Windows collapsing overnight

iviv · 16 Jun 2008 at 23:40

Overnight I leave utorrent running, but in the morning when i come back to it, its always throwing up a few errors. Often the torrents have stopped because 'There aren't enough available system resources' and I am unable to run any programs, not even open the task manager, they all throw up errors.

I'll get solid details on the errors tomorrow morning, but any ideas? Done a full system scan with nod32 and panda online scan, nothing found. And I'd rather not have to format again.

markyb · 16 Jun 2008 at 23:45

Could be a memory leak from a program thats running.

First thing would be to strip down anything not needed in msconfig (Start, Run, msconfig)

- What version of windows are you running?
- How much ram do you have?
- Do you have a lot of programs running in the background?

iviv · 17 Jun 2008 at 00:21

XP, SP3 1Gb ram, and the torrents are runing from an external USB hard drive, if that matters.
And not any specific programs. Daemon tools usually, AV, that sort of stuff. As a base, I've ended pretty much everything in the system tray, and I'll see if I get the problem. They I guess just keep adding programs untill everybody dies.
Assuming its a memory leak

Whats running.

Thanks for the fast reply, I'll post results in the morning.

iviv · 17 Jun 2008 at 09:10

Right, woke up to one of the torrents having stopped (Error: Not enough quota is available to process this command.)

Tried to open task manager: The application failed to initialize properly (0xc000012d). Click on OK to terminate the application.
Tried to open process explorer: Windows cannot access the specified device, path, or file. You may not have the appropriate permissions to access the item.

However, I was able to open up notepad to make a note of these and save it. And in the process of doing this, the other torrent was hit by the same error as well.
So, a memory leak? And if so, what could be causing it?

bledd · 17 Jun 2008 at 11:11

do some memtests

possibly..

memory, hd cable, corrupt install (format), hd

i'd test in that order..

Dolph · 17 Jun 2008 at 11:21

Firefox and some of it's addons are known for memory leaking issues, although many of them have been blocked up, it's one of the things FF3 is supposed to finally fully fix.

http://www.danbyron.com/blog/2008/01/12/major-firefox-memory-leak/

Contains a workaround for the most common one (the minimize/maximise one)

markyb · 17 Jun 2008 at 13:19

bledd. said:
do some memtests

About to suggest that. Try mem test just to make sure you have no memory problems.

The errors you are getting normally relate to ram issues.

iviv · 17 Jun 2008 at 20:25

I'll try the memtests, its a laptop so I don't think the HD could be loose. I'll memtest overnight, see if it throws up any errors. Hope not

And I only had Firefox open because I was writing this thread when I took the screenshot, I don't have it running overnight.