[QUOTE=debrouxl;281478]FWIW, on my father's computer we recently encountered a pair of 4 GB DDR3-1333 RAM sticks which survived 1 hour of memtest without any errors (a memtest triggered after a number of blue screens in Win 7), but miserably failed at the mprime torture test (4M-8M FFT, use 7000 or 7500 MB of RAM) under Linux after about five seconds of such treatment.
We returned the faulty sticks to the reseller, and bought other sticks instead, which survived hours of the same treatment, and also hours of msieve with a 4.6 GB matrix - so we declared the new chips good enough :smile:[/QUOTE]

Always a possibility, but it seemed to run fine on the 64 bit version for several days and the testing of this new 32 bit version is causing the crashes again.

I got another appcrash overnight, midway through the stage 1 and debugging says "Unhandled exception at 0x0204821a in prime95_271.exe: 0xC0000005: Access violation reading location 0x0274b000."

I had picked up another 8GB ram, planning to expand the system to 16GB, so I have installed this ram in place of what was in there for further testing on this.

Beginning to look like one of my memory sticks is causing the problem, I had set the memory allocation back up to 3600 when I swapped the ram out and it has completed a P-1 stage 2 and kept going onto a new one.

It just crashed again, with debug reporting "Unhandled exception at 0x0204821a in prime95_271.exe: 0xC0000005: Access violation reading location 0x04660000." I highly doubt I have 2 sets of bad memory sticks, so I am at a loss. In looking at the debugger, 0204821A says mov dl,byte ptr [edx]

After a LOT of troubleshooting, it appears I have narrowed down the problem to the part of the program that talks to primenet. The program crashed again in the middle of a stage 1 run last night, but when I started it back up, I saw it report a result, but primenet sent back an error 40, not needed. After a few hours, I see the rpogram crashed again, and again when I restarted, I saw the error 40 report. So I clicked manual reporting to check it out and the program crashed. Repeated it 4 more times, the program crashed each time it tries to talk to primenet.

Since this is only occuring on this one machine, I have to conclude that the problem is most likely (>99%) not in the software, or (<1%) I have some weird setup that does not agree with the coding that works with all the other computers out there. Problem is, how do I determine if this is a CPU or motherboard problem given what I have discovered so far? I only have 4 more days to return it under their 30 day no hassle policy for replacement, so any ideas on this would be greatly appreciated.

There's a lot of reason to think it's the 32 bit mode in Vista that's the problem..the CURL library does the communicating...can you ask it not to communicate when running 32 bit mode?

[QUOTE=bcp19;281820]Since this is only occuring on this one machine, I have to conclude that the problem is most likely (>99%) not in the software, or (<1%) I have some weird setup that does not agree with the coding that works with all the other computers out there. Problem is, how do I determine if this is a CPU or motherboard problem given what I have discovered so far? I only have 4 more days to return it under their 30 day no hassle policy for replacement, so any ideas on this would be greatly appreciated.[/QUOTE]

If none of your other computers are doing this, I would get rid of the problem child and try something else.....especially so since this is still under a return policy.


EDIT: Let me qualify. I did go back in the thread and see that this is a build. I am guessing that the return policy applies to various components. The most obvious candidate for return might be the motherboard. You've already tested the memory.

QUOTE (edit): Since this is a 32 bit program I had to drop down to 3600 on memory, but upon completion of a 47M P-1/start of another it crashed. I'm going to reboot and set memory to 2000 and see how it fairs.

On a 64 bit Linux system with 3 GB of physical RAM I can run P-1 with 2400 MB allocated between 2 cores, on a machine that does nothing else. I'm only guessing, but Windows might want more.

The communication aspect is puzzling. For me, that leads back to the mobo and the network components, since these symptoms are unique. Could the problem be with a network adapter driver?

[QUOTE=Christenson;281907]There's a lot of reason to think it's the 32 bit mode in Vista that's the problem..the CURL library does the communicating...can you ask it not to communicate when running 32 bit mode?[/QUOTE]

Both the 32 and 64 bit versions were crashing when the communication occurred.

[QUOTE=kladner;281912]If none of your other computers are doing this, I would get rid of the problem child and try something else.....especially so since this is still under a return policy.


EDIT: Let me qualify. I did go back in the thread and see that this is a build. I am guessing that the return policy applies to various components. The most obvious candidate for return might be the motherboard. You've already tested the memory.

QUOTE (edit): Since this is a 32 bit program I had to drop down to 3600 on memory, but upon completion of a 47M P-1/start of another it crashed. I'm going to reboot and set memory to 2000 and see how it fairs.

On a 64 bit Linux system with 3 GB of physical RAM I can run P-1 with 2400 MB allocated between 2 cores, on a machine that does nothing else. I'm only guessing, but Windows might want more.

The communication aspect is puzzling. For me, that leads back to the mobo and the network components, since these symptoms are unique. Could the problem be with a network adapter driver?[/QUOTE]

I have begun to think along the driver lines myself, since P95 was working flawlessly right after the build, but now that multiple updates from microsoft have been applied, it is having problems. I have also noticed that when you go to shutdown, it takes an extremely long time for the shutdown to complete and the computer to power down (often in excess of 5 minutes, more than 10 minutes a few times). I know the 'stock' version of Vista did not recognize the network adapter until I ran the disc that came with the motherboard. I also noticed something else today... I decided to put 27.1 on my 2400 and unlike this system, it had a definite speedup to the LL's, so I started checking everything between them and found that the AVX is not being recognized on this system either, and 27.1 actually runs 20% slower (which is probably the 64/32 bit difference)

I think my next move is going to be to locate the motherboard disc and reinstall it and see what that does.

[QUOTE=bcp19;281952]I decided to put 27.1 on my 2400 and unlike this system, it had a definite speedup to the LL's, so I started checking everything between them and found that the AVX is not being recognized on this system either, and 27.1 actually runs 20% slower (which is probably the 64/32 bit difference)[/QUOTE]

I don't think Windows Vista supports AVX. Windows 7 did not support AVX until a Service Pack was released about a year ago.

[QUOTE=bcp19;281952]I think my next move is going to be to locate the motherboard disc and reinstall it and see what that does.[/QUOTE]One thing you can try is looking at the updates that have been installed and see if there are any that are related to hardware.

I have an XP PC that showed an optional update for the "nVIDIA Network Bus Enumerator". I installed it and it killed the network completely. I removed with Add/Remove and it went back to connecting.

So you could check the updates first, because if Windows installed something that is messing with the adapter, re-installing the mobo drivers might not mitigate it, since the update would still be applied.

The slow shutdown sure sounds like something is having trouble. Either something is being polled and doesn't respond or something's crashing and being terminated by Windows. Do you get any "program not responding" dialogs during shutdown?

[QUOTE=Prime95;281958]I don't think Windows Vista supports AVX. Windows 7 did not support AVX until a Service Pack was released about a year ago.[/QUOTE]

Thanks, I'll disregard the new program on here then uless I decide to get Win7.

[QUOTE=schickel;281960]One thing you can try is looking at the updates that have been installed and see if there are any that are related to hardware.

I have an XP PC that showed an optional update for the "nVIDIA Network Bus Enumerator". I installed it and it killed the network completely. I removed with Add/Remove and it went back to connecting.

So you could check the updates first, because if Windows installed something that is messing with the adapter, re-installing the mobo drivers might not mitigate it, since the update would still be applied.

The slow shutdown sure sounds like something is having trouble. Either something is being polled and doesn't respond or something's crashing and being terminated by Windows. Do you get any "program not responding" dialogs during shutdown?[/QUOTE]

I did reinstall the drivers for the motherboard, and the problem has become less than it was. Not every communication attempt, but about every 3rd or 4th. I'll have to look through the updates and see if I can figure out what may have caused it.

On the shutdown, it closes all the programs, and the desktop goes to the 'default' screen and I see nothing other than 'shutting down' on the screen for several minutes. I am tempted to backup the files used in P95 and wipe the drive and start fresh with no updates to see how it works and then decide what to do from there.

[QUOTE=bcp19;281973]
On the shutdown, it closes all the programs, and the desktop goes to the 'default' screen and I see nothing other than 'shutting down' on the screen for several minutes. I am tempted to backup the files used in P95 and wipe the drive and start fresh with no updates to see how it works and then decide what to do from there.[/QUOTE]

A clean start might be the easiest at this point.

However, I have seen the prolonged hang on the "Shutting Down" screen in XP Pro. In that case it seemed to be something holding a Registry key open. There was a patch from MS for that condition. Some evidence of what was happening was in Event Viewer --in the Applications log, I think.

A search for "vista slow shutdown" turned up this TechNet page:

[url]http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/itprovistadesktopui/thread/270b76c8-ecc9-45b5-b8ad-68161ff694e6/[/url]

It recommends backing up the registry and then applying a tweak to shorten the wait time for ending services.