vorlonagent

Since I5, a RL freind's machine has been experiencing a lock-up after 20 min
or so of gameplay. I'm not sure what's up. Has anyone else had problems
like this?

General specs:

1.8 GHZ Athlon 64 (socket 939, not scoket 752)
1 MB of memory
WinXP (has all updates)
Geforce 6600 (I forget which flavor), PCI Express.

The system had a virus on it,and I couldn't get it completely off the system
so I reinstalled Windowes XP from scratch, getting all updates except .net
framework, downloading the latest drivers from nvidia, updating the
motherboard bios.

Getting into bios as fast as possible after a lock shows the processor st 37
degrees. I've seen it lock in combat as well as with characters standing
around.

The odd thing is the kids' Toontown Online exhibits the same behaviour, so
I'm tending to think hardware issue not I5 issue, with the Geforce 6600 at
the top of the list of suspects.

Anyt thoughts. I can get better specs if it will help. I'm just toaaing
out what I remember.

Thanks for any help,


--
John Trauger,
Vorlonagent


"Methane martini.
Shaken, not stirred."

chat: @vorlonagent

Vorlonagent (M), level 32 Blaster (Electric/Energy), Guardian
RolIing Thunder (F), Level 26 Defender (Storm/Electric), Infinity
NightfalI (M), Level 18 Defender (Dark/Dark), Pinnacle
Steel Night (M), Level 17 Tanker (Invulnerable/Super-Strength), Virtue
lmpact (F), Level 17 Blaster (Gun/Energy), Virtue
Pulsar Staraven (F), Level 17 Controller (Grav/Rad), Liberty
MC-2 (F), Level 16 Blaster (Force/Fire), Protector
Girl at the Bar (F), Level 14 Controller (Mind/Empthy), Triumph
Faraday Facade (F), Level 14 Controller (Illusion/Forcefield), Justice

xocyll

"Vorlonagent" <jt@otfresno.com> looked up from reading the entrails of
the porn spammer to utter "The Augury is good, the signs say:


The obvious question at this point is:
What did you do to get rid of the virus before reinstalling?
If there's an infection source on the system it may have been reinfected
immediately upon reinstall.

37 degrees doesn't sound particularly hot for an AMD cpu.

You'd really need a hardware monitoring app (if the bios supports it) to
see the real temps, since rebooting WILL give the cpu time to cool down
a fair bit.

Ok, you've now listed 2 games, both of which are online.
Does the problem exist with games that aren't online?

If it's just online games then the problem is likely in the net
connection somewhere.

Xocyll
--
I don't particularly want you to FOAD, myself. You'll be more of
a cautionary example if you'll FO And Get Chronically, Incurably,
Painfully, Progressively, Expensively, Debilitatingly Ill. So
FOAGCIPPEDI. -- Mike Andrews responding to an idiot in asr

vorlonagent

First a scan from Trend Micro's site.

Then three successive scans using AVG. Third didn't show anything.

Every time the computer started there was an instance of iexplore.exe that
was taking 99% (probably 99.99%) of processor time. The system was slowed
to to the point of near-stall. There was 20-30 sec wait between a
ctrl+alt+del and any response)

When reinstalling WinXP, the existing NTFS partition was deleted and
reformatted the long way.

The machine does not exhibit the previous iexplore.exe behavior after WinXP reinstall.

I know. I figured I'd see *something* and did NOT figure I'd see the full
operating CPU temp. The final time, I hit the reset and got to BIOS in
under 10 sec from lockup. I figure that would have to show SOME temp change
and it didn't.

The MB manufacturer doesn't have any monitoring software. I'll look at
3rd-party stuff. Any suggestions?

No known instances. But then they just discovered CoH a month ago and not
much else has been played. The problem itself is less than two weeks old.
They did have a few recent game demos installed. I'll get them to reinstall
and play around with them At the moment there's nothing on there more
intensive than StarCraft.

I did notice that Spybot Search and Destroy was having a hades of a time
getting all its updates after reinstall.. It would download some updates
fine and others it would just sit there with the progress bar showing
"finished" for a few min. Then report a checksum error. Nothing else
(including the update after reinstall of CoH) seemed to have problems
however. I had CoH verify itself too.

We have options there too. They have a USB-based wireless networking device
for the kids' machine. I can transfer it to the main machine and disconnect
the on-board ethernet card and see if CoH freaks out.

Thanks for the suggestions.

--
John Trauger,
Vorlonagent


"Methane martini.
Shaken, not stirred."

chat: @vorlonagent

Vorlonagent (M), level 32 Blaster (Electric/Energy), Guardian
RolIing Thunder (F), Level 26 Defender (Storm/Electric), Infinity
NightfalI (M), Level 18 Defender (Dark/Dark), Pinnacle
Steel Night (M), Level 17 Tanker (Invulnerable/Super-Strength), Virtue
lmpact (F), Level 17 Blaster (Gun/Energy), Virtue
Pulsar Staraven (F), Level 17 Controller (Grav/Rad), Liberty
MC-2 (F), Level 16 Blaster (Force/Fire), Protector
Girl at the Bar (F), Level 14 Controller (Mind/Empthy), Triumph
Faraday Facade (F), Level 14 Controller (Illusion/Forcefield), Justice

nathan engle

If your friend resets and reboots without letting the system
cool down, is the length of time until lock-up the same? (i.e.-
can it be demonstrated to be a thermal problem that happens
reliably once the system has reached a certain temperature?


Presumably 1GB rather than 1MB - I'm not sure where you'd FIND
1MB to plug into an Athlon these days.

37 celsius isn't particularly hot for a CPU. And unfortunately
without a good thermocouple sensor it's hard to measure what's
happening on the video card. Your hunch about the video card
has merit, albeit difficult to prove without a spare to plug in.


--
Nathan Engle Computer Support, IUB Psych Dept
nengle@indiana.edu http://mypage.iu.edu/~nengle
"Some Assembly Required"