KVR Audio

cron · Post by **cron** » Mon Aug 02, 2004 8:29 am

First of all, I do have "automatically restart" unchecked so it's not that.

I suspect that my problems are down to the crappy electricity supply in this house, but can't be sure. We always get briefly dimming lights etc. Anyway, my PC started playing up with these random reboots (even when in the BIOS sometimes

) when I arrived back here and I just want to be absolutely sure that the problem is my electricity before shelling out £80 on a UPS.

Is there anything else at all which can cause these symptoms? Anything?

Thanks.

spaceman · Post by **spaceman** » Mon Aug 02, 2004 8:32 am

cron wrote:First of all, I do have "automatically restart" unchecked so it's not that.

I suspect that my problems are down to the crappy electricity supply in this house, but can't be sure. We always get briefly dimming lights etc. Anyway, my PC started playing up with these random reboots (even when in the BIOS sometimes ) when I arrived back here and I just want to be absolutely sure that the problem is my electricity before shelling out £80 on a UPS.

Is there anything else at all which can cause these symptoms? Anything?

Thanks.

could be faulty memory (or cpu)
do a memory check, there a good free tool available for that but I forgot the name right now

bebop · Post by **bebop** » Mon Aug 02, 2004 8:44 am

memtest : http://www.memtest86.com/

You can check too if it's not heating too much.

You can check for virus too.

If it's the power supply really, you could try a power supply with a few seconds of condensors capacity, or a UPS to stabilize the power supply.

cron · Post by **cron** » Mon Aug 02, 2004 8:55 am

Memtest looks pretty cool, only I don't have a floppy drive, and all attempts to install one have gone horribly wrong

I want new RAM/processor/mobo/GFX card anyway, so I guess I could stall on the UPS until I've got those.

I did manage to find another utility called memtest which runs under Windows, so I'm going to try that.

Any other suggestions/possibilities are very much welcome in the meantime.

Ja.x · Post by **Ja.x** » Mon Aug 02, 2004 9:00 am

I had a similar situation last Summer, it happened more and more often, and in the end it stopped for good: blasted capacitators in the motherboard. Maybe it was due to too much heat we had by then, but I read an article by Dvorak mentioning a story about stollen technology (the wrong data) and faulty capacitators as a result.

It was a DFI CA63-SN/EN Rev. a+, if that matters.

AndreasE · Post by **AndreasE** » Mon Aug 02, 2004 9:33 am

You should check your system for a virus!

cron · Post by **cron** » Mon Aug 02, 2004 9:40 am

Checking for virii now (though I'm sure I've done that since the problems started).

I'd also kinda ruled that out since I didn't think viruses would be able to make my machine crash whilst in the BIOS. That's the scariest bit for me, as it screams to me "you have a hardware problem"

.

cron · Post by **cron** » Mon Aug 02, 2004 9:59 am

motherf**ker crashed before the scan completed

Second time lucky

edit: The 20 minute RAM test (stopped it to virus scan) didn't reveal any problems though. I'll try a longer one after this.

tetraplan · Post by **tetraplan** » Mon Aug 02, 2004 10:33 am

cron wrote:Memtest looks pretty cool, only I don't have a floppy drive, and all attempts to install one have gone horribly wrong

There should be an *.ISO, too. Burn that to CD. Excessive waste of space, but the only way if you have no FDD.

//edit
Every mac comes with a bootable hardware-test CD, I wonder if there is some kind of general-purpose test like that for wintels (1). I'm aware of SiSoft Sandra but AFAIK it doesn't run from a bootCD.
It would be nice to have something like that.

Groet, Erik

(1) or winAMD. Or Nixtel. Or NixAMD. Or...

cron · Post by **cron** » Mon Aug 02, 2004 10:34 am

Sweet!

Thanks tetraplan!

edit: Wow, I feel really stupid for not noticing that, it's right there when you open the page

Lunatique · Post by **Lunatique** » Mon Aug 02, 2004 11:46 am

I had the same problem last year, and I ran all kinds of test and had no solution. Eventually, the motherboard just died and never booted again.

I replaced the motherboard, while everything thing else is still the same components. That means it was the motherboard all along. Haven't had a single random reboot since the replacement.

Klemperer · Post by **Klemperer** » Mon Aug 02, 2004 12:05 pm

In my case was a Virus last December that came from a f***ing t-online-spanish-soundfont-address. You couldn't install an antivir-program so I had the problems 2 weeks

. After some antivir-program did work, re-installed and never had this problem (but bad motherboard I have

)

daniel · Post by **daniel** » Mon Aug 02, 2004 12:57 pm

My random crash problem turned out to be from a missing data file in my audio drivers. I backed up all my data and reinstalled ALL of the software after ereasing the HD. Call it extreme makeover but have had no problems since!

no_signal · Post by **no_signal** » Mon Aug 02, 2004 1:21 pm

take your pc to a friend (where there is no electricity problem) and make some tests on your pc.
1. Check PC health status in bios (temperature,voltage) If the 12V or 5V is too low it may cause reboot.
2. Run MemtestX86
3. Antivirus
4. Make a clean Windows install
5. install all drivers (Via4in1,DX9,VGA,AUDIO...)
6. run some benchmarks like 3DMark,Realstorm,Passmark and others.
If you find a test where it crashes every time, start playing (replacing) with components.
And before everything, dust free your PC, clean RAM,VGA card connectors.

no_signal · Post by **no_signal** » Mon Aug 02, 2004 1:25 pm

cron wrote:motherf**ker crashed before the scan completed

Second time lucky

edit: The 20 minute RAM test (stopped it to virus scan) didn't reveal any problems though. I'll try a longer one after this.

It's not the best way to test RAM under windows...
You can put memtestx86 on a CD if you don't have a floppy drive.

Random Reboots with no Blue Screen