Topic: General Hardware Discussion

[mephisto_kur]

Just talk about hardware.  Use the General Hardware Questions for support stuff.

[mephisto_kur]

Just tore the old monitor apart.  Went looking for any obvious problems - heat or burn damage, loose connections, that kind of thing.  Nothing noticeable, and I'm not sitting here with the multimeter trying to salvage a 3 year old monitor :/ .  Oh well.

[mephisto_kur]

My internal webserver just died.  The timing couldn't be better - I just finished the other server's upgrade and was about to start on the new webserver anyway.

[anomaly]

lan rig is back up and running. but for some reason now it takes about 1-2min before it even starts loading any of my apps or responds to any commands (wont even load task mgr)....

once it gets the stick out of its ass it runs nice and quick so idk wtf. i ran CCleaner and all the other normal maintenance stuff but didn't change a thing.

im thinking a reformat is in order... sucks tho i just put the OS on there about 2-3weeks ago. 

[mephisto_kur]

Go grab memtest and run a couple passes.

[anomaly]

i did the windows 7 memory test and all was ok... would you gage that tool sub par?

[mephisto_kur]

Yes.

Get memtest.

[anomaly]

in my search for memtest i found a neat freeware cd made up by some guy called "ultimate boot CD". its got a whole bunch of neat tools and utilities that you can run with out a OS or HDD for that matter.

ill let you know what i find.

[mephisto_kur]

The UBCD is a very nice tool.  Keep in mind tho that it is based on a very stripped down Windows OS, and that can hide some issues from basic memory tools.

Please just get memtest.  The memtest site even has a boot image that you can download that goes straight into the utility.  You don't have to do anything but boot from it.

[anomaly]

so you mean like as in it will be a boot option? thats slick!

[mephisto_kur]

No, not a boot option.  It boots from the CD, just make sure your first boot device is your CD\DVD drive, pop it in and boot up.  It will take you to a menu, which you don't have to touch.  It will automatically start in a few seconds.  Let it run at least one full pass (you'll see what I mean).

[mephisto_kur]

Got my main server finished.  With the upgrades, it now had the brute power to take on some other tasks, so I got rid of one of my garden machines - the one with the really whiny hard drive!  woot!  It is so quiet in this room now.

[anomaly]

lol gotta love those. prob sounds like the Quantum Fireball i have in a older PIII system over here.


*rrrrrreeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee*

did 5 passes of memtest with no errors on the lan box... idk.  but now like 1 out of every 3-4 times i turn it on from cold boot it freezes on the windows loading screen. would it just be fair to say windows got corrupted some how? i think im gonna try HD tune next. maybe one of the drives is failing. 

[Smoke]

could very well be but can you switch out ram,move around,pull all out down to one stick then switch out the one for another and build back up.

[mephisto_kur]

It could be Windows.  From my experience, it is 99% of the time RAM then Windows, then HDD issues.

do a chkdsk /R - that is normally enough to spot a failing HDD, and it only takes a few minutes if the drive is fine.

Windows issues would be harder to pinpoint, but considering you've ruled out the RAM, and you have had those weird issues with your Vista install since the beginning...