Holy Smokes! Crashariffic!

Holy.

My god, my machine RUNS again! And Tron 2.0 loads up in less than five minutes! I've gotta try defragmenting other stuff now too!

Well, I finally figured out who to upgrade the drivers on the NForce2 chip. Was in world for 20 minutes tonight with no problems. Will give a more extented test tomorrow.

Another solution to the horribly fragmented pagefiles is to disable the system cache entirely, reboot, run a defrag... re-enable the page file... and reboot... its a little messy compared to a dedicated defragger, but its better than nothing (if you're too lazy to download tools)

I consider a lot of the things on Sysinternals' site to be essential for a properly functioning installation of XP. It's pretty ridiculous that to do something as necessary as a pagefile defrag under XP, you have to defrag your entire disk and temporarily disable your pagefile beforehand.

Seriously, even if you don't have stability or performance issues, download the pagefile defragger. It's really useful, and only 35k!

Defragged.....still crashed.

Updated to 1.3.4....still crashed.

Totally uninstalled SL and re-installed....still crashed.

This is getting a little ridiculous now. It's been a week now without proper access to SL and I'm fresh out of things to try.

OK, I've tried something different to see if it makes any difference and it has, but not in a good way

Basically, I always run SL in a window, rather than full screen. So I thought I'd try running it in full screen instead. I've always had a problem with full screen in that if I toggle back to the desktop and then come back into SL all text in SL appears as dull blocks on the screen, rather than the text (and i mean ALL text here - avatar names, button text, menu text, screen text etc.). This is why I run windowed.

Anyway, I flew around for a bit and then got shunted back to the desktop with an 'Internet Explorer has crashed' message and one of my IE windows closed down. So I toggled to get back into SL and continued flying around.

And then, a few minutes later, from out of the blue SL crashed again. But...it didn't crash my computer, SL just closed down, no crash message or anything, just straight closed down. Not sure if this helps at all?

OK tried it again and this time it crashed as before - turning the computer off. So that doesn't make any difference by the look of things

I have the dull gray text problem too, but only sometimes.

No more suggestions from LL here? Really?

Try adjusting your video hardware acceleration under:

Display Properties / Settings / Advanced / Troubleshooting

Each notch disables more and more hardware features, so you may either try shutting them all off by sliding it to the left and then going up one notch each time until you start getting crashes again, or start at the right with full HW acceleration and keep turning it down one notch until you don't crash.

Joe, thanks for the advice but no cigar I'm afraid. I turned it down to about middle, ran SL again and within a few minutes it crashes again.

So then I went in again and turned it right down to the bottom and tried to run SL and it gave me this message:

"Your video card appears to be a GDI generic, which Second Life does not support".

I said OK anyway and then got this message:

"Second Life requires an OpenGL graphics card that has multi texture support"

And then it closed, so it wouldn't even let me try. So I tried it on the step up from None and got the same messages as above. The next step up is the one I tried first that crashed within a few minutes.

Dave Zeeman requested my system stats on another thread in the hope that that might shed some light, well here they are:

ASUS A7N8X (deluxe) mobo
Athlon 3Ghz Barton
1 GIG ram
NVIDIA GeForce FX 5600
80 gig hard drive

I've got three fans in the case and everything stays nice and cool. I'm not overclocking either.

Anything I've missed out there?

Moopf:

You mentioned updating a lot of stuff on your computer. I'm taking that to mean kit = hardware.

So my question is, if you did upgrade your hardware, have you gone over everything in your case and made usre all the cards, memory etc are properly seated?

Also, when you upgraded your hardware, how old was the case? If it's more than 2 or 3 years old, you may want to upgrade the power supply as well.

Colin

Colin,

I started replacing kit only after 1.3.3 was released and the crashes had started, to eliminate hardware at my end. I basically went over the most common things to go wrong - power supply, memory etc. It's a new power supply in there now and the memory sticks are also new ones. I have checked that all the cards are seated correctly and I use this computer day in day out for my work without a problem (it's the computer I'm using now to post this). This includes graphics applications - well in fact anything up to about 15 apps open at once sometimes.

The computer isn't 12 months old and, just to re-iterate, I only started changing kit around and updating drivers and DirectX after the crashing started (which started straight away after 1.3.3). Obviously drivers and stuff have been updated since to try and solve the problem.

BTW, I've tried going into SL with totally basic settings - even down to turning off the Avatar Vertex thingymabob and the AGP hardware setting. It's making no difference. I have a hunch that this isn't related to the graphics card, and certainly not the mobo otherwise I'd be expecting problems elsewhere which I'm not seeing - only with SL.

I'm at a total loss on this one.

Well, as I mentioned on eltee's post, I've got an ASUS A7N8X-E. Which I believe is the very same board as your "ASUS A7N8X (deluxe)," but you'll need to confirm this for me.

This mobo is very finnicky about RAM timings, especially in dual channel memory mode. Tell me your specific specs for your ram. Mine is PC3200 2-3-3-6, but I'm running it at 2.5-3-3-6 because the mobo seems to want this for dual-channel operation.

Also, and this may be key, what's your DDR voltage? The default 2.5v? I had stability problems until I boosted to 2.6v.

Although doing so may void your warrantee and technically could damage the hardware, I'd suggest you raise your DDR voltage to 2.6v. Also, make sure your CAS latency is not below 2.5 cycles. Your mobo has three memory sockets-- two are bonded together for dual-channel mode-- make sure you are using the correct pair, and not the dual and single channel slots.

Hmm, apparently this IS the case - it appears that EVERY BIOS update for this motherboard has had to do with memory issues.

For what it's worth, the crashes that we get from you generally do not appear to be our "normal" crashes - basically, it's crashing in parts of our code that we usually do not crash in. That may indicate that it's a memory problem, as well. Bus and GPU problems usually result in different kinds of crashes.

Another thing that could possibly give you some insight - it appears that we believe (using our own timer checks) that your CPU is currently clocked at around 1.73Ghz, whereas an Athlon 3000+ is supposed to be clocked at 2.167Ghz. I wonder if there's something wrong with your system bus speed or something?

- Doug

He's underclocking! Woo!

Do you think PC Pitstop could maybe help?

Doug,

I'll check my memory settings to see if I can get any joy. Regarding the underclocking every time my computer crashes from SL the Bios on my mobo likes to put the bios settings down to what it considers 'safe settings'. After a few times of re-setting them each time I decided to let it run with the safe settings to see if it made any difference at all. I do still set them back to what they should be now but that hasn't made any difference.

I shall let y'all know what happens and thanks for all the help from everybody who's posted.

never understimate the power of windows... to really bork up somethin...

i did a total reformat/reinstall of xp last night and *MOST* of my stability issues went away... its kind of a pain in the rear.. but in my case it was definately worth it

Well I got sort of the same problem, I just reinstalled XP (complete format). It didn't do me any good.

BUT, I swapped my 2x 256MB 333MHz DDR with 2x 128MB 400MHz DDR which seems to have solved the problems for me. I've been online for like 30 minutes without crashing!

Maybe it has something to do with my 800MHz FSB, and the 333MHz working against it.

Yeah, I swear. New PC hardware is sitting on the knife's edge of performance and stability. Knock one setting just a teeeeeeny bit in the wrong direction and you'll get fun, intermittant, mysteeeeeerious crashes. (Like the WinXP install behaving as though you are using a bad install media, even though you've tried three different copies of the known-good media on as many different optical drives).

Unless you really know your hardware and how nitty-gritty BIOS options interact with same, and you sacrifice live chickens to appease the stability gods, it seems as though your chances of making a self-integrated system stable *and* fast are waning with each jump in performance that the market makes.

This makes the Macintosh look more and more appealing, dunnit?

For my part, I worked through all this with my system during the first week until I found a configuration that gets uptimes as long as I care to make them and performs close to the edge. This kind of hardware is great for me, but terrible for the other 98% of the market.

My favorite error with the ASUS A7N8X-E? When I first got it, the BIOS setup actually crashed, leaving my screen covered in textual gibberish. I'd never before seen that happen in all my fourteen years of working with (and I don't just mean owning/using) PCs. It's actually a great board, once you realize the BIOS defaults are very very unstable.

(Doug says they've made an attempt to fix this with a BIOS flash update, but I fear to touch any of it, now that I've actually got a stable configuration!)

OK, well I'm beat here. I've wasted a whole day pouring over the Bios and all I suceeded in doing was making my system unstable for everything, including SL. Still can't get SL to run without crashing, but I've put my Bios back to normal and anything else I do on my PC runs as smoothly as it did before. So I'm no further forward, don't ya just love 'em

I suppose reinstalling Windows XP is the next thing but I just don't have the heart to do that yet

essentially do a new instillation of xp into c:\winxp instead of c:\windows... it'll let you boot into either instillation from the xp boot manager. If the new totally fresh install is stable... then migrate yer programs over, and keep yer data files since they wouldn be over-written

If the new install doesn totally fix the problem just kill it and use the original.

Yeah, that's what I was planning to do first of all, rather than going to the real hassle of doing it totally fresh. But it's been a long day and I hear the pub a calling me now

What really gets to me about all this is that this is the same computer I use all day everyday for work. It's the same computer I used to play SWG on. It's the same computer I played SL on happily until 1.3.3. Sometimes these ugly cases full of electronics really need a good slapping.