Crashing Win7

[pvelez (Pete)]

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 (Andrew)]

Originally Posted by 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.

What are the specs of your PC?

[asimov (John)]

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

[pvelez (Pete)]

Originally Posted by RB

What are the specs of your PC?

Andrew

details are here:

http://www.fit-pc.com/web/fit-pc2/fi...pecifications/

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

Pete

[supernova1965 (Warren)]

Originally Posted by pvelez

Andrew

details are here:

http://www.fit-pc.com/web/fit-pc2/fi...pecifications/

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

Pete

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

[pvelez (Pete)]

Originally Posted by 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

I have the 2GHz CPU with 2GB RAM

Pete

[pvelez (Pete)]

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 (Robin)]

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 (Trevor)]

Originally Posted by asimov

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

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 )

[pvelez (Pete)]

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 (John)]

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 (Andrew)]

Dodgy memory causes all sorts of crashes in random bits of code. Have your IT guru run memcheck 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 (Pete)]

Originally Posted by mithrandir

Dodgy memory causes all sorts of crashes in random bits of code. Have your IT guru run memcheck 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.

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 (Pete)]

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