Temporary Apothecary

[Kraellin]

post your computer woes and game woes here while the board is being fixed.

K.

[Lonewarrior]

yes what is this error, svchost.exe? It screw up my compute last week.

[Redleg]

While in the game I continue to crash back to desk top - what is weird however is that the game just halts in mid strid until I double click on the window icon at the bottom of my screen.

Not sure if I really want to try to fix it - because it happens about every 20 minutes and gives me a break to check out the .Org.

But let me know if you can think of anything that might cause this bug - I got a feeling that it has something to do with my internet explore settings.

[Placid Tramp]

Bolts keep falling off the bottom of my computer chair, should i be worried?

[The_Emperor]

yes what is this error, svchost.exe? It screw up my compute last week.

it could be a virus... I have experienced a few recently at work that have caused that problem on a system.

[Lonewarrior]

it could be a virus... I have experienced a few recently at work that have caused that problem on a system.

Yeah probably. I ran a antivirus called avast and it discovered 3 viruses :(

[hundurinn]

My hard drive makes strange sounds. Like there is a cat inside my case but there isn't one, I've checked. Should I take a backup or hope for the best?

[SwordsMaster]

Bolts keep falling off the bottom of my computer chair, should i be worried?

Yup, just get yourself a new computer

[Placid Tramp]

Yup, just get yourself a new computer

I'm serious, 3 have dropped off in the last week and I can't find where the're coming from

[Big King Sanctaphrax]

My CD Drive seems a bit shagged. The computer can see the drive, but it can't see any CDs inside the drive. I honestly can't think why this would be, it was working perfectly yesterday...

[Come Together]

My computer isn't as good as i would want it to be and i'm not rich.
Also bolts keep falling off my chair, and i have to end up repairing it every month or so.

[KukriKhan]

My computer isn't as good as i would want it to be and i'm not rich.
Also bolts keep falling off my chair, and i have to end up repairing it every month or so.

ConfusiKraellin say:

Duct tape fix everything.

[LittleGrizzly]

My computer isn't as good as i would want it to be and i'm not rich.
Also bolts keep falling off my chair, and i have to end up repairing it every month or so.

seen as kurki handled your chair problem, to be rich (which lead to computer being as good as you want it to be) play lottery succsessfully.

[Teleklos Archelaou]

My computer is about six months old. I usually keep it running almost all the time. However, if I cut it off and it sits through the night (and the place is not cold or anything, just not hot) when I start it up in the morning, there is a 50% chance it will freeze while loading Windows XP. But if I push the button and cut it off, restarting after about 30 seconds, it never fails to come back on, and everything is great.

Why would a relatively new computer be doing that?

[Kraellin]

this is a cut and paste from microsoft.com:

Svchost.exe is a generic host process name for services that run from dynamic-link libraries (DLLs).

in other words, these are normally ok. but, because some viruses do attack and embed themselves in .dll's, you shld check the registry to see what services are being run by each instance of svchost. more than one svchost process can run at one time, so you'd have to check all of them, or, just run a good anti-virus that can detect .dll embeds.

K.

[Kraellin]

While in the game I continue to crash back to desk top - what is weird however is that the game just halts in mid strid until I double click on the window icon at the bottom of my screen.

this could be any number of things, so we're going to need more data. i can tell you that if you're running onboard graphics, this is fairly common. but so much depends on your system specs and what you're running in software and hardware, that all i can do is give you some generalized help.

1. go to www.blackviper.com and find their recommended list of services you shld run, might want to run, and shldnt run. kill as much of that background junk as you can get away with. this is particularly true if you're running onboard graphics.

2. turn off anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering for your vid card drivers and in the game.

3. adjust your agp aperture (in bios) upwards by one notch and try the game again. if your vid card is a pci card, turn up the pci texture memory to maximum.

4. turn off as many background tasks as you can. turn off any programs you're running that you can afford to. along with this, tweak your startup to NOT run whatever you can get away with not running when your computer boots up.

these are just some simple things that can help keep your system from crashing as much.

K.

[Kraellin]

Bolts keep falling off the bottom of my computer chair, should i be worried?

yes. lose some weight. your chair will thank you ;)

K.

[Kraellin]

My hard drive makes strange sounds. Like there is a cat inside my case but there isn't one, I've checked. Should I take a backup or hope for the best?

on the off chance that you're being serious here... yes, noisy harddrives are not a good sign. if it's a grinding kind of noise, like metal on metal, BACK UP AT ONCE! the drive bearings are most likely failing. if it's a chattering noise, like something is rattling, BACK UP AT ONCE! if it sounds like a cat, feed it your mouse and see if it stops.

K.

[Kraellin]

My CD Drive seems a bit shagged. The computer can see the drive, but it can't see any CDs inside the drive. I honestly can't think why this would be, it was working perfectly yesterday...

the drive could be going bad or might just need the heads cleaned. however, the latter shldnt really prevent windows from seeing the drive. check device manager and see if it still shows up without any yellow question marks or exclamation points. also check bios to see if it's still detected there.

then get back to me.

K.

[Kraellin]

My computer is about six months old. I usually keep it running almost all the time. However, if I cut it off and it sits through the night (and the place is not cold or anything, just not hot) when I start it up in the morning, there is a 50% chance it will freeze while loading Windows XP. But if I push the button and cut it off, restarting after about 30 seconds, it never fails to come back on, and everything is great.

this one smells of hardware going bad, quite possibly in the power supply. but, it could also be on the motherboard. electronic parts do wear out with use. as they do, some of them lose their original electrical integrity and begin to do odd things. heat and cold will start to affect them also. when your machine is on and you reboot, the components are already warm from the electrical current. when you let it sit over night, the parts cool down. when you warm parts up they tend to expand and can change conductivity from when they are cooler and a bit more condensed. and it's not as rare as you might think. we've seen it before on this board. the last time it was a capacitor in the power supply or motherboard, as i recall.

i've also personally experienced this on an older machine. it would take anywheres from 1 to about 15 attempts with the power button for the thing to actually boot up.

as to why it's occurring after only 6 months, you partially answered it. you keep the system on almost all the time. normally, this isnt a bad thing, but if the components were a bit flawed during manufacture, then their life expectancy will be quite a bit less.

the only way to truly test if all this is correct or not, is to take it to a shop and tell them what's going on. the downside to this is that these can sometimes be hard to detect and murphy's law says that every time they try it in the shop, it will boot up normally.

off hand, i'd say if it's only 50% of the time on a cold boot that it fails, dont worry too much about it for now. if it gets worse, and it most likely will, then go ahead and let a shop technician look at it.

there is also one other condition i am aware of that could cause this, but not really with a 50% regularity, and that's a software problem, usually some little glitch is windows during your boot sequence. but those tend to be more rare than 50%.

intermittent boot-ups on a cold boot but not a warm re-boot, tends to be hardware going bad, usually a circuit board or power supply item. so, keep an eye on it.

K.

[Red Harvest]

Responding to multiple topics:

Noisy hard drives are a bad sign like K says. Back it up ASAP. If it is a few years old, and you don't find something obvious and harmless (like loose mounting screws) then you really should slap a new one in before this one fails. It will probably sieze up or fail catastrophically. Alternatively, separate the mouse and the hard drive as far apart as you can physically, and block line of sight from one to the other. That should keep the cat in the hard drive from screeching at the mouse.

CD drives go out. I've had a few die on various machines. The machine can usually see them, but they can't read any CD's. CD/DVD drives are dirt cheap!

Use hijackthis.exe to see what svchost.exe's are running. It should only be running from the system32 folder or something like that. Anywhere else indicates a virus (or so I've read.)

Teleklos Archelaou, Your problem sounds a lot like a faulty PSU. A weak PSU sometimes has trouble in the fire up sequence from cold boot with all the drives spinning and lots of things happening. Power draw is high on certain rails during spool up of the drive motors, fans, etc. I've never had one fail in this manner for me, but I've seen others post this type of problem and resolve it with a new PSU at times. Another possibility is some sort of vid card initialization problem with the motherboard. I had a particular motherboard/vid card combination that didn't get along. It wouldn't even POST on a cold boot at times (many others with the same motherboard had the same issue with that series of card.) Yours sounds a bit different since it sounds like you are actually getting into XP loading before it stops. (Solution for me was to switch to a different vid card within the RMA period.)

[Teleklos Archelaou]

Teleklos Archelaou, Your problem sounds a lot like a faulty PSU. A weak PSU sometimes has trouble in the fire up sequence from cold boot with all the drives spinning and lots of things happening. Power draw is high on certain rails during spool up of the drive motors, fans, etc. I've never had one fail in this manner for me, but I've seen others post this type of problem and resolve it with a new PSU at times. Another possibility is some sort of vid card initialization problem with the motherboard. I had a particular motherboard/vid card combination that didn't get along. It wouldn't even POST on a cold boot at times (many others with the same motherboard had the same issue with that series of card.) Yours sounds a bit different since it sounds like you are actually getting into XP loading before it stops. (Solution for me was to switch to a different vid card within the RMA period.)

Thanks, I do appreciate the advice. I'll probably let it go for now. I do run dual monitors, and it took a while to get that set up (onboard card and then a PCI slot). So it could be that. Thanks again to you and Kraellin too!

[Adrian II]

seen as kurki handled your chair problem, to be rich (which lead to computer being as good as you want it to be) play lottery succsessfully.

Ancestors always say: Bull droppings more deadly than bullets.

[Ja'chyra]

Quote:
Bolts keep falling off the bottom of my computer chair, should i be worried?



yes. lose some weight. your chair will thank you ;)

if it sounds like a cat, feed it your mouse and see if it stops.

Lol.

Here's one for you K, how hard is it to change my graphics card? I am changing from a radeon 7500 to a 9800 pro. While I am not an IT expert (otherwise known as geek ) I am an engineer, but being a mechanical engineer most of my experience is hitting things with hammers.

[Productivity]

Lol.

Here's one for you K, how hard is it to change my graphics card? I am changing from a radeon 7500 to a 9800 pro. While I am not an IT expert (otherwise known as geek ) I am an engineer, but being a mechanical engineer most of my experience is hitting things with hammers.

It shouldn't be too hard at all, sometimes a little fiddly (AGP locks can be a real pain to get too), and cleaning out drivers can be fiddly as well, but physically it is very easy.

[Kraellin]

Here's one for you K, how hard is it to change my graphics card? I am changing from a radeon 7500 to a 9800 pro. While I am not an IT expert (otherwise known as geek ) I am an engineer, but being a mechanical engineer most of my experience is hitting things with hammers.

generally, it's fairly simple. your 7500 is most likely an agp card, but check it. the 7500 does come in pci also and you do want to make sure you have an agp slot for the 9800 pro.

the recommended procedure for swapping cards is to go into windows safe mode and uninstall your drivers for the existing card first. safe mode puts you in vga mode at 640 x 480, 32 bit color, which is what you'll want to be in to load your new drivers. do not install them yet.

reboot once all the way into normal windows mode and make sure it's working in vga mode.

then, power down the computer, pull the power cord out of the back of the machine and remove the computer case. find your 7500 and remove it.

plug in the new 9800 pro and any extra cords, wires, etc that it may require (see your manual on this). you'll be putting it in the brownish slot, which is the agp slot. make sure it's seated well in the slot.

replace the case of the computer and plug the power cord back in and go ahead and boot up the machine. if you have an xp machine, windows may load new drivers or offer you the chance to load them on your own. if it does, accept loading them yourself and follow the prompts. you shld have a cd that came with the card that will have the drivers on them and you're going to load them in from that. the exception to that is if you've downloaded newer drivers in anticipation of this swap. if so, then load those when prompted.

if windows doesnt prompt you to load new drivers, just insert the 9800 pro cd into your drive and choose install, or, explore the cd with windows explorer and find the setup.exe and run that. that shld install the new drivers. if the drivers are downloaded drivers, then simply run the downloaded file or do whatever the web site where you got the drivers instructed.

ok, that's the long, and recommended version. the shorter version is, upgrade your ati drivers for the 7500 before you do anything else. these will most likely also work for the 9800. simply install them without removing the older ones. then, reboot once and test them. if all is ok, power down the machine and replace the vid card. boot up and you shld be good to go.

the other short version is to not load the newer drivers first. just power down and replace the card first then boot up and see how it works. since you are replacing an ATI card with a later ATI card, the chances are pretty good that it will work. if you then want to update drivers, or need to because of some windows message, go ahead and do so.

in most instances i've found, if you're going from nvidia to nvidia, or ati to ati, and both are pci or both are agp, and you're going from an earlier version of the card to a later version, you can get away with not replacing the drivers during or before the card swap. this is NOT the standard way to do it, but it normally works, in my experience.

on the other hand, if you're going from nvidia to ati, or ati to nvidia, remove the drivers first and run in vga mode first. the two have a tendency to overlap functions and interfere with each other a bit.... by report. in my experience, i've not ever done this without first removing the older drivers, so i cant say for sure.

at any rate, swapping cards and drivers or just updating drivers isnt too complex... even for an engineer ;)

K.

[Tocca]

About the computer freezing while loading XP.

I bought a new PC two months ago, and when i was deciding what hardware to get i read about some people having problems with S-ATA HDs.
I also heard the same thing from my brother, he actually ended up buying a second HD (old fashioned IDE) and installed XP on that one and used the S-ATA disc as a second HD to install programs on.

I finally decided to go the S-ATA way anyway, and at first there were no problems at all.
But the last couple of weeks i've had the same problem that i read about, mostly when rebooting the PC. It stops before loading XP and just sits there.
Seems that it doesn't detect the S-ATA disc in the loading sequence.

I spoke with the store where i bought the PC and they said that they hadn't heard of that problem, but i've read of lots of people with the same problem!?

Ah well, doesn't bother me much. If i power off the PC completely and then restart it always fire up.
Maybe i should send it back and ask them to check the PC, but not right now with the new RTW patch just out!

Do you have a S-ATA disc, Teleklos?

[Red Harvest]

Interesting info on the S-ATA problem. Never believe a store/vendor when they say they've never heard of a problem. I've had vendors tell me that when I called them...a week after having talked with them about it before. They have VERY short and CONVENIENT memories. I've also seen it happen when I had some rough statistics that showed a third or more of purchasers were experiencing the same problems I was...

Detection type problems are not uncommon with motherboards. Graphics cards often get the short end of the stick, but sometimes it is specific models of memory (not infrequently some high end stuff!) S-ATA still seems to be working out a few kinks. I remembe when USB was rife with trouble.

Word of mouth is the best way to find out what is happening with specific hardware. Without internet forums we would be back in the dark ages of hardware (and software) troubleshooting.

[Ja'chyra]

Thanks K and dgb the card gets delivered tonight and I'll fit it tomorrow.

Looks like I'll not be needing my trusty old hammer this time, I'll pack it away for the next time my central heating stops working

[Ja'chyra]

Got it installed at the weekend, with a hangover and without the hammer, and it even works so the wife was wrong, I'm not totally useless.