strange and worrying computer problem

[zelda_pinwheel]

Originally Posted by Idoine

Avast Home/Familial (the free one !) is good, for a free one, and in french ! But it has its limits (this is an opinion of "experts" in antivirus ! ). Nod32 is considered one of the bests by the sames... It's not mine, I have KIS personally, for years now, and as I'm pretty satisfied I don't see the reason to change !
For Teatimer, I had a problem once (before I turn it on, and before I purchased KIS in lieu of KAV ! ), it was my mistake (I installed a patch for Windows Messenger before verifying its safeness ). Now, with both softwares, when I scan my computer, I'm happy with 0 spywares !

okay ! well, i think i'll stick with avast for now, free is good ! this computer stuff costs a lot of money so i'll take advantage of that when i can... but i'll turn that teatimer back on.

Originally Posted by 6charlong

I've come to this thread late. There are so many things that it could be. But your description reminded me of a PC we had in the office with the same symptoms and thought to share what that one was.

It tracked back to the fact that there was a refrigerator on the same circuit as the PC. When the big old motor in the 'frig kicked on it created a power sag. Integrated circuits hate power sags. Actually, motors in heaters, air conditioners, fans, etc., create 'line noise' and some power fluctuations.

With a UPS your PC actually draws power from the battery, while the UPS recharges from your power main. If the problem is coming from the power source and if you decide to get a UPS, it might be wise to find out what replacement batteries cost for the model you consider. If the problem is power, that battery will keep on getting hammered and have to be replaced.

Just another one of the possibilities.

hm, thanks for that info. i'm not sure whether there could be anything else on the circuit, in this house anything is possible, but i doubt it's the refrigerator ; i'm pretty sure it has its very own circuit.

anyway it might not be the power after all ; this morning when i turned it on, i had a "serious error" in the nanosecond after it started the boot cycle (the monitor splash screen had just appeared, which is i believe the very first thing to come on the screen during the boot process) :

Type de l'événement*:	Erreur
Source de l'événement*:	System Error
Catégorie de l'événement*:	(102)
ID de l'événement*:	1003

Description*:
Code erreur 1000008e, paramètre 1 c0000005, paramètre 2 bf951755, paramètre 3 a7a3dc00, paramètre 4 00000000.

Pour plus d'informations, consultez le centre Aide et support à l'adresse http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/events.asp.
Données*:
0000: 53 79 73 74 65 6d 20 45   System E
0008: 72 72 6f 72 20 20 45 72   rror  Er
0010: 72 6f 72 20 63 6f 64 65   ror code
0018: 20 31 30 30 30 30 30 38    1000008
0020: 65 20 20 50 61 72 61 6d   e  Param
0028: 65 74 65 72 73 20 63 30   eters c0
0030: 30 30 30 30 30 35 2c 20   000005, 
0038: 62 66 39 35 31 37 35 35   bf951755
0040: 2c 20 61 37 61 33 64 63   , a7a3dc
0048: 30 30 2c 20 30 30 30 30   00, 0000
0050: 30 30 30 30               0000

i turned on the radio first, and it didn't shut off, so that makes me think it wasn't electrical. and it couldn't be the heat, because it is freezing here, so especially when it had been off overnight it couldn't have been overheated.

*sigh*

more testing...

[Peverel]

Just a thought but I think you said you thought you were on SP2 maybe SP3. It may be worth just trying to re-install whatever service pack you are on. I know it sometimes sorts out OS issues and is quicker than an OS reinstall.

That's the other thing I think you should consider. I know that my work PCs don't last longer than 6 to 9 months between OS re-installs on both desktops (they are dev machines) and servers. Some people are going to be shocked at that but we do do some nasty things to them.

[zelda_pinwheel]

hm, i don't know if i can do that... i'm pretty sure the sp is already *in* the installation, if you know what i mean.

(plus i hate reinstalling my system. disk images are my new best friends. i hope never to do a complete install ever again in my entire life.)

[Peverel]

Originally Posted by zelda_pinwheel

hm, i don't know if i can do that... i'm pretty sure the sp is already *in* the installation, if you know what i mean.

You may well still be able to download the SP and re-apply it. Microsoft used to recommend reapplying service packs after any major system change such as a hardware change or major application install. Don't think they do any more but if something you installed has overwritten one of the updated service pack files it *may* be causing your issue

Originally Posted by zelda_pinwheel

(plus i hate reinstalling my system. disk images are my new best friends. i hope never to do a complete install ever again in my entire life.)

I have dreams like that I really do - but that said I can rebuild a base server in about 2 hours now lol

[ShortNCuddlyAm]

Did you say what your video card is, and if it's the same make (and maybe even model) as in your previous PC?

[rjfarrell]

Zelda,

I had the EXACT same problem about 3 years ago on a new HP. Spent countless hours with HP Support. They tried hard. But to no avail. They took it back and worked on it several times. They thought it was Ram. Replaced power supply. No improvement.

Then, I decided to upgrade to a MUCH larger power supply. The reason they had not put a larger one in was the case would not hold a power supply any larger than the 300w they had installed (Mini Tower case was too small). So. I bought a 650w power supply and installed it on the OUTSIDE of the case. I used a nice black gaffers tape. I NEVER had the shut down, reboot problem again. And it didnt look bad. lol.

Just a thought.

[djgreedo]

What is the wattage of your power supply? It sounds like you are running a pretty high powered PC. I've had similar problems when using cheap power supplies. Anything less than 500W is probably not good enough. Do you have one of those CPUs that requires an extra 4-pin power connector? Do you have a powerful video card that requires its own connection to the power supply?

Also, if the power supply is low quality it can cause fluctuations in the power going into your mainboard (which would probably be even worse since you indicated your house has old wiring). A not so easy way to test it would be to plug it in at someone else's house, but that's an extremely inconvenient way to test it. Maybe you could make an effort to turn off all unneeded electrical devices (and unplug them) and see if the computer still crashes with minimal load on your electrical supply.

Although it seems almost certain to be a hardware/power issue, have you considered installing another OS (on a separate partition) to rule out software as the issue? It's time consuming, but might be worth a try. If it has the same problem on day 1 you can end the experiment right there. Windows 7 is available free at the moment (it will deactivate some time next year, so it's not totally free). Being based on Windows Vista it is inherently more stable than XP and will probably not suffer from driver problems.

You could try running with only 1 stick of RAM and see if that eliminates the problem. And switch the stick around if it still crashes. If all three (four?) sticks fail by themselves then you can almost rule out RAM as the problem since it is highly unlikely that all your RAM sticks will be faulty. But maybe the RAM socket is.

[zelda_pinwheel]

Originally Posted by Peverel

I have dreams like that I really do - but that said I can rebuild a base server in about 2 hours now lol

oh, sure, the system doesn't take so long... but then there are all the apps !!!! (dear lord, reinstalling all the apps....)

Originally Posted by ShortNCuddlyAm

Did you say what your video card is, and if it's the same make (and maybe even model) as in your previous PC?

my video card is a Gigabyte ATI 4850HB 512Mo DVI-HDMi pci-e2.0. it's not the same as my last one (i don't remember what that was, but i know that it's not compatible with the new motherboard).

Originally Posted by rjfarrell

Zelda,

I had the EXACT same problem about 3 years ago on a new HP. Spent countless hours with HP Support. They tried hard. But to no avail. They took it back and worked on it several times. They thought it was Ram. Replaced power supply. No improvement.

Then, I decided to upgrade to a MUCH larger power supply. The reason they had not put a larger one in was the case would not hold a power supply any larger than the 300w they had installed (Mini Tower case was too small). So. I bought a 650w power supply and installed it on the OUTSIDE of the case. I used a nice black gaffers tape. I NEVER had the shut down, reboot problem again. And it didnt look bad. lol.

Just a thought.

Originally Posted by djgreedo

What is the wattage of your power supply? It sounds like you are running a pretty high powered PC. I've had similar problems when using cheap power supplies. Anything less than 500W is probably not good enough. Do you have one of those CPUs that requires an extra 4-pin power connector? Do you have a powerful video card that requires its own connection to the power supply?

Also, if the power supply is low quality it can cause fluctuations in the power going into your mainboard (which would probably be even worse since you indicated your house has old wiring). A not so easy way to test it would be to plug it in at someone else's house, but that's an extremely inconvenient way to test it. Maybe you could make an effort to turn off all unneeded electrical devices (and unplug them) and see if the computer still crashes with minimal load on your electrical supply.

my power supply is an Antec NSK 6580 430W.
my motherboard is a Gigabyte EP45-DS3R FSB1600 Energy Save S775.
Proc : Intel E7300 Core 2 Duo 2.66Ghz Box.
3 Go of G.Skill DDR2 800 PC2-6400 CL4-4-4-12

it might be the power supply, although if it is i'll be really annoyed because i had trouble with that on my last build and specifically asked for a good power supply for this one. but if it is, could that cause problems during the boot sequence ? i wouldn't think there was much of a drain the second it starts up (before it even gets into windows). if it is, i could get a stronger one, how hard is that to install myself ? i've installed things like internal hard drives or dvd players, but never anything like a motherboard or processor... is it just a question of a few screws / cables, or is it more complicated ?

Although it seems almost certain to be a hardware/power issue, have you considered installing another OS (on a separate partition) to rule out software as the issue? It's time consuming, but might be worth a try. If it has the same problem on day 1 you can end the experiment right there. Windows 7 is available free at the moment (it will deactivate some time next year, so it's not totally free). Being based on Windows Vista it is inherently more stable than XP and will probably not suffer from driver problems.

You could try running with only 1 stick of RAM and see if that eliminates the problem. And switch the stick around if it still crashes. If all three (four?) sticks fail by themselves then you can almost rule out RAM as the problem since it is highly unlikely that all your RAM sticks will be faulty. But maybe the RAM socket is.

i haven't thought of installing a separate os for the moment, i'm not sure i want to go through all that. especially since the problem is so intermittent and unpredictable that i could have to wait weeks for it to happen again, and meanwhile i might not be able to use my apps which i need for work (i haven't checked if they are compatible with windows 7, but i know there were some problems with vista, right ?).

i'm going to try to do some more hardware testing and see if i find anything. thank you, everybody for all the good information and help.

[vivaldirules]

Originally Posted by zelda_pinwheel

i'm going to try to do some more hardware testing and see if i find anything.

Yes, but you're going to do it after a good night's sleep, right? I mean, it is 4:00 IN THE MORNING! Right, Zelda?