ooops sorry

[RDSaustinTX]

holy crap I was blind drunk and posted a nasty message here. At least I wasn't driving...
 
You guys responded nicely anyway.   
 
My machine is new and downright republican. Windows 7 (64), 1156 socket, i7 860 chip, 8G ram, GTX 260, etc.
 
I have had a couple of ugly crashes. I mean restarted the computer during AH play, which is about all I did with it for a month. Now migrating work onto it and I got a BSOD yesterday. On top of a very nasty hangover...
 
It's a pagefile problem, something throwing off memory controller. Tons of debugging tools in W7, so I'll find it.
 
Anyway, sorry for the rant. (although it's true some guys are famously hard to hit, same guys as year before last).
 
RTR, thanks for advice, but the internet connection is fine. I get tiny pings, as only a couple of hops to Grapevine. Never lose packets. Getting ready to upgrade all new gigabit router and switches, so don't go far...   
 
lothmog, I will look at sound acceleration settings. I assume this means in the Realtek driver and not in the AH front end. I know Realtek ain't popular, but this chip doesn't break a sweat and I'm glad to be done with sound cards.
 
gyrene, i realize it is a pagefile problem. With this much RAM I shouldn't be using it at all. I moved pagefile off my SSD, probably screwed something up. Might be smart to move it back to the boot drive, but the SSD fans still argue about this.
 
Thanks again,
 
Mulla
 

 

[Krusty]

SSDs are good for reading, not so much for writing, or repeated writing. You don't want a swap file on it, ever.

The problem with windows is that you cannot truly disable the swap file. You could set it to have none, but it would still use one. At least, that's how XP works. I don't think Vista/7 is much better.

Also, my memory is hazy but you may have issues trying to set the swap file to another drive. You may always have a swap file running off your boot drive no matter what. If that's your SSD then you might not be able to change that.

[RDSaustinTX]

Yeah the prevailing wisdom is you can move the pagefile, but windows may make another one under certain conditions. Whether or not it's ok to have it on a TRIM-enabled SSD is about 50/50 on the blogs I read. But EVERYBODY is booting off their SSD's. They do haul at startup.
 
I am shocked, shocked I tell ya how unprepared for 64-bit the world is.   

[Skuzzy]

Uh, actually the UNIX community has been doing 64 bit for many years.  They giggle at Windows and its excuse for memory management.

[RDSaustinTX]

Yeah Yeah Yeah. Maybe there are lots of 64-bit UNIX apps. In WindowsLand it's amazing, hardly anything out there. And what there is is buggy.
 
Skuzzy, I don't think AH is the problem, but it definitely happens more when AH is running. I suspect AH keeps going happily along until machine reboots. What would be best way to log this?
 
I turned my pagefiles back on, letting the system manage them.
 
Last crash was so hard game settings were changed when I came back in.
 
Sheesh.   

[RDSaustinTX]

ooooo nuther question Skuzzy:
 
Sometimes "Ctrl I" display says VM Internal, others it says VM External. Seems random. What does that mean?
 
VidMem 0 4077M Used 7.9M    <- can that be right??
 
Not a great card (Palit GTX 260), but should be plenty for AH and drivers are definitely up to date.

[Skuzzy]

If it were me, I would be reformatting the system.  Once that type of instability is reached, it is usually prudent to get back to a basic configuration to be able to tell if it is software or hardware related.

The video memory used is accurate.  Sort of.  The video driver is reporting the actual video memory used.  NVidia and ATI have gone the route of using system, in conjunction with video RAM.  Take a look at the DXDIAG output and you will see around 768MB to 1GB of your system RAM being used by the video card.  As you increase system RAM, the video card steals more and more of it away.

[RDSaustinTX]

If it were me, I would be reformatting the system.  Once that type of instability is reached, it is usually prudent to get back to a basic configuration to be able to tell if it is software or hardware related.

Eek. OK let me rationalize my way out of that. I've built a bunch of machines and this was my first BSOD since W98.   
 
It's still basically a fresh install, haven't used it much, just played AH while it burned-in. My work file migration was ginormous, but my only tweak was turning pagefile off on the SSD. Everybody says 1600Mhz memory is hinky (gotta use xmp profile from the DIMM's), but mine tests fine and I don't overclock.
 
Intel and MS both now say the pagefile is fine on SSD. I turned it back on (system-managed) and so far so good. Worked in Office last night couple of hours. I had AH, FTP downloads and virus scan running in background. This multi-core stuff is amazing!   
 
Even if I have another problem, the pagefile thing was serious. Event logs have tons of warnings (AH is on the list, but mostly problems with Adobe slowing down startup), but they don't even show the shutdowns, so I am guessing it baffled the debugger too. The computer gods will smite me if this doesn't fix it.
 
Thanks for the vid info. But why does it say VM Internal sometimes and VM External at others?

[Skuzzy]

It will just depend on when you post up the Ctrl-I information as to whether of not the video card driver is uinsg onboard (internal) or system RAM (external).

[gyrene81]

Worked in Office last night couple of hours. I had AH, FTP downloads and virus scan running in background. This multi-core stuff is amazing!   

Hold on thar...do you do that on a normal basis? If so, it's no wonder you run into problems...especially on an SSD with Win7.

[TequilaChaser]

RDS, you might find the linked article inthe following thread helpful........


Microsoft details Windows 7, Vista, Server2008 memory leaks, hangs, freezes

http://bbs.hitechcreations.com/smf/index.php/topic,283985.0.html


ah heck.. here's the linked article......

http://arstechnica.com/microsoft/news/2010/02/microsoft-details-windows-7-memory-leaks-hangs-freezes.ars?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=rss


hope this helps... good luck........


sidejack:  gyrene, what is wrong with DSL?  noticed you questioned it in the locked thread......

[gyrene81]

sidejack:  gyrene, what is wrong with DSL?  noticed you questioned it in the locked thread......

Well aside from it being slow upstream and downstream...it's reliant on telephone cabling and and the distance to the nearest telephone switching station...the further away you get the more unreliable it gets...believe it or not telephone cables to the house get replaced less frequently than sewage lines...I could go on with a big list...just consider that people who cannot get cable to the home due to location, are connecting to old telephone cabling and analog switches that won't get changed out until they go bad. With people moving to cell phones and voip with cable service...the telephone companies are not investing a lot of money in land line technology.

[Skuzzy]

That is not quite accurate.

I have DSL (3Mb/s down, 768Kb/s up) and it has been very, very reliable.  The reliability of DSL is not distance based at all.  The speed of some DSL (Digital Subscriber Line) implementations are regulated by the distance to the switch.  DSL is a whole family of methods including ISDN, ADSL, IDSL, SDSL, DS1, DS3,....  The telephone company infrastructure will vary from state to state depending on the Public Utility Commission and state laws (I cannot address telco related implementations outside of the U.S.).  

In Texas, for example, any troubles with wire based phone lines in a resedential area have to be addressed within 72 hours of the complaint being filed.  Commercial businesses get 24 hours turn-around.  Problems with wireless are not covered at all.  Quite the opposite.  The phone companies are free to do as they feel with complaints about wireless problems.  This is one reason why phone companies are pushing wireless so hard.

[RDSaustinTX]

TequilaChaser, thanks for the link. Interesting reading, memory leaks may be an issue.
 
But the main problem here was an incorrect memory multiplier. This is embarrassing. I originally built the machine with 1333 memory and ran the Intel DCC, which bumped memory speed up. A month later I upgraded to 1600 memory and the DCC didn't deal well with the XMP settings. Started a series of bizarre (and frustrating) errors. W7 always flagged these as application problems, but it was the hardware. Finally I noticed my memory cache errors were huge, went back and found the memory multiplier was off by one. Machine has been ROCK solid ever since.
 
Embarassing.   

[Skuzzy]

Glad you found the issue.