yep

anonymous_at_discussions.microsoft.com
Date: 09/28/04 

Date: Tue, 28 Sep 2004 09:25:36 -0700

To "I Like Toys & Cake" & Nathan...

all good suggestions...and I know I got a bit defensive
about the caps lock issue...its just that Im at the end of
my rope with this 4 month long troubleshooting marathon.

Youre right, despite all my troubleshooting I never
switched the hardware components other than Hard
drives...the reason is that I didnt really have any extra
hardware at my disposal (not anything less than 4-6 years
old, anyway)...so I resorted to and relied upon redundant
and thorough hardware testing using diagnostic and
benchmarking software...which as one of you pointed out,
is not fool-proof nor guaranteed to show every single
possible hardware flaw.

and as Nathan pointed out, my troubleshooting really
eliminated everything except hardware, which despite
success in testing,is looking like the main suspect.

BUT...

***I Have made some progress since my last post! Not 100%
solved, but about 80%...which has only served to further
confuse me as to what the problem is about.

Here's what happened....

First, the only thing that I have done so far (which I did
only yesterday)which had apparently solved the issue was
upgrading my BIOS

It might have seemed obvious, but since I was encoding
videos just fine on my old old BIOS version (version F4)
and then upgraded several months ago to F14 and never
encoded successfully after that (I hadnt needed to encode
video for months...in the middle of which I updated the F4
BIOS to F14, so I didnt BLAME the F14 version either)

Yesterday, I finally decide to pull a "Hail Mary" and
update to newest version, F15...

SUDDENLY, everything seemed to work....all the
applications that crashed with the same application errors
100% of the time each suddenly worked 10 times in a row
during testing of video encoding...long videos, short
videos, various formats, various source material and
material properties...etc etc...

I figured that it probably wasnt that F14 was bugged (F14
was the BIOS version which the problem started under),
since F15 only changed one small bit from F14...and it
wasnt the settings reset since I had tried every possible
CMOS setting combination in my troubleshooting steps...I
figured that perhaps MY particular BIOS had become
partially corrupted...that, coupled with some other
mystery ingredient (probably video driver related) caused
my application crashes.

~~~****Then, as I continued testing, I got the same
application errors on occasion (meaning once after 20
successfull encodings in a given application)...

I cannot tell you how broken-hearted I was to see that
error dialog box pop up after I had already did everything
to celebrate my victory except stand in the mirror with my
shirt off and flex.

Since I dont have the monetary mean$ to buy more RAM (I
wish I did cuz I need more), a bigger PSU (I wish I did
cuz I need one), or a better video card (I wish I did cuz
I need one), I am about to try another vga driver update
to the latest version (which didnt work before, but under
the new BIOS, who knows)...

Also, I am going to run through my CMOS yet again to try
tweaking one pertinent thing at a time if the vga driver
update does nothing.

after that, who knows....Im pouncing on my last bit of
patience as far as this issue goes...and now that its only
failing maybe 10% of the time, my testing just got much
much harder than when it was crashing 100%

as for the heat issue....thats something I hadnt thought
of until yesterday when someone in the other newsgroup
here suggested it...so I monitored the box and cpu heat as
the application errors happened (before my partially
fixing it)...all were normal...especially since I never
overclock anything (I cant afford to get cute with
hardware that I cant afford to replace if I burn it out)

thanks to you all...

If you think of anything else in light of what I said
about the 90% fix, please let me know...I really really
appreciate all of your help and advice

Relevant Pages

  • Re: Install PCI-E, blackscreen POST
    ... I am afraid to configure the bios setup to look for the video on ... the PCI-E card first because if I do that and the card is bad, ... How is this business about changing from integrated video to pci-e card ...
    (alt.comp.hardware.pc-homebuilt)
  • Re: Vic-20 inside a single FPGA
    ... semi-forgotten hardware tricks of video game and home computer hardware ... various audio, video and storage functionality. ... 1-5 Brief History of Home Video Game Systems ... 6-2 Character-Based Systems and User Defined Graphics ...
    (comp.sys.cbm)
  • Re: Wozu noch DOS?
    ... Die ganze Hardware auch nicht. ... Die Hardware initialisiert sich mit ihrem BIOS selbst. ... Wenn jetzt aber von DOS nicht jede Hardware über ihr BIOS angesprochen wird, ... Klar wenn ich mit meiner sich selber bootenden Software, ...
    (de.comp.os.msdos)
  • Re: Linux, X, ld, gcc, linking, shared libraries and stuff
    ... >> because, originally, video cards / system RAM could NOT afford to have ... > GL actually "copies" everything, but it's done by the graphics card, so ... > anyway if it's not hardware accelerated. ... installed the proper driver, then it zooms around the screen... ...
    (alt.lang.asm)
  • Re: BSOD windows...Think its video..going crazy. Done a lot of homework on this.
    ... goes black..video signal still being sent to the computer but no video. ... swapped video cards; ... played around with PNP vs. no pnp in the BIOS ... overclocking when I boot up after changing *nothing* in the bios. ...
    (alt.comp.periphs.mainboard.asus)