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Jul - Computers and Technology - Bizarre, Inexplicable Freezing New poll - New thread - New reply
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Rachel Mae

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Posted on 03-01-10 07:24:19 AM Link | Quote
Hmm. Time to ditch XP x64, then? Is there any particular reason you're using it, i.e. will any of your programs or drivers become unusable if you "downgrade" to 32-bit?

Windows 7 64-bit might be worth a shot, too.

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Posted on 03-01-10 07:28:11 AM (last edited by Metal_Man88 at 03-01-10 04:30 AM) Link | Quote
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Metal_Man88's Post
I can even get Windows 7 x64 for free, I'm just an old curmudgeon using a funky old OS because I can, however these freezes may cause me to move OSes.

Oh, and I forgot the damning piece of evidence--I had wondered why it took so long for the downstairs one to freeze.

The downstairs one has 2 GB of memory. So when I upped this one to 2 GB, it began acting like the one downstairs--only a lot of TF2 playing would speed up le freeze.

I just got through transferring this old XP x64 install from the old hard drive though... I'll see how annoying the freezes get, then switch if they continue to bug me.

Thank goodness for my College's MSDN account.

Hm, I'd need to install a DVD drive to upgrade, though. Been using a crunky half-broken CD-rom drive all this time.

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Posted on 03-01-10 11:21:14 AM (last edited by Surlent at 03-01-10 08:33 AM) Link | Quote
Maybe some specific benchmarks could help or provide more information than those random crashes?

Like stressing only selected components like CPU, video memory and/or RAM.
For CPU, you can try Prime95 or Orthos. Just run the most demanding tests there, but be sure to backup the most important data, as a malfunctioning component could always die if stressed a lot.
As for your video card, something like Furmark could come into mind. If it glitches or makes the system freeze, it could show a broken or dying GPU ...

And maybe just open up the case, search for any damaged electrolyt capacitors, like these below.
It is often a sign of a failing mainboard, as it can cause many different effects, from fluctuations in terms of voltage, to random reboots, errors and many other things. If you have any of those capacitors broken, you will have to replace your board - hoping it _was_ the actual cause for that:



(Taken from this source for showing purposes only, and uploaded to an image hoster, not stealing the site's bandwith:
http://www.mad-monkey.co.uk/resources/pchf/capacitor.jpg)

The bad thing is, that computers are similar like cars. Often you just have to replace and try certain parts, until you find the cause for most problems.

By the way, in terms of diagnostics, Vista and Windows 7 are very good. The Event Viewer is much more better than XP's. It actually logs everything, marking critical system errors, and giving you more clues to find something. You could just install Windows 7 to provoke a blue screen, as an installation already is some kind of small test for the hardware itself. I don't want you to just install Windows 7 for this, as older hardware and problems may even disrupt the installation process, damaging other partitions or any other things (although you said your HDD is okay) and being not to access you previous installation.

I went straight from Windows XP to Windows 7. And never regretted it. Personally really a worthy sequel to XP

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Lyskar
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Posted on 03-01-10 06:07:16 PM Link | Quote
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Metal_Man88's Post
I might fiddle around with individual benchmarks, but, I've already stared real hard at all the capacitors, and none of them are leaking.

I figure it's just some dumb problem with XP x64, which was meant to be a stopgap until, you know, Vista x64 and 7 x64 provided full support for 64-bit processors.

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Posted on 03-02-10 05:02:55 PM Link | Quote
Did you ever get around to running the memtest? Maybe that'll help clear things up a bit.
Bagel

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Posted on 03-02-10 08:33:47 PM (last edited by Bagel at 03-02-10 05:37 PM) Link | Quote
Originally posted by Metal_Man88
I figure it's just some dumb problem with XP x64, which was meant to be a stopgap until, you know, Vista x64 and 7 x64 provided full support for 64-bit processors.

Do you have virtual memory off or something? o.o

If that's not it your suspicion about XP x64 having an addressing issue is most likely correct, aside from bad RAM. I've not heard any good things about it, mostly because of the difficulty involved in locating hardware drivers and things. I remember reading on some old ex-Microsoft employee's blog someplace that XP x64 was really released just as an interim thing, rushed out the door with several glaring problems left in, though no doubt some of those have been addressed by updates. I wonder if I can locate that entry someplace now as it's been a few years. I'm not exactly a huge fan of Microsoft but I have to admit that Windows 7 is a truly massive improvement upon any other Windows release. It might be worth looking for some way to obtain it, or at least test it somehow.

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Posted on 03-02-10 09:51:39 PM Link | Quote

When your computer lists having lots of free memory, that doesn't mean that it can be used, if the system is trying to allocate a single chunk of memory larger than any free chunks. Seeing as the problem takes longer to occur with more RAM, I'm thinking something like this might be the case

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Lyskar
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Posted on 03-03-10 03:32:09 AM Link | Quote
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Yeah, what Sukasa said sounds like it. It likes to choke up during heavy memory things (sound playing, video games, etc) although it rarely also freezes at about the same time without that (just that sound/video speeds it up.)

Memtest I haven't run but I literally replaced the old RAM with entirely new RAM, and I paid for my new RAM to be tested before delivery. It could potentially still be bad and I could be haunted by bad RAM, but, IIRC, bad ram causes BSODs, not 'screen locks in place, Windows doesn't even get to BSOD, all hardware stops responding, not even keyboard beeping.'

What Bagel said is my suspicion as well, Win x64 used to be, in fact, MUCH MORE freezy (and the old freezes were in this manner was well), so the patches wound up fixing most of the win x64 bugs except for this one.

Unfortunately nobody uses the downstairs computer a lot, so it doesn't get a chance to do this bug very often down there, especially with 2 GB (Took 2 weeks of me hammering on it with unending TF2 sessions).

Windows 7 I get for free via my MSDN license--I am a programmer/programmer-in-training and thus Microsoft offers it to me so I can make my programs for it.

I've just been slightly leery as I just finished transferring Win x64 over to this hdd. I'll probably wait until a good chunk of free time without programming and then experiment with Win 7.

With any luck, Win 7 would not freeze, while still maintaining x64 stuff, which my system already has drivers for.

Thanks for the help, anyway, I think I'll play around with some of the benchmarks and things on a slow day to see. My only other piece of hardware that hasn't been replaced/investigated thoroughly is the Video card... although the freezes sometimes happen without any video card involvement, although the freezes include the video stream dying (as in, the monitor turns off after a moment and reports no video, after being frozen on the same image for 5 mins).

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Lyskar
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Posted on 03-27-10 02:54:42 AM Link | Quote
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Metal_Man88's Post
After having it happen yet again, at yet again the same time, I have to say, it's definitely OS bound.

I've had mobo issues, HDD issues, etc, and they don't go off like clockwork every 1.5 weeks like this. Especially since it's a cumulative thing, based on use not as in 'gaming freezes it' but rather 'add up all the times you've loaded/unloaded programs and it freezes when that number is too high' stuff.

Hmmmm...

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Danika
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Posted on 03-27-10 03:01:51 AM Link | Quote
Try a virus checker, and see if anything comes up. Sounds like a virus or other malware... I had a type of time-release virus in 2004 that fucked up my boot sector, and I had to replace my hard drive and reinstall Windows 98 because of it. =/

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paulguy

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Posted on 03-27-10 10:18:45 AM Link | Quote
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Replace the hard drive from a boot sector virus? Seems silly to me. That's easily wiped out.

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Posted on 03-27-10 06:34:23 PM Link | Quote
Originally posted by paulguy
Replace the hard drive from a boot sector virus? Seems silly to me. That's easily wiped out.

My old HDD was only 2GB anyway, so I decided that it would be better to get a larger hard drive... (I later recovered the data from the 2GB hard drive a couple of years ago, then I recycled it for my Performa 575 using an IDE to SCSI adapter. =P)

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Lyskar
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Posted on 03-27-10 07:34:29 PM (last edited by Metal_Man88 at 03-27-10 04:42 PM) Link | Quote
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Boot sector virus? Impossible.

I replaced my old hard drive with a new one and it kept happening anyway.

I also have Avast and have scanned everything, finding nothing remotely malicious on the computer.

Nothing odd happens except for once every 1.5 weeks, my computer just freezes. No malicious program runs, no change occurs, it just goes to do a routine action that'd allocate memory, and freezes, cold.

And it's not the memory, as no corruption/BSODs based on that happen. I also replaced my memory, and it kept happening. It's a system lockup, motherboard related.

Not the capacitors on the motherboard, none of them are leaking.

My hypothesis is that there's a bug which causes the buggy Windows XP x64 to lose the pointer/proper place for memory allocation, then it tries to allocate another block of memory and crashes because that's not a valid location.

And of course, it's a low level crash, so BSOD doesn't get a chance to make a minidump or anything.

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Lyskar
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Posted on 04-04-10 08:09:33 AM Link | Quote
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A NEW WEIRD CHAPTER



I began stalking people's posts on other boards who used the same x64 XP, and found they, too, had hardware freezing issues. They said it was due to weird IRQ resource conflicts.

Then I got a totally unrelated idea:

Cool n' Quiet could be causing the problem!

See, Cool n' Quiet does a cool thing: It slows down my CPU when it's not in use to save power.

Buuuut...

What if it got stuck between changing voltages/frequencies?

That's right. The CPU would be stuck and unable to advance, causing the hardware to lock up and making the screen no longer change, the mouse/keyboard no longer react, not even beeping, while things like the ethernet (which have their own sub-processors) would continue working (and in the case of sound, continually loop as it waits for the CPU to tell it to go to the next part of the song).

So I'm trying it with Cool n' Quiet turned off. Let's see what happens!

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Lyskar
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Posted on 04-17-10 04:14:23 AM Link | Quote
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Computer has broken the magic 2 week barrier without freezing once Cool n' Quiet was disabled.

Playing TF2, compressing files, going nuts has had no freezes so far.

I think this problem is finally dealt with.

Thank goodness. *Falls over*

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Lyskar
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Posted on 05-16-10 05:41:07 AM Link | Quote
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Metal_Man88's Post
So, for anyone finding this on an internet search, here's something to look out for:


Originally posted by drew455
and to o1die...how often did your system blue screen?


Originally posted by oldie
About once every 2 weeks. No big deal. It's just that the voltage fluctuations caused by the software to save energy caused this problem with 4 sticks of memory. Your board might work fine with it. I've had 2 other boards run it with no problems. Try it.


So, there you have it. The Cool n' Quiet causes memory to freak out and freeze due to voltage fluctuations.

Hope this helps any hapless person who has the problem I had.


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Rachel Mae

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Posted on 05-16-10 08:14:11 AM Link | Quote
Bah. I could never use CnQ here because the clock speed changes freaked out a few of my programs...apparently it was a little slow to figure out when more CPU cycles were needed, and it would fluctuate between speeds when a program just barely hit the limit. I seem to recall emulators faring the worst.

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Posted on 05-16-10 06:35:20 PM Link | Quote
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Zsnes is REALLY bad about that. I wonder what bizarreness they use that causes that... I bet it uses busy looping to time stuff in some places that screw up when the clock speed changes. Can't wait for the rewrite... too bad most people have lost interest and by then there will be no benefit to using zsnes because snes9x will be about as fast after the rewrite and probably have more features for a good while, and even modern budget computers can run bsnes.

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Posted on 05-16-10 07:05:15 PM Link | Quote
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Metal_Man88's Post
Yeah... Cool n' Quiet's driver helps to deal with some of the problems, but I realized after thinking some more that the other freezes were also being caused by it.

TF2 Freeze: Just like your ZSNES problem, TF2 can't cope with having the processor jump all over the place, causing it to freak out and lose something in the video buffer. BAM! CRASH! Freeze.
Youtube Freeze: Like Flash was buggy enough, now imagine Flash trying to keep from falling over while the processor speed is bouncing all over the place.
Winamp Freeze: All those plugins (which cause a DEP warning just opening it) obviously do not take nicely to having changes in the processor, causing them, too, to eventually mis-allocate something and take down the sound/motherboard.

With it gone, I've had a grand total of one freeze, and that was caused by the combination of an Avast Program Update and Windows Update and not having restarted yet...

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Posted on 05-17-10 02:53:23 PM Link | Quote
Originally posted by Metal_Man88
[...]
With it gone, I've had a grand total of one freeze, and that was caused by the combination of an Avast Program Update and Windows Update and not having restarted yet...

Still something what should be looked into. What does the Event Viewer (if it was even logged) says at that time when that particular freeze came up?

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