The Computer Problems thread!

[Cvstos]

Andromeda is easily one of my favorite shows.  It's the only long-running series that I have on DVD in it's entirety (all 5 seasons, every episode). 

I found this avatar and other Andromeda avatars while surfing the 'net - I can't take creation credit.  I found them over at Andromeda web.  This one's definitely my favorite, and Harper is definitely my favorite character in the show (followed by Andromeda herself).  And you have to love lines like these:

Harper: Oh great, in lieu of a parachute, here's a hanky!

Abel: You must be the engineer.
Harper: Why? Because I'm the short guy with the sense of humour, the wry wit? Huh? Because I'm so freakin' amiable with the careless demeanor? Is that it?
Abel: Well, that – and the tools.

Harper: Yeah, well, I don't feel very lucky. In fact, I feel like a big old can of unluck that's just about to open up on someone.

Tyr: Believe me, boy, Elssbett holds you in utter contempt.
Harper: I know. She's hot, and she's a good judge of character. So what if she holds me in utter contempt? At least she's thinking of me.

Harper: The Andromeda, like any other ship, runs on hydrogen and anti-protons, or AP.  The hydrogen combines with the AP in controlled reactions to create anti-matter/matter reactions, or matter/anti-matter reactions, either way, it makes no matter, but what it does make is power, for the ship, a few hundred megawatts.  Most of the power is used to power the GFG, which reduces the effective mass to just under a kilogram.  A smaller chunk of power is used to accelerate more hydrogen in a dozen magnetoplasma dynamic drives, which give it thrust. A thrust of a half million Newtons or so.  So, when you're pushing a kilogram with a half-million Newtons of thrust, it's a good idea to keep one hand on your valuables, 'cause you never know when you just might run straight into some two-faced lying jerk.

Harper: "I'm sorry Captain Hunt has stepped away from his desk.  Please leave a message after the tone from the funny little guy...beep"

Anyway, I'm impressed you got away with as much passive cooling as you have.  Personally I don't care quite as much how much noise my system makes, so long as it fades into the background when something else, like my music, starts up.  It would be intolerable for it to be super-loud, but it takes a lot to get me irritated from it.  I care more about the system being cool and stable than I do about quiet.  I've had too many systems that encountered problems from heat.  I do hope to get a full tower case soon, as the mid-tower I have now is too crowded for good airflow.  But it's still doing much better than my previous systems.

Larger case, new power supply, probably a Core 2 Duo and some kind of crazy GeForce8-series (or whatever it'll be called) graphics card.  I want to do the build late this year or early next to prepare for C&C 3.  (Yep.  C&C addict here.)

If I do build a Core 2 Duo system, it'll be strange.  I've built AMD systems exclusively since the K-6 2.  But the Core 2 is winning in benchmark after benchmark, and if nForce 5 boards come out for it the CPU will be very tempting.

[Rowne]

There's no doubt really that that show had great writers.  Then again, I have to consider just about any show that can actually raise a chuckle out of me worthy of that merit but there're actually surprisingly few that can.  That's mostly because I still operate on British wit and a lot of American humourisms just don't click with me but bold-faced sarcasm can usually cross the divide.  And Harper's good at that.

As for my passive cooling, well ... let's just say that I've seen a number of components die in my time, it took me a while before I found a set of products that really work well in heat.  That's the problem, really.  Many hardware manufacturers design their hardware under the assumption that the buyer will have a jet engine sitting inside their case (quite literally).  For this reason, more and more companies are overclocking their cards and hardware by default.  That's bad and something that one really needs to be wary of.

It hasn't been an easy road to obtaining the ultimate passively cooled PC but I have hearing issues, my ears are way too sensitive and when loud noise upsets them, I get tinitus and when I get tinitus, I get all sorts of fun stuff happening.  So I don't much care for that.  It was either really find a PC that could stand up to the heat or lose my sanity.  I prefer the former!

It is a hard thing to do though, yeah and costly.  Very costly.

Your plans sound good to me anyway.  The most important part with a case isd airflow, that cannot be stressed.  A PC might seem to need four fans in some cases where it simply needs two, purely because the exhaust fan is the wrong way around (I've seen a few machines like that).  If you have a case though that's designed to provide good airflow, then you could likely get away with a four-fan system with just about any hardware, even the crotchety stuff.

Then there's always water-cooling but water-cooling still scares me.

As for the Core/GeForce8 lineup, I can't say I wouldn't be jealous, I would.  The primary reason I dismiss Intel for my own building purposes is that the chips don't like heat as much as AMD chips do, they generally have lower die temps.  That and AMD chips have the whole 'cool and quiet' system going for them.  I think that's why I've stuck with AMD all these years.  If Intel ever manage to match AMD's average heat tolerance though, I'll be one of the first to jump on the Core boat because those processors are downright tasty.

[Aridas]

Isn't the new core 2 duo thing going to run cooler and with less power or something? I would've guessed something like that was already a boost in the way of whatever you plan to do since the regular temperature is lower to begin with...

[Rowne]

In all honesty, I haven't done much research into their newest line.  I simply assumed that Intel would be following old traditions.  I'll look into it, thanks for the heads up.

[Cvstos]

Rowne:

The Core 2 Duos use a lot less power than the AM2/939 AMD processors.  Other than the top-of-the-line Core 2, they're all 65W CPUs.  Tom's Hardware

And water cooling scares me, too.  Too complicated, too risky.

[THiN]

Alright, let me toss in a thoroughly complex series of issues for you guys to mull over.
The core issue is that due to a virus removal gone horribly wrong, my computer is permanently stuck in Safe Mode, and I have to Activate windows in order to log in and change it out of Safe Mode, but you can't Activate while in Safe Mode, so I'm in a catch 22.
The solution I've been given to this is to use my lovely, $200 Windows disk to overwrite the MBR, thus removing the Safe Mode boot command from the BOOT.INI file. While I don't know what other effects this will have, if any, it's my only real choice, so that's fine. However...
Secondary issue one is that my CD-ROM will not read the disk. Every other computer in this apartment reads it fine, but this one cannot read any disks. It shows up on the boot list, but it may as well be empty. The fact that I know this is pure fluke, because...
Secondary issue two. My graphics card will not display anything on the screen. It's a PCI-E Verto GeForce 6800 GS. It's worked for four months, and now it will not work. Except for if I unplug the PCI-E power plug. But I don't think that's a good idea, so I'm not doing that. So, to do list: Get graphics card back up in working order, get CD-ROM back in working order, rewrite boot commands so I can log on in normal mode and activate Windows, thus reclaiming my delicious computational goodness.

[llearch n'n'daCorna]

I'm inclined to say that the boot.ini issues may be triggering the other issues - Safe Mode disables a lot of things.

However, boot.ini is fairly easy to edit using any handy notepad. The only problem comes wiht saving it, and, IIRC (I don't run windows much) later revisions of windows allow you to overwrite things without needing anything more than a click on an approval dialog. Earlier ones you had to open up a command prompt (probably hidden in XP) and run attrib on the file - attrib file will show you the current settings, probably Read only, System, so "attrib -r -s boot.ini" will remove the settings so you can edit it. "attrib +r +s boot.ini" will put them back again once you're done.

Make sense?

[THiN]

It makes sense, but you may be missing the problem - I cannot get into anything. I can't even log in. It boots in safe mode, and if I try to log in, it says I have to activate, and logs me out. I don't have another computer I can toss the drive into to browse the files and edit the INI on.

[Rowne]

The Bootdisk page will likely help you find a solution that will allow you to boot into a clean environment.  If you have a FAT-based file system, I strongly recommend that you use one of the DOS bootdisks and lock the disk to read-only, that way you have a selection of files that whatever viruses remain on your system cannot touch.

If you can use one of those boot-disks then perhaps I can write you up a batch file to include on it that would perform the nessescary attrib changes before opening the file in an ASCII editor, I believe even Windows Recovery Mode comes with one of those (Edit hopefully, I'd have to do some research).

That's the best I can think of.  Once you're back into Windows, I strongly recommend you get a top of the line, industrial strength virus scanner to run through your system, check out the rest of this thread for suggestions but usually Nod32 and Kaspersky Anti-Virus are the best.

Other than that, I'm not sure what advice I can give.

---- Edit

Admittedly, the boot-disk solution assumes that you have another PC at hand but since you've likely got a family member or a friend who'd help you make a bootdisk from that site, I don't see that that would be too much of a problem.

[THiN]

Yeah, I've come to the realization that while it's got fancy little things, AVG doesn't do much - I knew about the virus in the first place because it started squealing at me, along with Teatimer, but because it was executing itself, nothing short of rebooting in safe mode would halt it. I'll try to snag one of those two.
As for the boot disks; The website seems more geared towards CD-ROM boot disks, of which I already have one (The Windows boot disk). The problem is, without a working CD-ROM or, more importantly, any sort of output from my computer to know what it's doing, I can't implement any sort of boot CD, or make any decisions on a floppy-booted program.

...And wheeling this in a totally different direction for but a moment, would you happen to be the Rowne that worked on WoW addons for a while? >>

[Rowne]

Ah, the problem is really that you need a clean environment to work from, something that whatever malware you still have can't write to and therefore destroy.  Perhaps you could pick up a cheapie drive that the BIOS recognizes and that way we could use your Windows CD?  We could use the Recovery Mode of that to change the Boot.ini.

Further, if you can find out what kind of malware you have, if it's more trojan/worm-like, it'll be very vulnerable in that environment and it's doubtful it'll be able to do anything to protect itself.  So you could delete all its files and then boot into Windows with confidence, knowing that you're not still infected.

I'd honestly recommend that when you do have your system up and running again, you look through the thread and grab not only a top of the range scanner (which is the bare essentials) but all the other things that've been talked about too.  It's all good stuff and great to protect you from the ravages of the internet.  That and you should never use Internet Explorer unless you have a choice, ActiveX is an evil thing.  Firefox with NoScript or K-Meleon is the way to go.

As for being the same Rowne, yes, it's me.  My attitude is different here though because I'm surrounded by more intelligent people.  Back there, I was very cynical, the Counterstrike level of perspicacity that Warcraft suffers from had left me very depressed and bitter, I was frequently facetious and silly even and it was unbelievable how many people took me seriously.  Truly unbelievable.

If you want my advice; if you're irritated by a community and you're hanging around for whatever reason, don't ever parody the writ word of another Addon coder, people won't be smart enough to recognize it.

Anyway, that's one of the reasons I had to get out of Warcraft.  Counterstrike the MMO just isn't for me, I had to look elsewhere.

I miss my FF IX days to be honest.  FF IX had such a bloody great community and playerbase, admittedly the game and the content sucked particularly badly which is why I eventually got bored and left but you'd never find nicer people.  On the forums or in the game with random pickup groups.

Well, wherever I go, it'll never be back to Warcraft.  So don't worry about my attitude being particularly cynical here, it's never going to be.

[THiN]

I think my roommate has a working CD-ROM left from when the shipping company used a sledgehammer to dismantle his computer. I'll try messing with that, see if I get a reaction from it. I think the Recovery Mode is what my friend was talking about when he said I could change the MBR like I'd mentioned earlier.
To my knowledge, I've removed the malware; The entire reason I got into Safe Mode was to run Trend Micro's free virus scanner, Ad Aware, Spybot, AVG, Registry Mechanic, and a couple others. And since I'd rapidly tracked down the files for the particular virus that my computer was squealing about, I deleted those before running the scan.
Since the prevention angle of AVG and Spybot is obviously not enough to stop anything, I'll definitely be trying to find the orbital laser of antivirus programs. I've not used IE for several years; First Opera, then over to Firefox when I found out about it.
As for WoW; Well, yeah, if you're not happy playing the game, don't play it. I'm beginning to get to that point, and with my PC out for a month with no means to play, I may end up not going back.

[Rowne]

I'm not sure I'd recommend tampering with the Master Boot Record though, there should be no need for that when a simple INI change could solve the problem.  A wrong step in tinkering with stuff like the MBR can leave a drive unbootable, I'd always consider that an action near to a last resort, not as bad as formatting but almost.

Sounds like you've been thourough, glad to hear it.  Your PC is likely clean now then but I would suggest you be wary, look out for anything odd.  Once you've got Windows healthy again, it shouldn't crash, not ever.  If anything weird does happen with it, assume the worst and keep checking it over.

As for World of Cou... Warcraft, to be frank, I stayed there because a friend of mine was enjoying the solo content and we hung out there.  Hanging out was fun, exploration through hoofing it (wall-walking to everyone else) around the place was a blast but aside from that, eh.  I found it a genuinely torturous experience from the get-go.  One day I'll realize that this unbreakable sense of loyalty I have is a curse.

[Aridas]

Rowne: Just an update about the Core 2 thingamabob, I've just recieved my latest issue of the magazine I regularly read, and They're raving about the Core 2 Extreme X6800. To quote a few things, they said that the C2E posted a 32 to 70 percent performance increase on cpu-bound tests, as compared to the AM2 they had tested. Also, they claimed that the processor, running at its stock speed, wasn't getting too hot, even under full load. Apparently with the stock cooler, it's 44 C on dile and 58 C on 100% load. (34 and 45 respectively with a swiftech apex ultra) We'll get to see how much truth is in that soon enough.

(edited for temp. benchmarks)

[Kitsune Ascendant]

I have a somewhat interesting problem. after something rather weird happened to my computer (was probably a virus) I got the reload discs out (which turned out to have a norton ghost image on them), and let them restore windows. well, right now I'm at the bit where you're setting up windows, and it seems to hang (you can still move the mouse, and if you put a cd in it will respond) at the part where you enter a name for the computer, or to be specific, right after you click next (which, if I remember correctly, is when one would normally set up any network stuff).

it's an emachines t-series, running windows xp. I think a t 2825 or something like that. don't know anything else about it really.

[Dakata]

My laptop hates me. D:

It'll turn off every once in a while. For no friggin' reason. And when I restart it, it'll either shut off again after I click something, screw up my Firefox stuff (It'll mess with the settings) or just lag (and shut off again later).

I scanned it with Ad-Aware, and it didn't find anything. I scanned it with Avast, and it didn't find anything. And when I try to scan it with Spybot S&D it'll shut off when it's like 1/4 done.

It's an...Acer Aspire 3003WLMI (I think XP). With Windows XP.

Edit: Oh, and it'll randomly kick me off the internet too. The internet'll work for my brother's computer and my dad's computers when the internet dies on me so I doubt it's -not- the laptop's fault. D:

Edit #2: And when it shuts off, it just shuts off. It doesn't say "Windows is shutting down" or anything.

[Kitsune Ascendant]

a few things for you to check, dakata:
first of all, If you haven't already, do a virus scan. if you don't have antivirus, I think avg antivirus is free for personal use. also, if, after it crashes and restarts, it displays a message saying the computer has recovored from a serious error, hit send error report and, once it finnishes, it should bring up a page saying what might have caused the problem.

also, run windows update

as far as the network problem... I'd need more info on the network to offer any specific advice, but check the drivers for the wireless card on your computer. if it's built into the laptop, windows update should catch that. and given the troubles, I'd suggest using a wired connection to the internet when you run windows update.

[Rowne]

Ah, I can guess what Dakata's problem is.  The thing is, when certain components get too hot, they either get a little fritzy or they shut down.  If it's the graphics card or somesuch, that'll usually cause a bluescreen or with more recent hardware, a reset of the hardware that won't upset the system.

When it comes to important items though like the motherboard and the CPU, things that are vital to keeping the system running, if they get so hot that they can no longer be stable, they shut down.  That's called a die temp, basically once their internal heat sensors tell them they're past XXc temp, poof!  Off the go.  Laptops, as I've seen, are especially vulnerable to this because it seems like a great many models are undercooled or have poor fans.

The one thing I suggest is to take it to a computer store and have the innards de-dusted, to make sure there's no dust clogging up the vents, the fan motors or anything else.  Have them check the fan speeds too and if any fans are running under-speed, have them replace the fans.

That'll solve your problem, Dakata.

KA, if you haven't yet, you might have to do a low-level format, I mean completely wipe the drives clean.  Not the DOS type of format either, scrape all the data off them.  Particularly resilient forms of malware can hide in the works and reperpetuate themselves and if it's that bad, sometimes that's the only option.

It might just be a bug in Norton Ghost Image though, it seems that sadly that software has a lot of issues with hanging.

I wish I could be of more help to you, KA, I really do.

[Kitsune Ascendant]

okay, so how I do this "low level format"?

[Rowne]

You actually have to get a tool from your hard drive's manufacturer.  Here's a page that links to a lot of manufacturer util pages but if you don't see your HDD manufacturer there, tell me what it is and I'll see what I can find out.

Even if you do though, don't immediately run off and do the format.  You're going to need a boot disk or a way to sort the hard disk out once you're done.  If you have a Windows startup disc, that'll do it.

Anyway ...

If you don't know your manufacturer or it turns out they don't have the type of utility you'll need, there is another option but I don't like it as an option, there are unknown variables involved.

You can blast the master boot record and then do a format of the drive from the software on your CD or any clean disc (to avoid getting the virus back on your system).

What you have to do is get into the command-line part of the Windows startup disc, I think it's the Recovery Console or somesuch and type "fdisk /mbr".  If it doesn't have fdisk (I think it would), let me know and we'll figure something out.

I haven't had to do a low-level in a while so I'm a bit rusty on the details but I'll find them out as we go along.

[llearch n'n'daCorna]

Alternatively, you can try booting off almost any linux boot cd (I like the debian netinst ones, but you can use whatever) and getting to a console - with debian, that's waiting for it to finish booting, and hitting alt-f2.
Once there, running

Code Select Expand

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda bs=1024 count=1 will write zeros all over the master boot record.

If you skip the count option, it'll start writing zeros and stop when it runs out of drive...

*cough* I'm a geek, though, so I hardly ever trust microsoft products to do what they say they are... :-)

[Aridas]

Looks like it's time for a revival of this thread.

Recently I've been getting this problem at random... Sometimes I go a really long time without it, sometimes it happens not long after booting back into it. Here's the error
svchost.exe - Application Error

The exception unknown software exception (0xc0000409) occurred in the application at location 0x5b86a3c0
I have no idea why it does this, but I know that pressing OK or Cancel only hurts things. I get the exact same error yet again, and after finally clicking whatever however many times before it stops coming up, I lose the use of things like internet and network. I can't even disconnect from dialup when it's like that. Leaving the error up though, things work. Any idea what's messed up?

edit: Oh, and on the taskbar, it shows up with an IE icon, the one that's used for internet shortcut files and such

[Dakata]

Eh. I was having problems with my computer yesterday...might as well get some help...

Alright, after my computer just randomly died on me, I restarted the durn thing. Then I did the disk check thing and it said 2 of my MP3s had invalid links (What the frig does that mean?) and it said it replaced some bad clusters in another MP3. After it was done with the dumb disk check, I deleted the MP3s just 'cuz I didn't listen to them anymore.

Then it died on me. Again. (Before I could empty my recycle bin) When I tried to open Firefox. And then I just skipped the disk check thing and it kept screwing up on me. It'd show me a blue screen but then it'd just die before I could read it. All I can read was something about dumping the physical memory. (Or something like that.) And I restarted it again and again (and I kept skipping the disk check thing) and it kept doing the same durn thing.

....Then I finally let it do disk check (and I used my brother's computer and whined because it LAGS.) and it took like an hour and a half and it started working again. And it stopped dying on me too.

...Were the MP3s evil?

(BTW, how can I make my brother's computer (and mine I guess.) go faster? He uses Windows 2000 I think. (I use Windows XP.))

[mini-lion]

okee this has happened to me many a times and by the sounds of it you were lucky,

basically theres a address system for all your files, windows reads this to see where things are stored on the hard drive much like a map. However this sometimes gets distorted or things get moved on the hard drive accidentally or are corrupted. So no the mp3's are not evil my guess is that the random system failure caused your hard drive to lose track of what it was doing.

My suggestions : do a defragmentation more often / back up more / perhaps you hard dirve is geting old, in the future possibly back up to a newer hard drive / do a bit of "house keeping"

Ok now for increasing the speed, check your motherboard specs and see what type of RAM your motherboard takes, my suggestion is if you have the money upgrade your RAM, if you have a large hard drive do you split it into mini hard drives commonly known as partitioning, this always helps (makes the map smaller). If you did get a new hard drive the increase in rpm may make opening of files quicker. Have a clear out of stuff on your hard drive perhaps move a load of stuff to secondary storage. Have you got uneccessary programs running in the back ground, have you got a hijacked memory virus (use hijack this program pm me), going to extremes there is of course a update for the cpu if you find out the socket type you may be able to increase your cpu clock speed by buying a new cpu, or indeed if you feel up to it you can overclock the cpu (only if you have correct venting and cooling) there are many more....

[Dakata]

Dakata has no money for RAM upgrades. Dakata spent his/her money on candy. D:

Alright, now I have another problem.

Whenever I go to my music folder and open an MP3 file, it'll freeze up the folder-thing. And I can't close it unless I use Task Manager. And then it screws up Task Manager (When I open it, a little icon appears near the clock. And I have to use the icon to close it.) by making the stupid little icon disappear. Then I have to either deal with Task Manager being open, or restart (And I'm too darn lazy to do that.)

And I dunno why, but nothing'll screw up when I just open Winamp and THEN open the MP3. (But sometimes I'm too darn lazy to do that too. )

[mini-lion]

interesting, how big is the music folder, maybe consider making another folder. Have you run a disk defragmentation recently (start --> run --> dfrg.msc). Its strange how winamp can open the file where as you can't, maybe winamp has a updated link to the location of the file and windows doesn't.

[Dakata]

It's like 340 MB. Only because of a movie file that's in there.

(I'm too lazy to move it. And I dunno if I can make it smaller. It's a .FLV file that I "stole" from Google Video with a Firefox Extention-thingie.)

[Rowne]

Aridas: The file svchost.exe is used to launch and house services.  If that file is crashing then it's most likely because it's actually a bad service that's responsible for the deed.

Press the Windows key and R and in the resulting Run dialog, enter in services.msc and you'll bring up the Services dialog.  Find the services list I posted on an earlier page and note down any services that you have running that aren't in that list.

You can either come back to me with that list or Google them to ensure that none of them are essential.  The ones that aren't essential or are unknown should be turned off.  They should be stopped and set to Manual.  If they require a reboot to stop them, then do so (just be sure to Manual them first).

Dakata: Mini-lion has already covered a bunch of stuff.  I'm curious about a couple of things though: such as, is it only those few MP3s that don't work now and will other players not play then or is it only WinAMP that locks up?  Try another player, any other player, something like Foobar, VLC, whatever takes your fancy.  I'm just curious.

[Dakata]

Well, it's not screwing up now*. I moved my mp3s. (And I deleted a few more Mp3s that I don't listen to anymore....and some other files that are useless to me.)

* - I finally did something. I'm so lazy.

Now it's just lagging. And lagging and lagging and lagging. And Winamp is randomly freezing.

BTW, if I defrag my comp, will it mess up any of my files?

[llearch n'n'daCorna]

No. It's likely to clean them up instead.

What a defrag does is, well, when windows stores files, it can store them either all in one lump, in one place on the drive, or it can store them in two or more places. Obviously, if it's in more than one place, the drive has to move the read heads to find the next bit.

Sometimes windows can store a file in ~50 places. That makes it -real- slow to find all the bits and reassemble them in memory so you can play it.

Defragging is taking all those fragments and putting each file into one place, so when you read them, the machine can read them all in one go, much faster.

You're not going to mess up any files, in the same way that sorting your bookshelf isn't going to shuffle the contents of any of the books.

Well... unless you have a -really- strange way of sorting... :-)