Area51: Win7 crashes

Windows 7 on Area51 keeps crashing when my son punishes the box with excessive CPU loads. Culprits include:

• Gary's Mod
• Saints Row
• GTA 4

You get the idea. Background tasks include Firefox running Youtube, Facebook, Yahoo, etc. Time to run the Basic Windows Troubleshooter!

Basic Windows Troubleshooter



Assess

First, can I find any information about what led to the crash?

• Reboot and log in as admin
• Review any crash data. See a sample report.
• Administrative Tools >  Event Viewer. Review Custom Views > Administrative Events, sorted by Date and Time.

Update

One of the easiest ways to stop crashes is to make sure everything is up to date, especially the OS and critical software.

Run Windows Update. Reboot as required to install all important updates.

Area51 Win7 Updates for 2011-06-22

Lots of updates today!

• Windows Update
• Flash
• Java
• MSIE 9

Windows Update fails: Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 Service Pack 1 (SP1) installation error: 0x800F0A12

Resolution:

Click the Start button Picture of the Start button, and in the search box, type command prompt.

In the list of results, right-click Command Prompt, and then click Run as administrator.

Type bcdedit, and then press Enter.

Error reads "The boot configuration data store could not be opened. The system cannot find the file specified."

This error can occur if the system partition isn't being mounted, or made accessible to Windows during startup. To re-enable automatic mounting of all partitions and volumes, do the following:

type mountvol /E and press Enter.

Restart your computer, and try reinstalling SP1.

Let's see what happens.

Win7 Crash Data 2011-06-22

From July 22, 2011, on reboot:

Problem signature:
  Problem Event Name:    BlueScreen
  OS Version:    6.1.7600.2.0.0.256.1
  Locale ID:    1033

Additional information about the problem:
  BCCode:    116
  BCP1:    FFFFFA80072374E0
  BCP2:    FFFFF8800FFD7CF8
  BCP3:    0000000000000000
  BCP4:    0000000000000002
  OS Version:    6_1_7600
  Service Pack:    0_0
  Product:    256_1

Files that help describe the problem:
  C:\Windows\Minidump\062211-22152-01.dmp
  C:\Users\Neil\AppData\Local\Temp\WER-292673-0.sysdata.xml

Read our privacy statement online:
  http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?linkid=104288&clcid=0x0409

If the online privacy statement is not available, please read our privacy statement offline:
  C:\Windows\system32\en-US\erofflps.txt

Click [Check for solution]: that  process seems to have disappeared! No results, I guess. Let's look ourselves...

C:\Windows\Minidump\062211-22152-01.dmp

Looks like four (4) ".dmp" files were created in the last 4 days. The largest & oldest is 512 KB. Permission settings make it difficult to open, so I copied the file to the desktop. I open it in Notepad, and see

PAGEDU64 .... PAGEPAGEPAGEPAGEPAGE

and some non-ASCII characters. Nothing to see there.

The next file looks promising.

C:\Users\Neil\AppData\Local\Temp\WER-292673-0.sysdata.xml

The next file looks promising, but is not visible. Hidden? Nope, "Show hidden" is on. It's gone? I can't find it with either the MS or Google Desktop search. Gone, I guess.

Windows 7 Ultimate Custom Install on Area 51

Finally, it's time to erase the preview edition of Windows 7 and install the real deal onto Area 51, the Quad Core box with two SLI nVidia cards, Windows 7 Ultimate has been sitting in the box for months now. The preview edition expired long ago, but booted up for 2 or more hours at a time. But, we are having some boot up problems, and I've been working to elimainate potential issues for some time.

The boot issue is this: often, the BIOS phase of the bootup is very slow, and it may take several minutes to reach the GRUB menu, if it appears at all. The workaround has been to boot off of an old Knoppix 5 CD, but I suspect my 7-year old cracked it and we can't use that disk anymore. We've had mixed results with an Ubuntu CD and Spinrite.

I ran Spinrite and did an exhaustive (level 4) check on the 200 GB C: drive partition (IDE HD) and it was fine. I was not able to finish the testing on the internal SATA drive, as it is 2 TB and the test would take forever.

I suspect the problem is either a bad SATA cable, a loose connection, or some problem with the SATA drive. Whatever the issue, I've disconnected the SATA cable from the drive, and the boot problems have vanished.

So, I just installed Windows 7 Ultimate (64-bit) after formatting the C: drive (an NTFS volume). The new install recognizes all 8 GB, which means the 64 bits are all working away at managing my RAM.

Performing the initial installation from the DVD was fast and easy, about 10 minutes, but then it's time to wait while all of the other updates install. The end results: Windows 7 Ultimate, basic installation, requires 25.6 GB of hard disk space and uses about 1.37 GB of RAM. Wow.

3D Visors

I've been predicting 3D immersion glasses for a while now. Here they are, on the market, the eMagin Z800 3DVisor from 3DVision.com, for a mere $1,20o ($1,500 MSR) -- that's not a mass market price point, though. Actutally, 3DVision looks like a reseller. The 3DVisor comes from eMagin.

Post a comment if you've used these. Are they convincing? Comfortable?

Here's a review of the Z800 from MaximumPC, and a review from FPS Labs that quotes a price of $550 in July 27, 2006. So, they've doubled the price since release 2 years ago? When it came out, they were also promoting it in games like Ubisoft's Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter with a $75 rebate, and that drops the price to $475! Now the price is almost triple, which seems to disprove Moore's Law right there ... actually, they are probably not moving the volume they expected.

Disk Usage by OS

Here's my disk usage by operating system:


neil@area-51u:~$ df -h
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/hdb1 14G 4.4G 8.5G 34% /
varrun 1.4G 196K 1.4G 1% /var/run
varlock 1.4G 0 1.4G 0% /var/lock
udev 1.4G 96K 1.4G 1% /dev
devshm 1.4G 0 1.4G 0% /dev/shm
lrm 1.4G 38M 1.4G 3% /lib/modules/2.6.22-14-generic/volatile
/dev/hda6 58G 13G 45G 23% /media/DRV1_VOL3
/dev/hda5 39G 9.6G 29G 25% /media/DRV1_VOL2
/dev/hda7 119G 46G 74G 39% /media/DRV1_VOL4

XP or Vista?

In case there's still any doubt about Windows XP vs. Vista, this surprising upgrade report settles the question of whether to upgrade or not.

(Thanks, Eric, for that URL)

Soundblaster X-Fi errors

I installed my new Soundblaster X-Fi in Area51. I tried to install the drivers on both XP and Vista; problems with both.

Creative suggest I might have a BIOS problem, so I find the support page for my mobo, here: ASRock Motherboard - Product - 939Dual-SATA2 - Overview. I downloaded and installed the latest BIOS update (939Dual-SATA2 - Download).

Although this was a Good Thing To Do, it did not fix my problem. As it turns out, moving the card to a new PCI slot fixed the problem.

Windows XP & Vista can't recognize all my RAM!

It looks like I need to go to Vista 64 to get this to work, according to this article in the MS Knowledge Base:

The system memory that is reported in the System Information dialog box in Windows Vista is less than you expect if 4 GB of RAM is installed

I've installled 3 GB of Ram, but Vista only recognizes 2 GB:

Total Physical Memory 2,798.69 MB
Available Physical Memory 2.04 GB

Note that the Total Physical Memory should be 3072, so I'm missing out on 273 MB of RAM I have installed.

Playtool

Great information about selecting a video card, plus extensive information on power supply issues, which are very important for current video cards.

More information on power supplies at Tech Hounds: Power Supply.