The usual problems

Stan_Lite

Stan_Lite

Stan_Lite

Man of Honour
Man of Honour
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27 Apr 2004
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As usual, now that I'm at work, things have started to go breasts up at home. 3 out of my 4 rigs have been playing up incessantly for the last week and culminated yesterday in two of them having BSODs at the same time and the other generally being annoying. I've had my assistant Folder (my flatmate) fiddle with them and nursed them along for a bit but now the bedroom machine refuses to restart after it's latest BSOD and the gaming rig needing restarted on a daily basis. The other i7 hasn't been much better and has required restarting 3 or 4 times in a week.

All these rigs were working fine for weeks before I left but the Stan curse strikes again. My assistant Folder has rendered all 3 rigs "Not on" on my instructions and they will remain "Not on" until my return. The only rig left running is the media machine in the living room, churning out SMP2s on a Q6600. That'll have to do until I get back.

I'm going to be cutting back anyway as I'm on an economy drive now. I'll probably only be running my farm part time and some of it will be sold off. I'll be keeping the two i7s (obviously) and a low spec media rig - the rest will be going. I have no need for all these things and I'm tightening my belt just now as I want to get some money in the bank.

I'm not throwing another wobbly and "leaving" but I'll be on low output for a while until I get back and then on higher but still reduced output when I get back home. I haven't decided whether I'll run the machines while I'm at work in future or not. I may run them but at stock to reduce the likelihood of failures and see how that goes.
 
So...

When you are at home do you have to nurse them this much? I'd chuck in the towel if I needed to spend that much time keeping it all going as well! :(

How about setting everything to automatically start when it reboots? Then you don't have to nurse it, set it to reboot on bluescreen and then all you have to worry about is a solid lockup. Back down on your overclocks big time when you are away, run as much as a service as you can and if you can't e.g. VMware Player, just add a shortcut to the .vmx to your startup folder and set the machines to automatcially log on and lock themselves.
 
Biffa said:
So...

When you are at home do you have to nurse them this much? I'd chuck in the towel if I needed to spend that much time keeping it all going as well! :(
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Nope. I was home for 10 weeks last time because the rig moved to a new location and there were many delays before they were ready for us. During those 10 weeks, I think I had 2 BSODs and 2 lock ups.

Biffa said:
How about setting everything to automatically start when it reboots? Then you don't have to nurse it, set it to reboot on bluescreen and then all you have to worry about is a solid lockup. Back down on your overclocks big time when you are away, run as much as a service as you can and if you can't e.g. VMware Player, just add a shortcut to the .vmx to your startup folder and set the machines to automatcially log on and lock themselves.
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It's all set up to automatically restart. They're set up in the BIOS to reboot on power off in case of power cuts. All the clients are started automatically - I even went to the trouble of installing startup delayer to start the clients a minute apart as sometimes, with multiple clients, all of them starting at once confused Windows and some didn't start properly.

With normal BSODs, the machines would all restart and all the clients would fire up automatically. Yesterday, the bedroom one was stuck on the blue screen and the gaming rig was trying to reboot but was freezing at the Windows screen.

The future plan is to run only the two i7s and, when I'm away, they will be running at stock clocks to minimise the chances of stability issues. If that doesn't work, I'm going to BOINC :p
 
Stan_Lite said:
Nope. I was home for 10 weeks last time because the rig moved to a new location and there were many delays before they were ready for us. During those 10 weeks, I think I had 2 BSODs and 2 lock ups.


If that doesn't work, I'm going to BOINC :p
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So whats different between when you are there and as soon as you walk out the door. The stability should be the same.

BOINC always makes me think of these:
oobihopper.jpeg
 
Biffa said:
So whats different between when you are there and as soon as you walk out the door. The stability should be the same.
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I wish I knew mate. I can almost guarantee that I'll get home, switch them all on and have no problems for days or weeks on end :confused:
 
miniyazz said:
Do you shut the window when you go? etc.
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I do. I closed the window but shut the curtains and left explicit instructions to leave the door open. I also turned all the fans up full. Both rigs in the PC room are watercooled and I monitored them under those same conditions before I left. The one just doing SMP2 was at 65C and the other one, the CPU was at 75C and the GPUs at 48C. Even if the ambient temperature is higher than when I left, there should be plenty of headroom as far as heat goes. As for the bedroom PC, I'm not sure how that would react to the heat but from the blue-screen, I suspect it's the GPU that's at issue. It's an 8800GTX and it can usually still work while it's PCB is melting so I'm not sure what the problem is.
 
Plus freezing on the windows screen on reboot isn't going to be a heat problem unless a pump's died or some such thing, it hasn't even started trying then. Maybe you should invest in Microsoft's new error-handling OS, can't remember what it's called - Itanium's replacement. Instead of crashing, it pops up a little dialog box telling you something went wrong and sorts itself out :D
 
There must be something different between you being there and you being at work - other than a lack of a Stan. When you get home, I would try restarting the rigs under the same conditions as when you left them, and see what happens.

Have you fully investigated the cause of the BSODs through the Windows Event logs? You may be able to discern a pattern such as overheating or some other factor causing instability. When at home do the machines get periodically rebooted, for updates or other reasons? Apart from general use of these machines, is there anything you do to them that doesn't get done when you are away?

The minute you walking out the door and machines falling over is going a bit beyond bad luck, as this has been happening to you for a long, long time now. I really do believe something you are doing [or not doing] when you go to work is causing problems.
 
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