My Windows comp has been doing odd things for months now & it's getting worse. I think the first sign of trouble was when it would refuse to recognize a usb drive. A reboot would generally rectify the problem.
Then I started having problems with Firefox, although mostly of Facebook. When I wanted to start an app or view photo,s the page would start to load then just hang indefinitely until I hit refresh, then would load almost instantly. I got around this by installing Google Chrome.
Then it started refusing to start programs such as Acrobat viewer & the occasional other program. Generally fixed by a reboot.
About a week ago it started to refuse to start Chrome. The cursor would change to an hourglass for a few seconds then nothing, not even an error message, and for months the computer has rarely does a reboot through the start menu. It just hangs until I turn it off with the button.
Then most annoyingly it started to error out all my GPUGRID work. I've always had a high error rate, but at least the odd one finishes, but not any more.
So I uninstalled the NVIDIA driver then cleaned it up using Driver Sweeper then re-installed. No good. Tried again. Still no joy. So ran a scan with AVG then Dr Web Cure it, then AdAware, then Spybot search & destroy. Found a few trojans, managed to get Chrome working again, but Firefox still has problems & GPUGRID still errors out.
I've attached to Set@home & Collatz to see if there work errors too or if it just has a problem with GPUGRID, but neither seems to have any work at the moment.
Are there any other projects with a Cuda app that will work on a 8800GT card, and does anyone now of any other free programs I could run to try and fix or at least identify whats causing all this chaos? My only other option is to re-format the drive & start from scratch, but thats a last resort as this is my everyday computer that has all my crap on it.
Thank you to anyone who bothered to read this far. You deserve a medal, or at least a +1 :thumbsup:. I probably wouldn't have made it this far if I was reading it :blush1:
I regularly run Auslogic boostspeed, a 5 meg download at: http://www.auslogics.com/en/software/boost-speed. It has some useful utilities for cleaning out the crap on the hdd, registry, defraging and tweaks. Although I'm not sure if it'll help in your case,,, I find it a very usefull program I've loaded on lots of machines without any negative results.
P.M me at 10 days if it helps :)
Aside from the [inevitable] reinstall or... move to Linux option, :wink try running this CCCleaner (http://www.ccleaner.com/help)
It does work, i have used it, and there's now a later version since i last did - this time (see screenshot below) it removed a bit over 200Mb of junk with, so far, no noticable probs etc.
Final word that you know anyway, though we both have used a crap load of so-called "cleaners", "boosters" etc over the years we really have found that nothing, and i mean nothing, will truly fix a broken Doze box other than a clean re-install - to do otherwie is just postponing the inevitable!! - and Billy will tell you that it was well and truly broken long before it was released and that was over 20 yrs ago biggrin
HTH
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Just a thought but I don't suppose you've checked to see if you've got a memory stick playing up. That can give all sorts of weird results and it's not the OS at all
Dave
G'day from the US of A
Been having such a fun time that I haven't had all that much time to come online, but was reading Rob's post with interest cause the puter I am using at the moment is a "wonderful".... back in a sec, want to get this right *grin*...............
"Dell Computer Corporation
Dell DIMENSION DIM2350
Celeron (R) CPU 2.00 GHz
1.99 GHz 640MB RAM"
and don't ask about the video card.... cause it ain't a quicky *sigh*
Anyways, it is having fun and games at the moment. The paging file system is set at 958MB, and it loads programs soooooooooooooooooooooooo slowly that I can get a coffee (downstairs) and it might have opened Firefox when I return.
The owner insists that if there is to be a new puter that it be a Dell. (I'm not complaining about the screen, cause it has more than adequate acreage and is very clear and is a Dell, as is the rest of the input options.)
What I want to know is:
Is it possible to get Dell to make a puter without all the crap they install to make it run better? BTW, am talking about US here, not Oz... where I'd NEVER have anything to do with dell, since they are not made to be upgraded (to my knowledge.)
Oh and Rob.... nethinks it may be time to upgrade that system, at least from a HD view, and also check memory sticks... just in case.
Ran boost speed & CCCleaner and things are better now but still not perfect. Only the occasional GPUGrid wu errors now, have a few Seti wu's in the queue waiting to run, so I'll see how they go in the next day or so. Firefox is still a bit dodgy, haven't noticed any other probs yet, but I only ran the programs yesterday, so I'll give it a few days & see what happens.
As for memory. I hope it's not that. I upgraded to OCZ 1066 reaper ram 6-12 months ago because I was having stability problems with my old Corsair XMS2 800 sticks. I'll see how it goes over the next few days, if I continue to have problems I'll try running memtest for a few hours and see what happens.
Thanks all for your help :thumbsup:
Most of my GPUGrid work is still erroring out. Don't know if the link to my tasks will work [url]http://www.gpugrid.net/results.php?userid=9349/url]. I've crunched a few Seti Cuda wu's succesfully but don't know if somethings wrong somewhere or what. They seem to be taking up a whole CPU despite having prefs set to no CPU work, & only return less than 30 cr/hr. Thats less than I can get on most projects with the cpu alone. I'm going to try running memtest this afternoon for a few hours and if that doesn't find any probs, I'll run down my cache & do a complete os re-install :cry2:
Ran memtest for about 3 hours & it did over 4 passes in that time with no errors. Took 3 reboots for Boinc to work, so it looks like a re-install in the next few days :cry2:
Sorry mate. Good luck
Dave
Hmm, seems like I may have been barking up the wrong tree (sort of) when I assumed Windows was corrupted.
Re-installed Windows only to find it wouldn't access the internet. In fact the light for that comp on the network switch didn't even light up. Tried rebooting, didn't work. So then went into BIOS & everything seemed ok, but ran Smart Lan just in case. This at least made the light on the switch come on but instead of just running once it kept looping over & over giving me different cable lengths all the time, from less than 10m to about 33m, all OK with no faults though.
So decided to put the HDD in another comp to see if it would work, which was a semi major job. Had to remove the Vid card which was a challenge with all the watercooling plumbing all around it, and one Ram stick just to remove the Hard disc. After all that it wouldn't even boot in that comp.
So now I'm installing on a spare hard drive plus I reset BIOS just in case it was corrupted as well. Should know shortly if it worked :-\.
EDIT:Bugger!, it still wont connect to the internet. Looks like I'll have to buy a network card :-(
Doh! I'm an idiot Bashhead. Made a trip into town this morning to buy a network card. After installing it & finally having access to the internet I realised I also had no sound. After much head scratching it suddenly occured to me that a driver disc came with the motherboard, maybe that would help, took a while to find but I eventually located it. After installing the drivers I now have sound & the onboard Lan is also working. Could have saved myself 20 bucks & a trip into town if I had've used my brain ::)
Oh well, at least I have a backup now if any of my comps lose there onboard Lan ;D
Quote from: Rob on October 24, 2009, 11:42:40 AM
Doh! I'm an idiot Bashhead. Made a trip into town this morning to buy a network card. After installing it & finally having access to the internet I realised I also had no sound. After much head scratching it suddenly occured to me that a driver disc came with the motherboard, maybe that would help, took a while to find but I eventually located it. After installing the drivers I now have sound & the onboard Lan is also working. Could have saved myself 20 bucks & a trip into town if I had've used my brain ::)
Oh well, at least I have a backup now if any of my comps lose there onboard Lan ;D
:rofl: :rofl: I can't remember all the times I've done something like that. :worship
Cheers!
its amazing how easily those discs that come with the mobos get tossed into the selected "lucky" , shiny storage box (for me, ALWAYS the mobo box) and get forgotten about.
Usually, many of the included drivers are "out-of-date" but still. they usually WILL get things working....
I did yet another stupid thing last night. A few weeks back I bought an external hard disc & backed up my system. When I re-installed the other day I thought " oh well at least I'll be able to retrieve all my photo's from the back up". So what do I do last night?. Thought to myself "I don't need that backup anymore I'll reformat that drive so I can create a fresh backup with all my regular programs allready installed to save time if I have to do it again".
Shortly after the format finished it suddenly occured to me "Oh crap! I had all my photos on that disc" :hbang:.
I had spent the last 2 or 3 years slowly scanning in all my photos a few here & a few there there & had nearly finished. Now I'll have to start from scratch, plus most of my photos from my digital camera are gone for good :cry2:
Moral to this story. Never do anything important on a computer late at night when your normally in bed ::)
EDIT:Woohoo! all is not lost. Rummaged through a stack of unlabeled cd's trying them one by one & found a couple with info I backed up a couple of years ago when upgrading to a new comp. Between the discs & whats still on my digital camera I managed to recover all my digital photo's & about half my scanned photo's ;D
:rofl: been there, done that - wait til you reformat 5 yrs worth of backups only to then go ... :boom: