Author Topic: Free tech support.  (Read 7559 times)

za1000101

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Free tech support.
« on: July 25, 2009, 10:28:32 PM »
Just putting up my services as a computer nerd to help people figure out certain problems realted to NWN or not. Just totake a little load off the DM's.

So post your problems below and let's see what we can do about em.

Kattze

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Free tech support.
« Reply #1 on: July 25, 2009, 10:54:52 PM »
Non-related eh? I'll give you a cookie if you can figure this out for me.

My computer will freeze apparently at random. I haven't been able to find a cause as this happens when the computer is idle, watching videos, browsing webpages and playing video games. It happens a lot more when I play WOW and watch videos at the same time.  I don't seem to freeze when I'm playing games full screen mode.  If I close the game sometimes I'll freeze immediately.  Sometimes it won't crash for a day but then I open up a youtube and it decides that's too much to handle.

My screen will freeze up and become unresponsive to anything except the reset and power buttons. My sound will either finish playing the music/video track (if I have my music shuffling it simply finishes the track and stops, even if there's another song afterwards) or drag out the soundwaves as if it's going through a friggin timewarp which freaks me out so I press my power button. I've left it sit for several hours frozen and it hasn't rebooted or shut down when I returned.

I can still access files on the network from my laptop while it's frozen, play music and videos from the hard drive (wtf mate?).

This is a fresh install of windows and it was happening last install also.

No errors on Windows Memory Diagnostics
All temperatures are below 100F
No critical errors in the windows error log except me pressing the power button.
This freezing has occured with 3 different video card drivers.
Switched out my RAM
Installed windows on different hard drive
Isolation tests with 3 different hard drives
Disabled sound card from BIOS
Disabled network from BIOS
Updated BIOS

Some information about the system
Operating System: Windows 7 Ultimate 32bit RC1 Build 7100
Motherboard: Gigabyte EX58-UD3R (Bios version F6)
CPU: i7 920
Memory: 4GB DDR3 ocz
HDD: 64gb gskill ssd
Video: Geforce 8800GT
Sound: Onboard Realtek HDA

Only thing I haven't tried is a different video card.  I'm waiting for my tax return.
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za1000101

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Hmm...
« Reply #2 on: July 26, 2009, 10:20:10 PM »
It sounds like a power supply issue honestly. Could maybe be your video card but if that was the case there might be some other clues.

Does your motherboard have an integrated video chip? giving it's an i7 board I'd say probably something decent, or atleast maybe an intel GMA video chip. Also about the power supply issue it could be dying which causes ALOT of random freezeups, or maybe you just didn't buy a big enough PSU(power supply unit) to power everything? Have these problems been happening since ya built it or only recently?

Try CPU-Z from http://www.cpuid.com/download/cpuz/cpuz_152_setup.exe to make sure your CPU and ram are running at the proper speeds. It's freeware. and totally clean.

And try http://www.almico.com/speedfan438.exe to monitor your voltages and temps as well as control case fans, it's a nifty freeware app and is clean as the falling snow as far as spyware/virii.

After you run speedfan report your voltages back to here please so we can make sure they're on par. Also don't just look at it one time. Monitor it for a while and see if they fluctuate. if your PSU is fluctuating voltages it's definately going bad (more then by 1 or 2 decimals, it's it's dropping or gaining entire volts then it's definately time to replace it before it fries your board or cpu or ram.)

If it all seems good try your onboard video chip and see if you get the freezes. Also Is your current video card overclocked? I'd imagine so with your setup. Could be causing unseen heat issues which cause the video driver to die on ya. don't know if the geforce cards have an automatic driver recovery feature like my radeon HD4850 which reboots the video card when it crashes instead of locking up the system.

Kattze

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« Reply #3 on: July 27, 2009, 07:41:32 AM »

These are my voltages and temperatures.  I've had that idling for a long time so the min-max is accurate.  Looks fine to me.

I do not have my video card OC'd or anything else for that matter.
I do not have onboard video.

It's a new PSU (650w) I had to get it as my old PSU didn't have the 8 pin connector for the i7 motherboard.

My motherboard is this one http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813128375

I may aswell just link the other stuff I got.
ram
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820227244
cpu
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819115202

When my system halts I've recently been letting it sit there and sometimes it reboots on its own.  It leaves a dump file but I haven't been able to open it because I'm apparently "doing it wrong", which doesn't help me diagnose what made me crash.
THOSE ARE MY SHOES
GIVE THEM BACK
YOU ARE A DOG
THEY DON'T EVEN FIT

za1000101

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« Reply #4 on: July 27, 2009, 08:07:56 PM »
Have you run memtest to ensure there's no errors in your memory chips? I've had that issue before but it caused bluescreens not lockups. And see if you've got another computer with a video card in it or a friend with an old video card lying around to test it with. run it until the normal time it would approximately crash.

all your voltages are fine cept the +5 VCCH but for some reason mine hangs in the 3's too and I have a powermax 850w PSU lol (think it's powermax brand, I know it's black lol) and if you test the ram and it passes, and you test another video card and it passes, then we know it's your video card, if it crashes with another GPU in I'd RMA the motherboard and get a replacement. It's the process of elimination really. Memory, video, power, cpu. and I'd say HDD error checking if ya haven't. But I'd assume that would lead to corrupted files rather then system lockups. Never had a HDD fail on me though.

sucks that our times we get online are offset lol would be nice to be able to talk abuot it in close to real time lol.

In other news, I  found some generic DDR2 800 ram modules from a ghetto 600 dollar Acer desktop PC. slapped em in my computer for some extra ram, and they're running great at 4-4-4-4-10-16 1T and only underclocked them  by 67mhz. Just goes to show even the noname generic stuff can work good too..it's all about luck lol.

Lemme get ya a couple links for software to run.

Everest Ultimate(30 day trial) very clean software, features a burn-in test among others. I'd say run it on the components it lists individually for atleast 30 minutes a piece or however long it normally takes for your computer to die. see if you can single one out that locks up.
http://tinyurl.com/lf4mbs  <- that's a tinyurl version of the download from softpedia cause their link was HUGE lol.

ATItool (freeware) also clean software(while we're at it let's just assume everything I link is clean) This is a video card overclocking and testing tool. And don't worry it works for nvidia cards too despite the name. Edit: btw just press scan for artifacts, and it'll work your card really hard with that furry cube lol.
http://www.techpowerup.com/atitool/

Memtest86 (freeware) the best memory diagnostic tool there is. burn the cd, boot it, run it.
http://www.memtest.org/download/2.11/memtest86+-2.11.iso.zip


As for opening the system crash dump hmmm...go here.

http://www.brighthub.com/computing/windows-platform/articles/29860.aspx

It's an article that tells you exactly what to do/get from microsoft to be able to analyze the dump(<- lol)

I wish ya the best of luck, i sincerely HATE computer problems lol I hate having them more then fixing them, i'll work on the same problem sometimes for weeks trying to figure it out. but that's generally in linux where you can't google every system option lol in windows it's generally easier. Make sure ya report back here with results cause if all that stuff I mentioned above passes I'd say Motherboard, which would really suck and I hope yours is still under the RMA time with newegg.

za1000101

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« Reply #5 on: July 27, 2009, 08:13:23 PM »
I think the forums time posting system is broken? lol or atleast works all funky like..My 2nd post was at 2pm, your post which is below my 2nd post is at 11:40pm on the same date, so somehow you managed to post before me but end up below me lol. which I assume is reporting our individual time zones. But that could be very confusing for anybody who's looking for time sensitive information lol

za1000101

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« Reply #6 on: July 27, 2009, 08:21:38 PM »
I was just looking over your voltages again and I noticed your cpu voltage was at 1.04 most of the time which seemed a bit low. I looked it up and:
Core I7 920 overclocking :
The default voltage for this processor is 1.2V (1.16 with full load)

Do you have some power saving feature turned on that throttles the cpu? I also noticed it spike at 1.28 and you said it was idling, if it was really idling meaning you didn't touch it and it gave that spike that could be your problem. if it spikes like that when you're under load it could be basically stopping your computers heart lol.

I'd go into your bios and make sure the CPU voltage is set manually to 1.20 volts and make sure any power saving features are disabled. On my AMD processor there's "Cool 'n Quiet" that throttles the cpu to save electricity when it's not active lol. If I was that worried about saving .2volts for 20 minutes I wouldn't own a computer.

I'm hoping any of my posts are helping you. None of what I've said is definitive information that says hey it's problem xx. It's just more of an aid in the debugging process.

Kattze

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« Reply #7 on: July 28, 2009, 12:20:27 AM »
I'll take a look at the CPU voltages when I get home (at work as I'm posting this).  I had the program running while I was playing games so that is probably the spike you see.

My memory was set manually at 1.8v at 7-7-7-something-20 (i think off the top of my head) and manually set to 1333mhz but I was getting bluescreens and was causing one of my hard drives to not show up on the bios listing... so I set it all back to auto.  I've run WMD (windows memory diagnostics) overnight and it brought up no errors.  I've cycled out the RAM stick by stick and it still caused the system to halt.  I'm still not ruling out the RAM though as its OCZ, a brand that I loathe but for some reason my boyfriend bought it.  Just like this amazing gigabyte motherboard I asked him not to buy because gigabyte was the brand that made me replace my system in the first place.
As in my original post I'm upgrading my video card when I get my tax return which should be within the week.  I'm hoping it's the video card since I won't have to spend anymore money on this system :P

I'll try a couple of those links (as I've already tested most of it with other software).  I realize you can't really say "hey its this" I was more after some debugging help to narrow it down.  You've been a lot of help and given me some more things to check out.

What I'm most mad about is the ability to play team fortress 2 for 4 hours but then I close the game and click a youtube link and it locks up.  What the fuck?
THOSE ARE MY SHOES
GIVE THEM BACK
YOU ARE A DOG
THEY DON'T EVEN FIT

za1000101

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« Reply #8 on: July 29, 2009, 08:44:02 PM »
any luck with anything?

Kattze

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« Reply #9 on: August 08, 2009, 08:40:18 AM »
My boyfriend fixed it.  Not really sure how.. I think he tweaked with the voltages of the RAM and changed some weird stuff on my motherboard.  Sorry I couldn't give you a real update on the fix.  Evidently I was doing something wrong all along :(
THOSE ARE MY SHOES
GIVE THEM BACK
YOU ARE A DOG
THEY DON'T EVEN FIT

 

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