More PC Problems: Slightly Different

[SurfD]

Finally got my brand new computer hooked up (about 5 or 6 days ago).

I must say, i really like it: It plays CoH like a dream, and i can run Doom3 on medium with full settings turned on very smoothly.

However, I am running into a strange lock up problem.  Every so often (usually after about 5 hours of operation or so) it will lock up HARD.  I mean, complete and total freeze.  Nothing short of a reset fixes it.

I have an Athalon 64, 3200+, Asus K8V Se Delux motherboard, and 1 Gig of ram from Micron.  Been trying to narrow it down to what might be causing it.

I have ruled out the Power Supply, as it is quite sufficient, metered across all connections is providing sufficient power, and all connectors are good.

I have ruled out heat, I have fucking 7 fans on this Case, live in a cool basement appartment, and bave been running with the side off just in case.

I think it MAY be my RAM timings or the RAM itself.

In any event, I wanted to ask: Does anyone have the name of a good piece of software that can do a RAM diagnostic check?

[Trippy]

I have ruled out heat, I have fucking 7 fans on this Case, live in a cool basement appartment, and bave been running with the side off just in case.

Are you actually checking your CPU and GPU temperatures and fan speeds through some sort of monitoring system? It doesn't matter if you have 7 case fans if your CPU/GPU heatsinks aren't fitted properly or their fans aren't spinning fast enough. You should also check the temperature on the chipset chip.

I think it MAY be my RAM timings or the RAM itself.

In any event, I wanted to ask: Does anyone have the name of a good piece of software that can do a RAM diagnostic check?

I've used Memtest86 but that may not work with your motherboard. You could try Memtest86+ instead.

[SurfD]

Well, i just installed the Asus PC probe, so I will check it after my next lock/crash to see if it has anythin odd stored in its history.

Going to try Memtest 86+

[Arcadian Del Sol]

temperature issues are more likely to result in random hard reboots than system freezes - that sounds like a GPF memory over-right, which can be fixed by optimizing your hard drives or lowering back some video settings (refresh rate, et al).

Question: If you leave it just idle at the desktop for 5 hours, does it still lock up, or is this only when you're gaming?

as always with a new PC, call them on the phone and make them fix it or replace it.

[Sky]

I have ruled out heat, I have fucking 7 fans on this Case, live in a cool basement appartment, and bave been running with the side off just in case.

Taking the side off negates a lot of the airflow of the fans. Also, more is not necessarily better, more important is to have a good, unimpeded (by cables, especially IDE ribbons) air flow through and out of the case. I personally don't put in side or top fans because they swirl the air too much, a good 120mm on the front and back has always been good, reversing airflow to blow over the cpu and out the front in rare cases where it's real hot.

Just they way I do it. Heck, I've been griping about the whole "RAID 0 isn't for gaming, it's for large sequential read/writes" for years now, and only now am I seeing it in print. :)

[Bunk]

Could be a lot of things. I had a PC that would lock up randomly if I played any sort of game for more than a couple hours.  I had assumed it was heat or memory, but it wasn't.

Went in to Event Manager, and found that one of my floppy controllers has crashing right before the lockups. It was a bad CDRW drive. Never crashed again after I pulled it out.

[SurfD]

well, just for more info:

It shouldnt be heat: logs from the Motherboard Monitor never show the CPU temp climbing over 44deg C.  Motherboard Temp stays a constant 32/33 C.

It doesent appear to be Memory.  Memtest 86+ ran for nearly 7 and a half hours, did 22 batches of tests, out of which there was only one small bunch of errors during the 6 test in the 14th batch. (something like 8 addresses failed a single write operation, but only that once)

It will freeze doing damn near anything:
- It freezes randomly when playing games (I can play CoH for 3 or 4 hours before I get a freeze, but I cant play much more then 10 minutes of Warcraft III before it freezes on me)
- It freezes on me when just playing music and surfing the net.
- It freezes on me when doing pretty much nothing
- hell, it even froze on me while running Memtest 86+  (screen was still showing blinking charactes, but program was not responsive and the timer had stopped counting the overall run time)  And Memtest 86+ doesent even load windows, it boots itself off a floppy disk.

Oh, and Geld, Its not a new PC in that kind of sense.  It is home built.  Parts ordered individually, and put together myself.  I am just trying to figure out what might be causing the problem at this stage.  I am beginning to think I might need to RMA the motherboard.

My next test is either going to involve reinstalling windows, or booting into the bios and leaving it running to see if it freezes/becomes unresponsive while sitting on the bios screen after long periods of time.

[Trippy]

Have you tried slowing down the memory timings? The fact that memtest found an error at all is not a reassuring sign. You could also try just running with one stick of RAM assuming you have more than one. And you may want to flash your BIOS if it isn't already the latest version.

[SurfD]

Bios is currently flashed to most current version

Have two sticks of 512meg memory.
Memtest reported them as running at 3-3-3-6 for timings, which sounds right.

Will try running with one, see if it changes anything.

[Bunk]

Go with the old standby test: remove all non vital components. Extra memory, floppy drives, cd drives, sound, network, whatever.  If it doesnt crash, you know you have a bad component.  

That doesnt work, go with the full wipe and reinstall to prove it isnt software.

[Resvrgam]

That was my biggest gripe with ASUS boards...they're really picky as to what type of RAM you install on them.  

I have an ASUS P4T533-C Mobo and made the unfortunate mistake of using some non-certified RAM RIMMS (the manual claimed the board liked Samsung & I through Kingston in).  

After countless lock-ups, restarts & underclocks, I finally sunk some cash into those Samsung RIMMs the manual requested and voila: the Board's problems went away.  

God, I hated that.

[SurfD]

It seems that it might have been my RAM after all.

After pulling out one of my RAM sticks, so far, I have managed to go a good 8 hours of surfing and CoH last night without crashing.  I will keep going on the system as it is, if i can make it through a day or two of regular use without experiencing a lockup, I will know it was the RAM for sure.

Not sure if it is a bad stick, or if it was being picky about which of the two slots I had the second stick in however.

Perhaps it was a bad stick, and I got lucky and pulled out the right one (Any way of  knowing which stick of ram contained those few addresses that generated that one error set on Memtest?).

[Murgos]

Perhaps it was a bad stick, and I got lucky and pulled out the right one (Any way of  knowing which stick of ram contained those few addresses that generated that one error set on Memtest?).

If you wrote down the addresses that failed then yes there is.  The addresses are in hexadecimal and NOT arbitrary.  Finding out the addressing scheme ASUS is using to address your RAM on your particular MB could be a good trick though.

I wouldn't count out the motherboard yet either though, it could be the cause of the RAM malfunction just as easily as the RAM could.  Me?  I'd return em both and get new ones.

[UD_Delt]

I had the same sort of problem with my PC about 8 months back. Mine would actually first drop the video drivers completely and then lock up on me. I could reboot, reinstall the drivers and keep using it for a random period of time before the drivers would drop again and it would lock up.

After slowly replacing various parts that needed upgrading anyway I finally narrowed it down to a bad stick of RAM. Bad memory can really cause some funky problems...

[Bunk]

Now that SurfD seems to have a handle on his issue, I have one for everyone to take stabs at.

Installed a new PC, new everything, win XP Pro.  Patched fully up to SP1.
Using an Asus board, using the onboard LAN to go direct to a cable modem.  Windows firewall activated on the network connection.

Here's the issue: IE randomly seems to lose track of the DNS.  I let the system sit a while, come in and open IE and get a "server not found/dns" error. Go in to DOS: ipconfig/all >  DNS is listed.  Ping the DNS = ok.  Run Agent and connect to the news server = ok.  IE = pfft.

Enable/disble network con: IE still doesnt find anything.
ipconfig/renew:  IE still kaput

Reboot or even just log off/log in:  IE works fine again.

Had a brief issue with some spyware/trojans earlier, but Ive run Ad-aware, seek and destroy, and two different virus scans and everything comes up clean.

Any ideas?

[Sky]

Download Firefox.

[Trippy]

Here's the issue: IE randomly seems to lose track of the DNS.  I let the system sit a while, come in and open IE and get a "server not found/dns" error. Go in to DOS: ipconfig/all >  DNS is listed.  Ping the DNS = ok.  Run Agent and connect to the news server = ok.  IE = pfft.

Enable/disble network con: IE still doesnt find anything.
ipconfig/renew:  IE still kaput

Reboot or even just log off/log in:  IE works fine again.

The best thing to do would be to install a packet sniffer like Ethereal so you can see exactly what your machine is doing at the network level when it tries to resolve a domain name. Depending on the packet sniffer you use you might need WinPcap as well.

If a packet sniffer is a little too cryptic here are some additional diagnostic things you can do to try and narrow down the problem a bit.

When IE is "stuck" try running tracert from the command prompt to the site you just tried to browse to. Is it able to resolve the domain names that way or do you only see IP address along the trace path? If you only see IP addresses then it's probably not IE that's at fault. You can try messing with the ipconfig DNS switches to see if that helps or gives you any additional information:

/flushdns  Purges the DNS Resolver cache.
/registerdns  Refreshes all DHCP leases and re-registers DNS names
/displaydns  Display the contents of the DNS Resolver Cache.

[Jayce]

Perhaps it was a bad stick, and I got lucky and pulled out the right one (Any way of  knowing which stick of ram contained those few addresses that generated that one error set on Memtest?).

Put the suspect stick back in and see if it starts crashing again.  If it doesn't, switch slots.  Then put the "good" stick in the second slot.  See if you can narrow down which slot/stick combo causes the crash.