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Venkman
Terracotta Army
Posts: 11536
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Computer's been running fine for awhile. But around October it would fail to start up once every 5-10 times. The fans would turn on, but I don't think the boot chime happens, and then it just hangs. Usually a complete shut down or two after that would make it load completely. But I don't consider that a fix  At first I thought maybe the HD, but tests of that and then the RAM both came back normal. I haven't made any changes to the BIOS ever (it's not OC'd), and the only software I've installed is the usual Windows updates and Black Flag. This problem isn't consistent, so it's hard to tell where the failure is (occasionally) happening. I'm thinking PSU maybe? There a good way to test that beyond looking at voltages in Speccy? |
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Strazos
Greetings from the Slave Coast
Posts: 15542
The World's Worst Game: Curry or Covid
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Sounds similar to something I was experiencing in Benin (and I don't think it's happened yet since my PC arrived).
I'm inclined to think it was a power issue for me, though I doubt that's the problem in your case.
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Fear the Backstab!
"Plato said the virtuous man is at all times ready for a grammar snake attack." - we are lesion
"Hell is other people." -Sartre
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Trippy
Administrator
Posts: 23628
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Computer's been running fine for awhile. But around October it would fail to start up once every 5-10 times. The fans would turn on, but I don't think the boot chime happens, and then it just hangs. Usually a complete shut down or two after that would make it load completely. But I don't consider that a fix At first I thought maybe the HD, but tests of that and then the RAM both came back normal. I haven't made any changes to the BIOS ever (it's not OC'd), and the only software I've installed is the usual Windows updates and Black Flag. This problem isn't consistent, so it's hard to tell where the failure is (occasionally) happening. I'm thinking PSU maybe? There a good way to test that beyond looking at voltages in Speccy? Plug the computer into a different outlet. Unplug some stuff (extra hard drives, DVD drives, etc.). |
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Venkman
Terracotta Army
Posts: 11536
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Sheesh, I shoulda thought of that. Thanks Trippy. That's my next step.
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Chimpy
Terracotta Army
Posts: 10619
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Also make sure to use a different power strip (and even a different power cord if you want to be super paranoid).
We had an older server which was running our control system server for the power plant showing a power supply failure that would not clear even after we replaced the PSU which we assumed had a failure on the motherboard connection. When we upgraded and retired the box, when I went to move a different machine to that rack/slot and reused the power cord I got a PSU failure. Ended up that the power cord was bad, when I grabbed a different cord it worked fine (and the power cord was not super old either).
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'Reality' is the only word in the language that should always be used in quotes.
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Venkman
Terracotta Army
Posts: 11536
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Good point. Thanks!
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Samprimary
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My computer is regressing significantly in gaming ability. It's performing terribly at games it used to display perfectly well.
I dunno what to do about it. I'm poking around with drivers and testing it on 3Dmark and wondering what went wrong. What's the first thing I should do when trying to isolate the cause of my computer's decline?
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Trippy
Administrator
Posts: 23628
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Describe the performance issues you have having now.
What's your computer spec?
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Samprimary
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low framerate, seemingly unimpacted by setting games down to low settings. Stuttering. Both in games and in video playback. Games it used to play just fine (MWO, SWTOR, etc) now have low framerates that crash down to slideshow levels in many situations.
Win 7 64 bit
Intel core 15-2500k CPU @ 3.30ghz (4 cpu's) ~3.3GHz
8192mb ram
page file 2876mb used 13470mb available
graphics card is amd radeon HD 6800 series
may be some driver issues somewhere; the previous administrator user account on the computer got hosed and I had to essentially start from scratch in the drivers dept.
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Trippy
Administrator
Posts: 23628
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I would turn off your page file temporarily. Is everything running off of a hard drive? If so what's the SMART status on it? Do you have another drive you can move some games to? Are the games on the same drive as the OS and page file?
For the video drivers I would try and do a clean install (i.e. deleting the existing drivers first).
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Samprimary
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alright, I disabled the page file, did a test on the disk and (as far as I am reading it) it's OK across the board. I'll test a game and then try the deletion and reinstallation of the video drivers ..
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Yegolev
Moderator
Posts: 24440
2/10 WOULD NOT INGEST
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Seems fishy to page out 2.5GB when you have 8GB RAM.
Question: is there a tool that can create a bootable recovery ISO of a running RHEL server?
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Why am I homeless? Why do all you motherfuckers need homes is the real question.
They called it The Prayer, its answer was law
Mommy come back 'cause the water's all gone
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Trippy
Administrator
Posts: 23628
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If you burn the RHEL LiveCD/DVD of the release you are on to a disk it'll have a recovery mode. If you are trying to burn an ISO of what's on the server right now you'll want something like Linux Live Kit. Not sure if Linux Live Kit will install the rescue mode that's part of the RHEL boot disc, though. |
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Yegolev
Moderator
Posts: 24440
2/10 WOULD NOT INGEST
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I know I don't know linux words for things, but this sounds unnecessarily complex. I want to run a OS backup of a running RHEL server and I want that backup image to be bootable such that I can use it to install a clone of that system. Via Ignite or Kickstart or whatever RHEL uses for network installation, which I believe supports ISO images. Ideally this will never be needed, but if alt-boot fails then no one wants to fuck around with a traditional reinstall.
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Why am I homeless? Why do all you motherfuckers need homes is the real question.
They called it The Prayer, its answer was law
Mommy come back 'cause the water's all gone
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Samprimary
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After page file / deleting and replacing drivers: the game seems to present greater stability in Huttball tests in SWTOR but framerates remain conspicuously low and games get skippy a lot.
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Trippy
Administrator
Posts: 23628
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Is it choppy on a consistent basis or does it come and go? E.g. is it choppy as you move into a new area but then it's okay until you move into another new area?
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Numtini
Terracotta Army
Posts: 7675
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My take is that when it gets to the point that you're noticing it, it's always faster to reinstall windows than to find the problem.
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If you can read this, you're on a board populated by misogynist assholes.
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Trippy
Administrator
Posts: 23628
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I know I don't know linux words for things, but this sounds unnecessarily complex. I want to run a OS backup of a running RHEL server and I want that backup image to be bootable such that I can use it to install a clone of that system. Via Ignite or Kickstart or whatever RHEL uses for network installation, which I believe supports ISO images. Ideally this will never be needed, but if alt-boot fails then no one wants to fuck around with a traditional reinstall.
Kickstart won't do what you want. Kickstart is the way to automate the standard RH installation process which installs everything from packages (RPMs). In other words the Kickstart config "answers" all the questions you would normally answer manually when installing RH and runs through the standard installation procedure. You can create custom repos for Kickstart to pull packages from but that's different than cloning a system or just copying the already installed files. You probably want something like Clonezilla which will clone a drive/partition onto a bootable disk and then allow you to clone that image back onto another machine. There's also a server edition that allows you to do this over a network if you need to create multiple clones at once. |
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Yegolev
Moderator
Posts: 24440
2/10 WOULD NOT INGEST
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It would be for system recovery, but I'll look at Clonezilla. Typically a system build is a planned event and we don't care very much how long it takes, but when a server goes POOF we would like to get it online again ASAP.
AIX does this very easily, I just can't correlate mksysb to anything on linux.
EDIT: It must be because linux wasn't around in the tape-backup era, otherwise I assume these tools would exist. OH WELL. I'll keep looking around.
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« Last Edit: December 13, 2013, 02:00:04 PM by Yegolev »
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Why am I homeless? Why do all you motherfuckers need homes is the real question.
They called it The Prayer, its answer was law
Mommy come back 'cause the water's all gone
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Samprimary
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My take is that when it gets to the point that you're noticing it, it's always faster to reinstall windows than to find the problem.
I think that may be the route i have to take. I just don't have my windows 7 registration info anymore and argh. |
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Trippy
Administrator
Posts: 23628
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I built myself a new gaming computer when I ran into that problem   |
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Salamok
Terracotta Army
Posts: 2803
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Samprimary
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I'm noticing some significant improvements in overall stability now, though in some games it still likes to drag in the teens, framerate-wise, and it's still a bit jumpy, especially when entering new areas.
I believe i can actually use amd overdrive and have it be stable now. huh.
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Trippy
Administrator
Posts: 23628
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Jumpy moving into new areas likely means your disk I/O is suffering (trying to load textures and level information from disk onto the card). You'll probably want to get an SSD at some point dedicated to games.
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Samprimary
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Yeahhh, probably going to start with the ssd then.
This has been very useful information! Thanks for taking the time to help me figure out some solutions.
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Yegolev
Moderator
Posts: 24440
2/10 WOULD NOT INGEST
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I would be converting it to a VM then it is easy peasy to back up and restore in minutes, plus you can move it around to different physical hardware:
I didn't ask about that since if it's not a VM now, I assumed there must be a reason for it. Or the guy that asked me is thinking too primitively. But yes, VMware should easily do this. |
Why am I homeless? Why do all you motherfuckers need homes is the real question.
They called it The Prayer, its answer was law
Mommy come back 'cause the water's all gone
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Chimpy
Terracotta Army
Posts: 10619
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P2V works pretty well if your VMware environment has access to the same IP/network space as the physical box so that you can keep your configuration (ours doesn't for a number of stupid reasons).
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'Reality' is the only word in the language that should always be used in quotes.
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Yegolev
Moderator
Posts: 24440
2/10 WOULD NOT INGEST
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Well, that would entail a migration project in all likelihood. Not that I know anything about P2V except generally what it does. The Winders admins used it for migration work that I wasn't directly involved in... I was using real computing systems.  Anyway, even if I decide that VMware backups are now the way to go, it still seems like it is or was a big gap in linux enterprise solutioning that you can't just take a backup of a server and then BOOM restore it in place or elsewhere. Luckily I won't have to worry too much about it. Not my project. |
Why am I homeless? Why do all you motherfuckers need homes is the real question.
They called it The Prayer, its answer was law
Mommy come back 'cause the water's all gone
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Trippy
Administrator
Posts: 23628
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it still seems like it is or was a big gap in linux enterprise solutioning that you can't just take a backup of a server and then BOOM restore it in place or elsewhere. Luckily I won't have to worry too much about it.
Yes, you can. |
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Yegolev
Moderator
Posts: 24440
2/10 WOULD NOT INGEST
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I'll amend it, then, to say that I don't know how to do it in a slick manner.
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Why am I homeless? Why do all you motherfuckers need homes is the real question.
They called it The Prayer, its answer was law
Mommy come back 'cause the water's all gone
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Hoax
Terracotta Army
Posts: 8110
l33t kiddie
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I'm not ready for IPv6, suddenly things that I used to be familiar with do not look familiar (why does my gateway have letters in it  ) anyone got a good link that explains what just happened and why? Comcast seems to have rolled it out in the last couple weeks and ever since my network (especially wireless) has been way less good/reliable. |
A nation consists of its laws. A nation does not consist of its situation at a given time. If an individual's morals are situational, then that individual is without morals. If a nation's laws are situational, that nation has no laws, and soon isn't a nation.
-William Gibson
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Chimpy
Terracotta Army
Posts: 10619
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I'm not ready for IPv6, suddenly things that I used to be familiar with do not look familiar (why does my gateway have letters in it ) anyone got a good link that explains what just happened and why? Comcast seems to have rolled it out in the last couple weeks and ever since my network (especially wireless) has been way less good/reliable. If your devices are having problems with IPv6, just turn it off on your router. AFAIK Comcast runs dual-stack so it won't hurt your ability to connect to anything (unless it is v6 only, but I have not heard of anything that has gone that way yet). |
'Reality' is the only word in the language that should always be used in quotes.
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schild
Administrator
Posts: 60345
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Mom wants to spend $400 to $600 on a new laptop. Someone just point me to whatever the standard is for things in that price range. 10 points to the Wizard School of their choice if it's an amazon link because I'm shameless. I don't really care where the link comes from. Here's what you need to know about the laptop:
She'll use, uhhh Outlook and Microsoft Word. Maybe Powerpoint if she's feeling saucy.
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Trippy
Administrator
Posts: 23628
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How portable does it need to be? Does she have good eyesight (i.e. can use a small screen with very high DPI)?
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schild
Administrator
Posts: 60345
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How portable does it need to be? Does she have good eyesight (i.e. can use a small screen with very high DPI)?
I'm thinking between 14 and 16" but 17" may be too bulky. I wouldn't go smaller than 14 though. |
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