My computer now does this bizarre thing, but it seem to be unrelated to Nexuiz.

After it has been on for some time, all of a sudden the mouse is paralyzed, and it shuts itself down and turns itself off.

My brother thinks it is overheating, but doesn't really know.

This is with XP Home Edition, btw.

Also, if I need to take it in for service, what would be a good way to hide or encrypt sensitive information?

A good virus scanner is also quite handy in such cases

System specs?

Download Speedfan (or MBM but thats not as thorough) and set it logging temperatures and voltages. Then play until the machine locks up and reboots. Examine the log file for bad temperatures. You should disable Speedfans fan modulation features to do this.

Post any temps you find along with idle temps.

Athlon's can take about 90C although most systems will have safegaurds below that. My Shuttle shuts down at 75C for instance, I tested that once by purposefully disabling the CPU fan.

Another possibility is the computer shorting out. This is possible when thermal paste bridges the contacts around the CPU core. It can be terminal.

Also, if I need to take it in for service, what would be a good way to hide or encrypt sensitive information?

Virus:
agree esteel - sounds Trojanish - virus type of thing.
Full scan with reputable AV program first thing. if at all possible, your dodgy drive shouldnt be the one running the AV, if its tied a bad .dll to a windows process, itl have trouble removing it if your drive is actually running as the OS.

Hardware:
you could try a stress test program. see -> http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/

If it is a heat problem its usually when your busiest, or graphically intensive.
If thats the case, amongst other things like cleaning dust, crap, from heatsinks, checking fans and airflow, check the CPU to Heatsink joining.
bad contact or poorly applied heat transfer compound and you get glitches all day everyday.


sensitive data :
It depends on whats sensitive.

Windows stores data all over the damn place. its very hard to cover up sensitive data. just a few basic utils and i can have all your (deleted) photos recovered, as well as documents, websites, passwords et al. and not just from the filesystem. The slack space and registry have residual info too.

You're quite right to be wary of this stuff. Technicians are renowned for looking where they shouldnt..

have you an old hard drive you can wipe and then re install a basic Windows on that?

My brother ran a virus scan, except it didn't turn up anything relevant. However, the dodgy drive was indeed the one running the virus scan.

We don't have any spare hard drives. At one time, we did have some 4 gig hard drives from an obsolete pc, except those were rather ...violently dissassembled, you might say. Oops.

As for sensitive information, it consists mostly of downloaded music and pornography, some of it tremendously disturbing.

I'll run the heat testing stuff and tell you how that went.

I'd open it up and see if I could clean it out or see if it needed heat transfer paste, except that opening it would void our warranty and service plan.

Here are my system specs from the "If 1.5 doesn't run well..." thread.

Win XP Home Edition
2800+ AMD Athlon XP processor
512 mb DDR SDRAM at 333 mhz
Nvidia GeForce 4 MX
160 GB Hard Drive

some of it tremendously disturbing.

yes, i know, Status Quo and the like. Get caught with that and you're well in the shit

re the Processor, if you havent had the heatsink off, to change cpu or anything, best not to mess. it really is a last resort, and usually happens if you've had the thing to bits.
i had overheating probs, highlighted funny enough by the Nexgun intensive maps. now have a Desktop fan tied to the side of the case, where the metal side panel used to be that and anothwer 512M of ram , sorted it out.

Shit I'm sure I already know that problem. It's too easy iirc. Not really serious and no virus.

Have to call it into mind..... wtf

Okay sometimes this happens with a cordless mouse, if You got one You shouldn't use rechargables or cheap batteries.

But there was another one, a laptop, something else...

sorry, I tell You when I called it to mind again.

No, I don't use a cordless mouse.

*Sigh*

I still use a corded ball mouse. It's terrible, especially since I don't have a mousepad. I'm going to run some diagnostics in a minute here, and see if I can get any useful results.

EDIT: Ok, here is Speedfan.




Temp1 and Temp2 hold fairly steady. Temp3 is extremely erratic and ranges from what you see to about 54 degrees.

-31 C.. thats kinda.. lol..

Somewhere somethign is wrong.

Hm.

Now Temp1 is a degree higher.
Temp 2 is two degrees higher.
Temp 3 seems to have stabilized a little and varies between 35-51, with a recorded mean of 49.1 and a max of 71.

Ok, this infernal contraption looks like it can go about 5-6 hours before it paralyzes the mouse and shuts down.

I forgot to enable logging. Doh!

The first time it shut off today, the temp readout in the task bar said 0.1. I immediately restarted, and I had just enough time to start up SpeedFan and open a browser window. I pulled up Speedfan, and I got to watch it as the computer did the routine again.

All of the numbers seemed normal at first. CPU usage didn't do anything interesting, and neither did the temperatures until the end. At the end, all of the temperatures went to -1 degrees, and did not match the readout in the task bar.

Does anyone else recommend any tools?

kozak6 wrote:Does anyone else recommend any tools?

You have nforce chipset, what motherboard?
Try this: NVidia nTune

Not sure which sensor is the third one for your sys, either on the mobo or rare times in your PSU. Is your motherboard BIOS updated, and is your video card BIOS too?

[edit: it could be an SMBus error, maybe try installing nForce Drivers?

nTune won't log as much as Speedfan but will allow you to comapre the two programs and confirm which sensor is which.

Temp 1 is going to be CPU. That 51C at idle is quite high. What does it get to under load?

Temp 2 may be PWM or system ambient. Mid fourties is acceptable for both both under load what will it reach?

Temp 3 looks like the thermistor has an offset. This is because some thermistors are incorrectly calibrated and then have an offset applied in the BIOS. Speedfan reads from the thermistor directly and hence gets the wrong temp. If you can identify what the real temperature it is that you are reading then you can set up an offset in Speedfan.

A temperature range of 100C is a lot and I would be worried about it if the temperature readings are accurate.

Geforec 4 MX's do not have temperature sensors, if they did you would have 2 temperatures from that in Speedfan. Anyway, your problem is inconsistent with graphics card overheating.

Have a look at the voltages logged before a crash. If they fall off then it is possible that your PSU simply can't put out the power.

The symptoms are also consistent with a loose molex lead somewhere, I'd check them all.

First of all, enter the BIOS. Somewhere must be some temperature and fan cotrols.

There must be a setting on what temperature Your system shuts down automatically (at least most of the BIOSes privide this featuer).

I would suggest to set it on a quite high level so You can assure this value is high enough for the system not to be shut down too early.

Then go on with speedfan.

Another thing is: open Your case, clean the inside carefully with a hoover, and if You have one, blow some air into it with a fan. Watch if it still shuts down.

I can't find the reciept, so I can't tell if it is still under warranty or not, and the store I bought it from makes every effort to be as unhelpful as possible.

To open the case would involve breaking a seal, which would void the warranty and service plan. I would love to open it up and clean it out, but it looks I will have to delay it until I can find the reciept or trick someone at the store into determining the vailidity of the warranty.

It's tremendously frustrating, as now the infernal contraption now shuts itself off after about an hour of operation, and the school's computers are horribly infested with all means of spyware and adware, requiring sometime betwen 20-45 minutes of work to make them useable.

And of course, I have two large essays due tomorrow. It looks like they are going to be a little bit late.

kozak6 wrote:I can't find the reciept, so I can't tell if it is still under warranty or not, and the store I bought it from makes every effort to be as unhelpful as possible.

To open the case would involve breaking a seal, which would void the warranty and service plan. I would love to open it up and clean it out, but it looks I will have to delay it until I can find the reciept or trick someone at the store into determining the vailidity of the warranty.

So you are not sure if it is under warranty, but you are afraid to void the warranty?
If you have made certain that malware is not the culprit by using up-to-date virus and spyware detection (try an online scan), you should still try running a Live CD of another OS, like Ubuntu, to determine if the problem is software-based at all.
If your computer still does not like to stay on, then hardware probably is the culprit. How long have you had the machine? Unless you purchased an extended warranty, you could have a standard warranty of 90 days.

Dave wrote:

kozak6 wrote:I can't find the reciept, so I can't tell if it is still under warranty or not, and the store I bought it from makes every effort to be as unhelpful as possible.

To open the case would involve breaking a seal, which would void the warranty and service plan. I would love to open it up and clean it out, but it looks I will have to delay it until I can find the reciept or trick someone at the store into determining the vailidity of the warranty.

So you are not sure if it is under warranty, but you are afraid to void the warranty?
If you have made certain that malware is not the culprit by using up-to-date virus and spyware detection (try an online scan), you should still try running a Live CD of another OS, like Ubuntu, to determine if the problem is software-based at all.
If your computer still does not like to stay on, then hardware probably is the culprit. How long have you had the machine? Unless you purchased an extended warranty, you could have a standard warranty of 90 days.

Shit.. I'm glad I live in a country with socialistic history.. For private consumers standard warranty is 2 years, and your right to complain of fabricationaly disfunctions is 5 years. Both of these wich manufactureres and resellers cannot shorten with special sales-agreements..

check the condition of the intake fan on the PSU and any grills that let air in..
if its full of dust, fluff etc, likely the inside of the PC is too.
if so, maybe get a vacuum hose with the hairy brush and just clean the vents out as a starter.
ive never heard of a pc Case being warranty sealed. would make me suspicious theyre tryna hide something. how the heck do u upgrade anything, or even check the PC has what it says it has by way of hardware?

kern wrote:ive never heard of a pc Case being warranty sealed. would make me suspicious theyre tryna hide something. how the heck do u upgrade anything, or even check the PC has what it says it has by way of hardware?

for some "brands" it pretty common to warrany seal the case. "void if broken", and its crap, but that make syou loose your warranty when you install hardware of your own...

But annother thing? what hardware can you possibly have that you cannot find thru the system without opening the case?

Well, I have good news, excellent news, bad news, and worse news.

The good news is that we managed to find the receipt, and it is indeed still under warranty. We are going to take it in sometime in the next few days. The excellent news is that we are also going to have a gig of RAM installed, which means I might finally be able to get 1.5 to run well.

The bad news is that my brother got on the computer to back up some things, and that now the computer won't even go to the log-in screen. The worse news is that I didn't have time to back up or hide certain things, and there is a chance they might run across some things.

Most of the horribly disturbing items were already renamed and tucked away, so there is a chance they won't be ran across. I'm still worried about the gigs and gigs of downloaded music, and the less disturbing and more conventional ...files.

If you still have the option (on other computer) you could download knoppix: http://knopper.net/knoppix/
Its a live/rescue linux CD what is easy to use and very helpful in such cases. It runs completly off the CD so it will not touch your system. At least worth trying.

Nope, no option. The infernal contraption can't even make it that far. I guess we just have to roll the dice of fate and see what happens.

So what do we learn? Get urself an external HD in sufficient time and be safe

PS: IMHO a decent VGA would be more effective for Nexuiz than more RAM btw.

Urmel aus dem Eis wrote:So what do we learn?

Never let your mother touch your PC!

Well, the computer was finally taken in for repairs.

Also, there has been a slight change of plans. We are only going to have 512 megabytes of RAM installed instead since it is apparently a lot cheaper.

Now, I didn't get to talk to the technicians, but apparently, Ed's guess is the closest. I was told there was something screwy with the voltages or some such thing, and that they are going to replace the power supply and the motherboard. I think.

I was told it should take about a week for them to repair it.

Yep.. that sounds like commercial support.. one week to do a 20 minute job

Apparently, they have to order some parts.

It could be worse, really.

Previously, it took them a week to replace a bad hard drive.

kozak6 wrote:It could be worse, really.

Previously, it took them a week to replace a bad hard drive.

hip hip hooray for patient clienst

Well, I finally got my computer back.

We only had 512 of RAM installed since it was significantly cheaper, and we also blew it out with the air compressor (they wanted to charge $20 to do it), and we also installed another fan.

Just in time for summer vacation, too. I started hooking up my consoles out of desperation.

Oh goddamnit.

They done fucked up.

Sound only plays through the right channel, and whatever the hell they installed has a wimpier processor, a 1.25 GHz one instead of the 2.08 GHz one that it is supposed to have.