Crashing Win7

[pvelez]

Has anyone had any problems with Win7?

I've bought a dedicated Astros pc. It's small and fits neatly on my pier and talks happily via wifi to the big computer inside in the warmth.

I had a few drop outs yesterday and thought it was the wifi. Turns out the pc has been crashing - repeatedly. Midway through a Maxpoint run it simply restarted itself - 3 times in half an hour. I thought, must be Maxpoint - newly installed at the weekend. Then it crashed during a FocusMax calibration run. Add to that it dumped the connection with my QSI - once telling me the camera had malfunctioned. That was another 2 restarts.

So have I overloaded the pc or is it a Win7 thing?

Any suggestions appreciated. The family could do with less colorful language from me!

Pete

[RB]

What are the specs of your PC?

[asimov]

Originally I thought my crashing PC was Win7 related but it turns out it was hardware related. Hope ya get it sorted.

[pvelez]

Andrew

details are here:

http://www.fit-pc.com/web/fit-pc2/fit-pc2i-specifications/

Its very odd - the pc should have plenty of grunt to manage Maxpoint, Starry Night and Maxim all at once.

Pete

[supernova1965]

These spec's show three different possible spec's and the minimum ones would struggle with win7 so which ones does your PC have:question:

[pvelez]

I have the 2GHz CPU with 2GB RAM

Pete

[pvelez]

One suggestion I have had is that it may be a USB driver issue for Maxim. Have any of the QSI users encountered any problems like this? The pc is 32-bit

Pete

[Tandum]

If you go to control panel/system/admin tools and look in the event viewer under windows logs/system you might find a bugcheck report or something to tell you why. Look for red exclamation marks.

[tlgerdes]

I will place my bets in this camp as well.

I find Win7 rock solid. The only time I have ever had a crash was my own fault, removing a USB device while the system was using it.

I only reboot the machine about once a month, all other times it just goes to sleep and wakes up happy (wish my kids were as easy :lol:)

[pvelez]

Oh dear - just worked out how to access the Event Log. There is a sea of warnings and error codes. Some predate my use of the beast - looks like it was problematic from word go as the dates refer to 2010 - I guess this is the default when the OS is installed. This suggests its not a driver issue nor the result of anything I have loaded onto it which is good (I think)

All the errors and warnings relate to boot monitoring or setup monitoring

There are 2 possibilities:

1. Its a dodgy install - so I need to do a fresh install of the OS

2. There is a hardware problem - so it needs to go back to the manufacturer

I have left it an IT guru at work to try and make some sense of it

Will let you know what happens

Pete

[asimov]

I've got 4 laptops here running Win7 64bit & so far, having a really good run apart from the ASUS with the hardware problem.

I'll be interested in hearing what's up with yours.

[mithrandir]

Dodgy memory causes all sorts of crashes in random bits of code. Have your IT guru run memcheck (http://www.memtest86.com/) on it for a few hours, or even days, with it in a place where it can run as hot as it is ever likely to get when in use.

[pvelez]

Thanks Andrew

my IT man tells me that he tested the memory this afternoon and found nothing odd there.

Looks like a clean install is the next step

Pete

[pvelez]

I have both fingers crossed and am touching wood as I type this but...I think I have it all sorted.

The pc I have uses an integrated graphics accelerator - ie no separate graphics card. Starry Night Pro looks for Open GL 2.0 or later. The Windows default driver (ie software driver) only caters for Open GL 1.1. Luckily, I found a very newly released driver which allowed me to run the chip with OpenGL 2.0 last Friday.

I considered myself very clever - having found and installed it. However, it looks like it was causing my machine to crash. By running SN without Open GL activated, everything runs very smoothly. With it on - crash!!

So now I have the issue identified, I need to work out how to solve it. For the time being, I can properly test out Maxpoint - which seems to run quite nicely thank you very much. I can't run The Sky and TPoint (they require Open GL 1.5 or later) but that is something I can work on later - especially if I can find how to get the right driver going.

Thanks for all the suggestions. I am now happily imaging M16 from the comfort of the study - all on my bright shiny new pier.

Woohoo!!!

Pete