Widescreen Gaming Forum

Interestingly what gimp chugs on photoshop often doesnt. (6000 pixel canvas)

My issue turned out to be Avast failing to find a required file then dying, making Windows stick in a 'load Avast, program crashes, load Avast' cycle. Uninstalled Avast... it's all fixed. Ran chkdsk to see if there was any problems with the HDD - I can only guess that Avast updated badly and killed itself, as everything else is fine. Now running ClamWin instead.

wow didn't know that could happen ...
was it win7 x64 or 32 ?
is clamwin any good ? I wonder how an open source antivirus might fare...
too bad there's no "av-comparatives" review of it

Windows 7 x64.

I've had Avast on my laptop do a similar trick a few times before when there was no internet connection, where plugging it into a LAN fixed the 'Windows hanging on black screen with cursor' thing. That wouldn't fix the Windows 7 problem though.

ClamWin is pretty good - it's not permanently 'memory resident' (ie: scanning everything you do all the time) so you need to be more cautious online (although let's face it, running Firefox with Adblock/Flashblock/Noscript should save you from website nasties) and make sure to scan any downloaded files before running/opening. It does have an Outlook plugin for e-mail.

I can't say how good ClamWin is at detecting viruses, as I've not had it or Avast complain about any files yet. It updates regularly, uses very few resources (my Win 7 memory footprint has dropped from 1412MB 'clean boot' to 1118MB) by switching from Avast to ClamWin...

Latest update:


Well, apparently neither my sound card or PaintShop Pro were at fault.

Started again today and bam - memory dump at windows boot. Restart, system restore, bang, BSOD mentioning 'Memory_management'. Retry, bang, BSOD talking about Page_Fault_In_Nonpaged_Area.

Turn off, eat diner. Take out plug from wall, reinsert. Reboot. System restore. Success. Problems solved.

...the temporary problems that is I'm afraid.

Just ran a harddisk check with the Intel toolbox and it found nothing. So the disk should be ok.

Could still be the RAM. But...

Everything put together points me more and more towards something with the power distribution. As if parts don't get enough power all the time. It started shortly after I installed the BluRay player (a few days I suppose), which is attached to the same cable as the harddisks. I think the next thing I'll try is to put the BDplayer on a dedicated power cable, see if that helps...
But surely one cable should be able to support 2 HDDs and a BD player? And the soundcard was attached to something else... Then again, that one was on the same cable as the case fans I think. All in all, perhaps I should be using more cables to spread the load from each PSU port...

Had a look inside my case and apparently the BD player was already on its own private SATA power cable. So I don't suppose it was sucking too much from other components...

I have however replaced the cable that powers the hard drives. And relocated some of the plugs in the PSU. See what happens now...

I shortly considered putting back the sound card already, but quickly figured I'd leave it until a bit later. When things are stable again. At least I can now do so with less fear of breaking things again.

Your memory voltage is too low, and/or memory timings too tight, and/or maybe you have a defective piece of memory.

Download CPU-Z, take a screenshot of the memory tabs showing your memory settings and SPD pages in CPU-Z. Go look in the BIOS what voltage you have the memory running at.

Also, wouldn't be a bad idea to check it with memtest86.

_________________
P8Z68-V Pro | 2600K | HR02 | HD5850 | 2x4GB Vengeance LP | 128GB M4 + 6TB | X-Fi > HD595 | AX850 | Tai Chi | PB278Q | G110 + Deathadder 2013
P8Z77-V | 3570K | Mugen 2 | HD5850 | 2x4GB Vengeance LP | 500GB | X-750 | Fractal R3 | U2212HM | G110 + G400
P8H77-I | G860 | 4650 | 2x2GB XMS | 320GB | CX500 | Prodigy | T22B350EW | MX518
DC3217IYE | 1x4GB Vengeance | 64GB M4 | TX-42VT20E

Gilly's right - sounds like defective memory. Either the RAM is bad (always a possibility) or it's not getting enough volts for the given speed.

However, don't give RAM on an i7 system more than 1.65v... you'll risk frying the memory controller in the CPU. It's not quite as simple as that, but the general rule of 1.65v saves you from any potential pain.

Now just before I read the above two posts, I had downloaded CPU-Z and already checked out my memory timings in the BIOS.



I bought them as being 9-9-9-24, so there's something too tight o'er yonder.

I changed the 'Performance Enhance' in the BIOS from Turbo (default) to Standard, but it doesn't seem to have changed the timings. Guess I need to set them manually.

I think it may have something to do with the memory running at 1066 MHz (something along those lines) instead of the 1333 it is specified at, because the CPU won't do more. In any case, I suppose I should set these timings to 9-9-9-24?

The vendor's site says the memory should run at 1.5 - 1.65V, with 1.65 being default. The downside is that the BIOS doesn't seem to support 1.65, but only goes in steps of 0.1 at a time. Will this cause problems, or is the voltage fine as it is and should I just change the timers?


Edit: now it looks like this:




Forgot to put the performance enhance to turbo again, but am I really going to notice this? Perhaps for stability I should keep it at standard for the time being. Can always put it back to turbo later.

I always run memory at least at the higher memory voltage they are certified for
this has no particular side effect since they're built for that purpose except a tiny bit more power consumption...

so unless another component don't like your RAM being too high voltage I would look into getting more juice into them
it can only increase stability which is what you need right now
however don't go above specs either... overvolting does not always brings benefits ...
also relaxing timings slightly too much can't do any harm either ....
but at the same time, at this frequency, your memory should in theory at least support the third JEDEC setting of 8 8 8 22 (which are read from the memory sticks themselves)

Should the problem continue, you might also want to run a bunch of mem tests for several hours to be extra sure http://www.memtest.org/

the cpu controls the voltage of the RAM on the i7 systems, and therefore bacause of this you can't run too much juice.

Like Whis said, try memtest86 and if that passes, I would format and try again with W7. If their was a sligh problem during installation because of the RAM, just swapping the settings now is too late, the damage may be done.

_________________
P8Z68-V Pro | 2600K | HR02 | HD5850 | 2x4GB Vengeance LP | 128GB M4 + 6TB | X-Fi > HD595 | AX850 | Tai Chi | PB278Q | G110 + Deathadder 2013
P8Z77-V | 3570K | Mugen 2 | HD5850 | 2x4GB Vengeance LP | 500GB | X-750 | Fractal R3 | U2212HM | G110 + G400
P8H77-I | G860 | 4650 | 2x2GB XMS | 320GB | CX500 | Prodigy | T22B350EW | MX518
DC3217IYE | 1x4GB Vengeance | 64GB M4 | TX-42VT20E