecoveryGuh, I never wanted to be one of these wankers, but I've got a system problem that's driving me nuts...
'tis my personal system, running xp 32 bit on an AMD 3200 with 1gb of ram. On an Asus A8v-Deluxe motherboard. Primary SATA 80gb, Primary and Secondary IDEs are IDE, plus a DVD-RWQ and a CDR. Radeon 9600 on board. A lovely little system, if I do say so myself.
The problm? It hangs like a scarf.
That would be easy to fix, one would think, but it's the complete and utter RANDOMNESS that is driving me completely and utterly bugshit.
It will hang, then hang, I reboot and it hangs (a hard hang - unresponsive) and then suddenly will be up and runnig and STAY stable as hell for months on end! Then I need to reboot, and BAM, it's fucked again.
So, is it something on boot? Hell no. The hang NEVER occurs on startup. Ever. It will happen anywhere from 10 mins to 24 hours after windows is fully loaded. Thrash the hell out of the system, or leave it idle, it doesn't care! It'll shit itself when it pleases! Drivers? I've uninstalled, reinstalled, danced naked around it whilst masturbating myself furiously with a screwdriver and STILL it does as it pleases. I've swapped RAM, fucked about, booted in safe mode - AND STILL IT DOES IT. Replaced the PSU thinking it may be power failure to the HDD or some such - nup. Still sits there with a big fat FUCK YOU. Finally cracked it and reinstalled the OS entirely, and it still does it!
Event viewer shows zip.
Heat levels inside the case, on the GPU, RAM and CPU are all well below 30c.
I've sat there and laid traps, leaving various monitoring programs watching everything from the page cycles to amount of fluff blown out the back and they all show exactly the same thing: Nothing erroneous.
*pulls at hair* ideas? anyone? 'cos I'm right fucking out of them. At the moment I have the SATA sitting outside the box so I can check when it crashes next that if the damn thing is caught in a spin cycle. ( doubtful, even on a hard freeze it does cycle down the DVD and CD roms if they're caught mid-motion after a certain period of time)
'tis my personal system, running xp 32 bit on an AMD 3200 with 1gb of ram. On an Asus A8v-Deluxe motherboard. Primary SATA 80gb, Primary and Secondary IDEs are IDE, plus a DVD-RWQ and a CDR. Radeon 9600 on board. A lovely little system, if I do say so myself.
The problm? It hangs like a scarf.
That would be easy to fix, one would think, but it's the complete and utter RANDOMNESS that is driving me completely and utterly bugshit.
It will hang, then hang, I reboot and it hangs (a hard hang - unresponsive) and then suddenly will be up and runnig and STAY stable as hell for months on end! Then I need to reboot, and BAM, it's fucked again.
So, is it something on boot? Hell no. The hang NEVER occurs on startup. Ever. It will happen anywhere from 10 mins to 24 hours after windows is fully loaded. Thrash the hell out of the system, or leave it idle, it doesn't care! It'll shit itself when it pleases! Drivers? I've uninstalled, reinstalled, danced naked around it whilst masturbating myself furiously with a screwdriver and STILL it does as it pleases. I've swapped RAM, fucked about, booted in safe mode - AND STILL IT DOES IT. Replaced the PSU thinking it may be power failure to the HDD or some such - nup. Still sits there with a big fat FUCK YOU. Finally cracked it and reinstalled the OS entirely, and it still does it!
Event viewer shows zip.
Heat levels inside the case, on the GPU, RAM and CPU are all well below 30c.
I've sat there and laid traps, leaving various monitoring programs watching everything from the page cycles to amount of fluff blown out the back and they all show exactly the same thing: Nothing erroneous.
*pulls at hair* ideas? anyone? 'cos I'm right fucking out of them. At the moment I have the SATA sitting outside the box so I can check when it crashes next that if the damn thing is caught in a spin cycle. ( doubtful, even on a hard freeze it does cycle down the DVD and CD roms if they're caught mid-motion after a certain period of time)
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Date: 2006-01-07 09:36 am (UTC)*pokes userinfo*
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Date: 2006-01-07 09:43 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-01-07 09:44 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-01-07 09:47 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-01-07 09:48 am (UTC)Well, shitweasels.
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Date: 2006-01-07 09:51 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-01-07 09:54 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-01-07 10:03 am (UTC)I'm using my laptop at the moment. The keyboard shits me up the freaking wall...
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Date: 2006-01-07 10:24 am (UTC)IV
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Date: 2006-01-07 10:56 am (UTC)Besides, It's on my main machine I'm trying to crash on the SATA atm.
Get back on MSN, you! (btw, tell me if you want me to send the original 80's HitchHikers series up with the Doctor Who DVDs)
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Date: 2006-01-07 11:12 am (UTC)that's why i don't use trillian. it does shit like that.,
IV
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Date: 2006-01-07 10:04 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-01-07 10:06 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-01-07 10:11 am (UTC)I need to update my icons, had the same since The Two Towers got out, which is quite a while ago ;)
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Date: 2006-01-07 10:57 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-01-07 06:58 pm (UTC)And to the rest of yas - if you can't handle the heat get out of the kitchen :).
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Date: 2006-01-07 09:55 am (UTC):-)
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Date: 2006-01-07 09:57 am (UTC)But unfortunately no, not on my main machine. Have yet to find a kernel that supports the specialised software I want to run to the level I need it run.
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Date: 2006-01-07 10:41 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-01-07 10:53 am (UTC)Nup, the laser drives are running off it without a murmur...
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Date: 2006-01-07 10:56 am (UTC)I'll be interested to hear what you eventually find out - I think at that stage I'd have gone postal.
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Date: 2006-01-07 11:00 am (UTC)Well, that and plenty of cigarettes and Doctor Who eps.
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Date: 2006-01-07 04:21 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-01-07 10:53 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-01-07 11:03 am (UTC)Last time I had odd system lockup and instability issues, it was related to the onboard sound system. Not drivers per se, I redid those as you have, just using it at all (admittedly, a different mobo and chipset, but in every system I've had with it, onboard sounds has given me some level of headache, be it stability, quality, performance, etc.)
Another possibility is overly aggressive RAM timings. And you need not be running the RAM beyond its supposed specs (I have two 512 MB DDR400 clips in my system, unfortunately they are running at 333 for stability, since my motherboard sees two clips and says 'dual channel' automatically, even though the semi-cheap RAM can't quite push itself to do 400MHz and dual at the same time.) Download MemTest or some other bootable memory tester, pop it in, watch a couple a movies, see if it reports errors (note, the RAM need not be flawed exactly, my clips all performed identically, I even RMAd one and got a replacement that had the same issue, and once clocked to 333 the tests ran clean. It's the last time I look for deals on RAM, to be sure.)
Beyond that, I note you mention onboard video. I've never played with that myself, by it may not hurt to nab a $40 card from nVidia (I like ATI but their drivers can be flaky, not a good call if you have stability issues already,) slap it in, and see what you get. Near as I can tell, on odd occasions in certain configurations, the onboard goodies sometimes conflict mildly with one another (nothing big, just a shared IRQ perhaps, which supposedly isn't an issue anymore, but still seems to be now and again.)
*shrug* That's my experience and Hell desk knowledge, for as far as it might get you. Best of luck to you.
-={(Erulogos)}=-
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Date: 2006-01-07 11:10 am (UTC)I've run MemTest - when it misbehaved the first thing I thought was the RAM. Mobo takes 3200, I'm running Kingston and I've tried it in dual channels and single channels. Two DIMMS and one DIMM. Also tried thrashing the shit out of the system during its stable periods (Adobe Premiere is good for that, when you fuck with the preview settings and force to calculate and play the video and audio tracks backwards in real time :D) and never had a burp.
It's the utter randomness that's driving me absolutely batshit. Once it's stable, you can't kill it by throwing it off a friggin' moving truck, but when it misbehaves, there's no precursors, no triggers. Went to a safe mode clean system (disabled everything in the BIOS) - just the HDDs and VGA mode - and it STILL shat itself.
Most recent tests though seem to be leaning towards it possibly being the mobo hating a particular IDE hdd..
It's the board.
Date: 2006-01-07 11:36 am (UTC)It freezes randomly, most often in Media Center, and I did figure out why. If I have AMD Cool & Quiet turned on, it will sometimes die when ramping the CPU from low power to full speed and back. Yours is freezing on a clean install, so your C&Q driver isn't loaded.
That's a workaround, but I'm ditching that board because there's no fix: I can't use C&Q without freezes. Latest BIOS no good, oldest BIOS that works with X2 4200+ and still no good. Also, the fan speed control doesn't work on that board (it will stay too low and you'll overheat!), it tends to randomly over or under-volt my CPU, and it takes FOREVER to boot IMHO.
Go search the AMD.com forums, these are all documented problems with that thing. I'm convinced it's just not stable. BTW, is your A8V Rev 2.0 or 1.0? From what I can tell, Rev 1.0 sucked for overclocking (No AGP/PCI lock) but at least it was stable at stock speeds.
I were you I'd get a different board, maybe an Abit AV8 if you want to stay with AGP. IF the AV8 is anything like my AN7, it's rock-solid even when overclocked. The AV8 might have the same problem tho, if it's a bug in the VIA K8T800 chipset.
Re: It's the board.
Date: 2006-01-07 11:49 am (UTC)Oddly enough I havedn't had a single problem with it since pulling out the IDE hdd. I don't overlock my system, this is a rev1 IIRC.
Doesn't matter, still pissing me off. I'll drop a call to my store and see what they've got for me...
Re: It's the board.
Date: 2006-01-07 05:16 pm (UTC)Now I know its the simplest idea and you reloaded clean so spyware shouldnt be an issue, but have you checked if any of the programs you have to use might have started loading something naughty?
Re: It's the board.
Date: 2006-01-07 09:07 pm (UTC)I finally tracked down the random BSODs/freezeup with my old laptop as the video drivers having interaction issues with windows, because Sony decided to "customize" the ATI Rage Mobility BIOS on this particular machine, and then only issue one driver update for it.
FOrtuantely, I've seince switched to a newer laptop which has a much more modern video card...
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Date: 2006-01-07 05:48 pm (UTC)also, check your motherboard for any cap's that are bulging.
it's looking like a power/mobo/ram problem
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Date: 2006-01-07 06:12 pm (UTC)Boing!!! Here's your critter. We had a selection of these mobos where I work (40-ish of them) and nearly half had the same random crashes you described here. I claimed "bad batch" and we got replacements that seem to work fine. Good thing they were still under warrantee or whatever the current word is for it
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Date: 2006-01-13 06:09 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-01-13 07:39 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-01-07 07:31 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-01-08 12:15 am (UTC)