Question for the PC techs

[evilsock]

'lo - fancy that, me asking for advice on computers - well here goes.

My PC is based on the VIA KT133 (EP-8KTA+) chipset - BIOS has been upgraded to enable 4xAGP - has 1Gb of PC133 RAM and currently a Maxtor 40Gb drive - video is nVidia Ti4200 (Pony - 64Mb DDR RAM - 4X AGP). O/S is Win 2K SP4 with the VIA 4in1 drivers enabled.

Here’s the deal - I built this machine myself from new - I have a background in computing (14 years, tech support upto UNIX SA) so I’m happy that the build was approached in a structured way. The machine has been absolutely great apart from one thing - every 12 months my hard drive fails. I play online alot - I mean alot - I play a combination of RtCW and ET every night (I’m a sad case) and have done mostly since RtCW was released. It’s really wierd - everything is absolutely fine for about six months, then I begin to notice a ‘harmonic’ resonance coming from the hard disk. It sounds like the power to the drive isn’t always right and I can hear the drive ‘skip’ a revolution every so often. This is usually the danger sign that everything needs ghosting because the drive is going to fail sometime soon. When my previous drive failed in similar circumstances, I replaced my 300W power-supply for a 400W thing, it hasn’t made a shit of a difference. This is slowly costing me a fortune. I have two main questions;

a) Is it likely that games such as RtCW and ET cause an overclocked machine so much stress that eventually the drive just messes up? (it’s always the same kind of fault and the warning signs are always the same)

b) Has anyone produced malicious code that updates either/or RtCW/ET executables in a backdoor, trojan, DoS style way?

I’ve checked the integrity of my drive in the last 10 days and I’ve suddenly found an unformatted 8Mb partition on my drive D (the drive is sliced into what amounts to /os = C: and /data = D: - I removed it and went hunting for viruses, spyware, disk integrity all show a blank. Nothing in the RUN key of my registry that suggests anythin gis auto-loading. Adaware and SPYbot show nothing and the util you can download from Maxtor has re-verified the drive - but I hear this damn sound and I know the drive will fail in the next 6 weeks.

As things stand - if I attempt to launch ET or RtCW, I can play for maybe 40 minutes then the game just freezes - it seems to me when I’m sprinting / jumping in certain ‘stressful’ situations… I’ve updated PB for both games and in the case of ET re-installed (I can’t find my RtCW CD at the mo). - this hasn’t made a difference. I have also experimented with replacing one or both of my normal 512Mb PC133 RAM sticks, but again this doesn’t make any difference - I don;t have a reference video card to swop my nVidia one with to rule-out the graphix card as a possibility.

I haven’t changed a damn thing on the machine - I’m very careful about what gets installed and am a veteran to the maxim ‘install only what you use’ - I admin the box like it was a UNIX box - actually I have installed something - Cygwin - does anyone know if cygwin (even if the executable isn’t running) can cause problems with these games?

Finally - I’ve noticed that the characteristics for my lagometer are not ‘normal’ - I seem to get lag-spikes (which I normally can tweak out of the game) - I’ve seen them before and can say that sometimes the lag-spikes don’t have anything to do with the internet but can be caused ny a hard-drive glitch or even a video card problem.

On the AGP side of things, I have fast writes, master writes and side-banding enabled - ithis in itself has never caused a serious problem before.

Has anyone got any insights on this or similar behaviour from a machine that they were able to pin down?

Help! Please!

[SylverDragon]

'lo - fancy that, me asking for advice on computers - well here goes.

My PC is based on the VIA KT133 (EP-8KTA+) chipset - BIOS has been upgraded to enable 4xAGP - has 1Gb of PC133 RAM and currently a Maxtor 40Gb drive - video is nVidia Ti4200 (Pony - 64Mb DDR RAM - 4X AGP). O/S is Win 2K SP4 with the VIA 4in1 drivers enabled.
Etc…

Sounds like you have most of the bases covered. But I’ll throw in my 2 cents worth:
First off, that 8MB unused space is left there by Windows, on pupose. Just in case you ever want to upgrade to a dynamic disk (and **** your system in the process).
Do you have any sort of cooling fan blowing air across your HD? From the sound of it, you may have a rather hot system (overclocked, high end Video card) It could be that the HD is overheating and slowly cooking itself to death.
At the risk of sounding like a fanboy, you might try switching to a Western Digital HD next time 'round. If you get one of thier special edition drives, it comes with a three year warranty. This won’t help with data loss, but might cut down on replacement cost. Also, check into Maxtor’s warranty policy. If its only 6 months out, you may still be under warranty. I just don’t know what Maxtor’s policy is, I’ve been using WD exclusivly for years now, guess I am a fanboy.
If you’re running Win2K, you might want to fire up the performance monitor and set some alerts for excessive paging activity, and then check your logs. You system may be thrashing the disk. In this same strain, look at the cache size of the next drive you buy, the larger the better as it will keep the disk from having to go back and find the same data over and over.
Lastly, and kind of an oddball, do you have a surge protector? You may have really ‘dirty’ power (voltage spikes, etc) comming in and its reeking havoc with your system. The HD may just be taking it hardest. If you have access to one, running a power analyzer on your mains might be good. Though this last is unlikly, I just throw it in to cover everything.

[Sick_Boy]

a) no don’t think so hard drive gets spared in most games and ET/rtcw as well

b) trojans/viruses that would actually damage a harddrive, haven’t heard of them since the ol’ DOS days when you could manually ‘park’ your HD

-about 8MB unpartitioned: sounds normal to me

-the freezing after 40 minutes may point at a heating problem, most likely CPU or graphic card

-cygwin: shouldn’t have anything to do with it, though I have no experience with that program so don’t know if it’s buggy

-watch out with fast writes on older hardware

-how many HD’s have failed on you? If not more than 2/3 you could just be terribly unlucky, otherwise there is definately something going on

-check the temperature around your HD and don’t drive to LANparties over too bumpy roads is my advise

[SJ_Frankenstein]

VIA drivers, I had a heck of a time with them and found that if I didn’t install them in turbo (?) and just did a normal install they worked fine. But when installing them in turbo, they caused RtCW to lock up.

Just a piece of advice about the VIA. They may be better now.

Good luck, hope that helps too.

[evilsock]

Thanks guys

The heads-up on that 8Mb partition is great - I didn’t realise Windows left it there - I had assumed it was it ‘lostspace’ and just another indication that things had gone bad.

So far this machine has eaten four drives in 2 years;

10Gb Fujitsu
40Gb Maxtor
3Gb Fujitsu (my non ATA indestructable spare from yongs ago)
40Gb Maxtor - just about to naff up

I did wonder about powerspikes. My house is in a village a couple of miles outside of a city- I think the power must come from a cow-shit generator from the local farm - I replace lightbulbs every month - I’m going to check out a power-smoother.

As for the fan - fuckit, I’m going to get a ‘human’ fan, take the side casing off and have the fan blow straight onto the innards - if it stays up then its a winner - I have seen a problem like this before on an old Compaq Enterprise server - it had environmental heat sensors that caused the machine to just die if the temp got too much - I solved this problem until it could be replaced ny sticking three large fans in front of it - now that’s professionalism

I think your suggestions are spot-on - reckon it’s a combo of heat and power - thanks everyone for backing that up with some great analysis

[stix]

I dont know if this is of interest for you, but i would like to tell you my story

A couple of months ago i was a happy camper, i used my gfx card to watch movies and surf the net. Then Wolfenstein: Enemy Territories was released. I started playing it, a lot. And it was fun, life was good. Then one day the computer started to freeze, it would stall for a couple of seconds and then continue. I learned to live with it, it was annoying but it was still kinda playable. Then it got worse, the computer would freeze and freeze and freeze. I could play for a while and then the computer would either freeze for some seconds or hang up completely. So I realized something was wrong with it, i started to troubleshoot it and tried to change some things in my configuration, this is what i tried:

Reinstalled Wolf:ET three times
Changed detonator (44.03,45.23, and some other)
Upgraded Bios
Downgraded Bios
Added a fan
Reinstalled Windows 2000
Tweaked the bios settings (removed fast write etc)
Changed Wolf:ET gfx settings to a minimum
Installed directx 9b
Removed and reinstalled directx 8.1
Removed my soundcard
Changed the network card
Removed the network card
Reinstalled the ACPI drivers
Upgraded the mobo chipset drivers
Downgraded the mobo chipset drivers
Changed network cable
Got a 300w psu instead of my old 250w psu
Cleaned the GPU fan and confirmed that it was working
Removed the overclocking of my cpu
Removed the overclocking of my memory

After doing that i got sick of the whole thing and decided to buy a new computer. So I bought mobo/cpu/mem. The freezing was still there, and now there were yellow lines and pixelation aswell. Since i had changed the core of the system and had removed all external cards I realized the problem must be with the pny (probably the same card you have, pny 64mb ti4200) card. It was a surprise to me, seeing how both Windows 2000 and the TV-out function was working. So I started to search the net and realized i wasn’t the only one with these kinds of problems, lots of people had problems with the pny cards. And lots of people had tried some of the things i had tried without success.

So I decided to underclock it, some people had diagnozed it as the card being overheated and i had tried underclocking it with some success before. And i was kind of desperate. But this time i changed both the speed of the gpu (to 200mhz) and the speed of the memory (to 300 mhz). And guess what, it worked! Of course it’s not great, and the performance isnt anything like the performance i would expect from my system, but it works and i can go back to playing

But anyway, all my 3d apps froze, does yours do that aswell? If they do, maybe you should underclock and test, or maybe try another card.

[evilsock]

shit me - the defaults for a Ti4200 are this;

Core Clock Frequency: 250Mhz
Memory Clock Frequency: 513Mhz

I downgraded mine to 200Mhz and 450Mhz - I thought that was pretty aggresive myself and it still didn’t seem to have any effect on the problem - seriously, take your side-casing off on one side and direct an office fan inside and try playing wolf or ET - I know it sounds kind of flaky, but I don’t see a faster way to check this out as a possibility - sounds like you’re masking a heat issue by downgrading the Mhz so aggresively.

Do you have any forum links so I can checkout other ppl’s hassles with Pony stuff?

*edit - QMB Quake has problems as does Quake2 - I haven’t been arsed to check CoD (play once, throw away) or Halo (tedium) - 2D everthing is fine of course. - I’m going to try the fan thing today - I’ll report back my findings.

[stix]

yeah, i know that sounds reasonable, but trust me, i did thinik of that and added another extra fan/cleaned the builtin fan. I read some post where they suggested that there is a memory timing problem (whatever that is) rather than a heatrelated problem but i cant find that right now. Anyway, i’m no expert in heating/clocking, but

1. the card did work with my configuration for a couple of months atleast, why would a heat problem just appear like that?
2. if i use that card at default settings it would be odd a heating issue would occur when i changed all the other hardware.

Maybe your solution would mask a hardware problem rather than a heating problem?

Anyway, enough about me, i’m pretty happy the way it works right now. Have you tried running the dxdiag program that comes with directx? If you do and it looks sketchy maybe you can rule out the harddrive problem since that would indicate a 3d related problem. Or maybe you can’t but i think it would be worth a try.

I cant find the links right now but ill search and try to get back to you

[evilsock]

I experimented with memory wait states when I upgraded to PC133 memory sticks - I have them set to 2 as they have been for 2 years. My experience of this is that if your machine can’t handle it then at the point at which windows boots into a GUI you get a crash-reset cycleloop. If the memory wait-states are too aggresive when the machine boots it kinda stands to reason that this situation wouldn’t wait for a 3d game to be loaded before it started to cause problems - my guess is that this would be a general problem everytime you used your pc and from what you described in your post, it may well have contributed to your original problem - try setting your wait-states to 3.

BIOS default for the momery is 100Mhz (that’s what it expects by default)- I manually over-rode this to get the PC133’s working at their correct speed - again, it’s accepted that by doing this you will cause more stress on the powersupply and other pheripherals - all causing more heat.

The FSB is only 200Mhz and the CPU is an AMD Thunderbird 1.2Ghz overclocked to 1.4 - stable, but generates mings of heat.

Bottom line - I haven’t seen video problems like this before on my Ti4200 - I have deliberately pushed/overclocked an old Geforce2 to see just how fast it would go and stay stable - and guess what? It caused freezing problems and generated heat like you wouldn’t believe.

I can’t imagine a more stressful environment for a PC than 3D gaming tbh - maybe a really, really heavy graphical maths program, but isn’t that what a 3d engine is already?

My guess is that over time components become less effective and if like me you’re already pushing the machine very hard anyway, I guess longer-term it can lead to problems which is why I’m ready to try the fan thing, power-smoother combo just to see what happens.

DX checks out fine - it’s DX9 which I was wary about as my machine has been around for a while and I guess DX9 is built with newer hardware in mind. I probably wouldn’t have installed but for Halo’s insistance that it be present - prior to this I had a fixed working config set at DX8.1b - I work along the lines of’ install the right stuff and tweak to get stability’ - I don’t change things once they’re working well unless something shit like this starts to happen.

I have also reduced Hardware performance by dropping Hardware Acceleration to the ‘safe mode’ - in that DD is reduced to the minimum config that allows RtCW and ET to boot into their GUI’s - you might want to try that yourself as well as increase your underclocked GPU and core memory back to their defaults. DX9 was installed in November and hasn’t caused a major issue.

Final note -

I’m not saying your wrong and I appreciate the fact that you’ve gone to the trouble of sharing your experiences with me so I’ll take on board what your saying - I just can’t accept a solution which means defeating the rational for upgrading my video card in the first place - it’s only 14 months old ffs.

[Lagger]

this is a long shot, but i once had a problem with athlon, windows 2000 and 3d games and the config looks a lot like yours - http://www.amd.com/us-en/Processors/DevelopWithAMD/0,,30_2252_871_2367,00.html

hope it works

[evilsock]

Nice find Lagger - I checked it out and the DWORD wasn’t in there - I’ve added it now and will reboot, test and let you know. If this works out I’ll organise buying you a pizza of your choice with delivery

[evilsock]

Nice find Lagger - I checked it out and the DWORD wasn’t in there - I’ve added it now and will reboot, test and let you know. If this works out I’ll organise buying you a pizza of your choice with delivery

*edit - this ‘bug’ affect both Linux and Windows O/S’s - here’s some more detailed information on the who, why for anybody thinking of applying this .reg file;

http://www.geocrawler.com/lists/3/Linux/35/175/7626960/

[McAfee]

I have 768mb of ram and i don’t use the swap file (paging file), i have it disabled.
Windows can be very ridiculous about swap file size.
The more ram you have, the bigger windows will set the swap file.
IMO this should be the other way around.

In summary I have enough ram for the all apps I use. This is not the the case for everyone.
But if you can, try disabling the swap file. It should reduce Hard Drive usage considerably.

How to know if you have enough physical ram?
The windows task manager will tell you how much ram you are currently using, what is your LIMIT (physical+swap), and the PEAK usage per session.
So basicly go use a lot of hungry apps/games, and then go to the task manager and read the PEAK value.
Then you can decide if you want to lower or disable the swap file.
Just make sure your new LIMIT is not lower than your typical PEAK usage.

[evilsock]

Thanks for that also - I think for gaming sessions, I’ll turn off paging

Here’s the first results of applying the REG fix for AMD / Win2K - I managed to have Wolf and ET running MP modes together at the same time - Wolf is running a mod called WolfBot1.5 - I had four bots active on Beach Invasion and just little 'ole me on Radar for ET - notice the fucked up texture for the gun

It’s looking good - I’ll test it out tonight and see how it goes - Lagger, I was quite serious BTW - if this turns out to be the ‘fix’ I’ve been looking for (and I’ll post that up tomorrow) I will expect a PM from you stating the following;

What kind of pizza you want
A telephone number for a local-to-you pizza shop which accepts credit-card payment over the phone
A location you want you pizza delivered to and WHEN.

[Lagger]

sounds nice

[ToasterKing]

I was curious about this

b) Has anyone produced malicious code that updates either/or RtCW/ET executables in a backdoor, trojan, DoS style way?

From a security (I dont run an et server BTW) standpoint, how difficult would it be to package something like sub7 into a update file to be shipped out by a server. Have it run and auto-execute on your computer?

From there the server admin could grab your IP addy while your still in-game.

Any thoughts on this? Is it possable? I always worry about auto downloading files (yes i know, me and my grandmother both)

[Computertech]

I think you solved the problem by mentioning the lightbulbs have to be changed every month. That’s power spikes. Computers HATE power spikes and brown outs. It might have even damaged the motherboard. And now the motherboard is taking out harddrives. (YES, I have had a motherboard destroy harddrives before). Get a UPS unit on the computer. That will help out alot. The problem will be how much damage is done now. If you’re lucky, it’s just the harddrive. But it could damage the power supply and the motherboard.
You might want to consider (after getting a UPS) of upgrading or building a newer system…

[evilsock]

ok, update - RtCW and ET ran fine for 1 hour. Run seperately, RtCW ran and I haven’t yet had it crash whilst ET ran for about 40 minutes then crashed. The only difference this time was that instead of getting a 10ms audio loop and the machine lock-up, I now get a 1ms audio-loop that sounds like a testcard transmission .

I have an office fan currently pointed at the AGP card and as a result my web pages are ‘blurring’ about every 3 seconds (I counted), more or less in time with the fan - room temperature is pretty low also, I have a jumper on :/. The motherboard seems ok for now but interestingly, I can smell a faint wiff of electrical burnage - this might just be because very hot air generated by the card would normaly get sucked out of the backplate vents - instead this is now being forcefully wafted at some speed across (more or less) my face

I will be visiting an electrial shop tomorrow to see if I can get a smoother for power spikes - failing that, I’ve squared things with my Dad so I can ‘borrow’ his video card for reference.

Computertech - thanks for the sanity-check. I’m taking alot of heart from your optomistic assessment of the situation - joking - I was going to wait until 64bit processors were properly supported before I upgraded but I’m not so sure now. Why does this shit always strike when you least need it?

Once again, thanks to all for your useful, generous help

ToasterKing - there is a thread on here that bani started todo with sv_fps - if you read through it, you’ll find some links for a DoS style attack that a hacker can launch with compromised game servers - it’s fair to say that at the moment most game servers are wide-open to abuse. As for auto-downloading stuff, I have it turned off. If I need maps or mods I go get 'em from places I trust - no gameserver is worth losing all your data over in that way.

[evilsock]

ok - 3 hours later - no crashes - the office fan has proved it’s worth - I think there are three issues;

a) System Overheatiing - deffo - fan proves this
b) Component failure on the video card - maybe that’s why it’s getting so hot all of a sudden
c) Power Spikes fookin up my hard disks - spike smoother should sort this.

I think I’m going to get an Ultra-wide SCSI interface and disk to replace my current IDE drive. It’s not as expensive as an proper upgrade and I can just disable the IDE chipset which I think has been damaged.

Thanks to all for your valuable help - if there’s ever a such a thing as a UK RtCW / ET Public LAN party I’ll get the beers in

[Lagger]

sniff no pizza huh?