my computer works fine doing absolutely anything, listening to music, writing stuff in reason, browsing the web, playing games or any combination of those at the same time. It has always worked fine with renoise as well, however with the most recent version (1.9.1) which i only started using last week, i have suddenly had a problem where my computer just resets randomly, sometimes this happens when loading, sometimes when recording, sometimes when playing, but most of the time it makes the file im working on corrupt and unusable .
Has anyone else had issues of this kind or am I going to have to empty my savings for new computerbits?
I had those kind of problems, turned out to be bad memory.
download http://www.memtest86.com/download.html and run the “long” test, cause the “quick” test didn’t find the problem for me.
that sounds like it would make sense, theres a stick of memory in my machine from an old machine which used to have crashing issues, unfortunately it is identical to one of the sticks in my computer at the moment and i cant remember which lol. I’ll run that memtest program and see what turns up, cheers.
in my experience random resets are a result of overheating. although of course, it could be anything. but if you are running renoise and VSTs its likely you are making your computer do some work, and therefore it gets hotter and it may do in other situations.
if you have a desktop rather than a laptop, one way to test if its overheating is to take the lid off the case. if that helps then overheating may well be the problem.
you can improve it by cleaning out all the thick dust which accumilates inside (a paintbrush + vacuum or some or one of the pressurised air-blowing canisters will do the trick). that might be enough, otherwise you may need to look at investing in a new case etc.
having a stable voltage from the powersupply can also make a difference i think. when i was having these problems i replaced the case with a good alluminium one, bought a quality powersupply, and some of those moulded rubber IDE connectors (to improve airflow). it made all the difference, the computer is an AMD athlon XP 2100, and its still running now which is fairly impressive given its age. although it has started crashing spontaneouly again recently. but i bet if i could be bothered to clean the dust out it would fix that.
Or just pull out one of your sticks and test with less.
Sometimes it might also help to switch dimms from socket as one of them may have a slight worse timing than the other that might cause problems when the gap area has to be filled. (this is when data is being devided across two physical memory banks and being called to a lot). If the dimm with the worst timing issue is in the last bank, this is less a problem than vice versa. In the last case the CPU has to wait a little longer on the other data.
Memtest brought up no issues, 0 errors after the full test.
When looking in setup, my cpu temperature is around 60, and my system temperature is 40, these are both fairly high, but the cutoff on my machine is set to 70 degrees, when it reaches this limit it emits a series of beeps and resets. but i havent had problems with overheating for a long time - i have 4 fans in my machine which all seem to be doing there job.
The other components in my machine which are perhaps suspect are the graphics card (second hand and ollllld), the soundcard (SB Live! which must be approaching 10 years old now), and the CPU, , an x86 barton core - amd 2500+. If the motherboard is the problem then i might as well take this oppurtunity to update to the latest level of technology but i dont really know how to test these other components.
Another thing that you could check, if you right click on “my computer” and select properties (I’m not in xp now so i’m not 100% sure what stuff is named).
Anyway, somewhere there, it’s a checkmark saying something about restarting after hardware failure (bsod).
I suspect that autorestart is on. try and see if you can enable bsod. Might say something about what’s causing the restart.
Beside doing what codec said to find out which driver causes the reboot, you may want to play around with your Audio and MIDI settings as well.
Its very very like that either your MIDI or Audio driver causes this issue. To find out if its the MIDI driver, disable all MIDI devices in the Renoise preferences.
To find out if its the Audio driver, try choosing DirectSound instead of ASIO or vice versa or choose a different driver if available.
Also sometimes a MIDI driver can crash the audio driver if they control the same device, so you might try to disable MIDI first…
Have you changed something in your (Audio/MIDI driver) setup lately?
i got IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL , which according to my google searches just means it is some sort of a hardware problem, not software. There were new drivers released for my graphics card a few days ago, so i have just grabbed them, and tonight ill see if thats made any difference… fingers crossed!
Also watch out for the driver module name that is listed there and try to google for it.
If its the GFX drivers, and you can not roll it back, try playing around with the “More compatible GFX updates” option in the Renoise GUI preferences. This uses (when enabled) a different, not so low level function for drawing which some drivers might have problems/bugs with…
I also have the ‘IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL’, but thankfully not when I’m tracking in Renoise. Fucking irritating though that the BSOD just globally depicts a hardware failure but doesn’t pinpoint exactly what unit causes it.
‘IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL’ - I got those BSODs more or less, when I had to deal with HDD issues the last time. On the other hand, this message doesn’t really must have something to do with the harddisk. Like Taktik said: Watch out for the driver module, if you encounter a bluescreen again.
Also a wise idea would be the try to narrow down to the faulty hardware. Pull out all additional hardware and only test one device after another possibly a stresstest. ie.: use a benchmarking tool for your graphiccard (or do some insane 3d gaming), use a hddchecktool directly from the harddisk-manufacturer, etc.
System Specs.
cpu AMD x86 2500+ (barton core)
ram 2GB (2x512 1x1GB) DDR PC3200 400Mhz
board MSI KT6 Delta
audio Some SB Live! piece of crap, in Renoise I use my PodXT as ASIO
gfx Geforce 6800 GT
os Win XP Home SP 2
mmm i should be getting a tax rebate in the next few weeks, so im looking at upgrading to dual core, 500gb sataII hard drive, and whatever ram people use nowadays, dont know what to do about audio card though, any recommendations?
(i would be really grateful for direct links to products on ebuyer or similar!)
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