doveman

This is a strange one. I've installed Win 10 in a separate partition on my SSD and am booting between them with grub4dos using: title Win 8.1 (SSD) unhide (hd0,0) hide (hd0,1) root (hd0,0) makeactive chainloader /bootmgr title Win 10 (SSD) unhide (hd0,1) hide (hd0,0) root (hd0,1) makeactive chainloader /bootmgr If I boot from cold then they boot normally (well Win 8.1 certainly did, haven't tried Win 10 yet) but if I boot one then reboot into the other (or even just rebooting Win 8.1 back to 8.1 I've found), they both get stuck on the boot screen for about 40s before the animation circle appears. I tried enabling Boot Log, OS Boot Information and No GUI Boot in msconfig but that doesn't make it show the drivers as they load like Win7 did, so I can't see if it's getting stuck at a particular driver. Could you take a look at my traces please MagicAndre? I did a boot trace when it booted normally and another when it hung for 40s but looking at the xml I can't see anything obvious. The second trace overwrote the first .etl, so this zip only contains the second (slow) one and the two .xml files .https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B1fDI89phEESVmJuM0xtR3JyRE0/view?usp=sharing

Yeah, I'll give him the options and leave it to him to decide what he wants to do

OK, thanks. I'll suggest it to my brother but I doubt he'll feel confident enough to do anything more than stick a head cleaning disc in, so he'll probably just have to buy a new drive.

My brother's Liteon DVD drive isn't working properly and continues to show the same files even when the disc is ejected or changed. I disabled the Windows CD Burning feature in case that was causing it and rebooted but that didn't help. I killed Explorer and restarted it and it still didn't update, although it did a bit after that. Sometimes it does update but it's rather intermittent. My brother says the drive is spinning up as it normally would when a disc is inserted and instead it just makes a brief noise. Does it sound like the drive is knackered and needs replacing or is there anything else I can try first? If it needs replacing, can anyone recommend a good, reliable drive for ripping and writing DVDs and CDs? I don't think flashable firmware to remove region limitations and so on is as important as it used to be, as he has DVDFab Passkey software now for that.

Awesome, thanks. That sorted it out. Nice to finally put that issue to bed He still has an issue where PDFs don't open in IE11 and it just shows a black cross in the upper-left corner but I just uninstalled and reinstalled Foxit Reader and unticked the option "Open PDFs in Browser" so that they open in Foxit Reader when he clicks a link instead, so I'm not too bothered about that.

Still not working I'm afraid. The checksur.log doesn't identify any errors: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B1fDI89phEESQWEyZUdhWmdqaHM/view?usp=sharing (I had to copy the CBS.log file as it was locked and wouldn't let me add it to the ZIP otherwise, hence why it's CBS - Copy.log).

Thanks, I'll try that later.

OK, got them now. https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B1fDI89phEESWTRKWXdESFh4dkE/view?usp=sharing I thought I should hide IE11 in case it was preventing any subsequent non-IE related updates from installing but after hiding it and checking for updates, it didn't show anything so I guess it's already up-to-date apart from IE11.

Sorry, only just had a chance to try this. Well it cleaned up a lot of Windows Update files (about 3.75GB I think) and then I rebooted, even though it didn't tell me to. Trying to install IE11 failed again though. I forgot to collect the logs, so I'll do that next time I connect to his PC. I believe when he tried it before, it made him reboot and then went through the "Rolling back updates" procedure before booting and saying that the IE11 install had failed, whereas this time it just failed within Windows and didn't ask to reboot, so perhaps we're getting somewhere!

Well it seems my memory let me down. Next time I was over, I checked and it was set to UMA, not Sideport. As it hasn't crashed on UMA but did on Sideport, it rather suggests there's a fault with the onboard Sideport 128MB RAM. As the onboard audio has stopped working as well, it seems that the motherboard is slowly dying! Anyway, I've got the USB soundcard now so I don't need the onboard audio and the onboard graphics seems fine using UMA, so I can only hope nothing else stops working and the motherboard hangs in there for a couple of years at least. I did run Memtest and that completed three passes with no errors.

Yeah, that's what I already use and everything seems fine. I checked with my Mum today and she says it hasn't crashed in the last few days, since I set it to Sideport only, so it does seem to be an issue with using the system RAM (UMA) for the IGP. I guess I should do a Memtest overnight next but I'd have thought if the RAM was dodgy then it would crash regardless of whether I was using it for the IGP or not. There's also the issue of the soundcard stopping working. I might be able to test it in a Win7PE and see if it's a Win8 issue, even though there's a Win8 driver for it but I've ordered a USB soundcard anyway to get her up and running again.

I'm having a nightmare with this system I put together for my Mum. I'm re-using the Asus M4A785TD-EVO motherboard http://www.asus.com/Motherboards/M4A785TDV_EVO/ and Athlon II X3 425 CPU that my Dad was using as his own system until a week or two ago, when I built him a new Intel PC. I'm also using the 2*2GB Corsair Ballistix Sport 1333Mhz DDR3 that he used to use in that system until I bought him a 8GB set a year or so ago. I replaced the old noisy PSU with a new Corsair CX430 and installed a new Transcend 128GB SSD (no HDD). It's running Win8.1 Pro Update 2 x64. When I was building and testing it at my house, I didn't encounter any problems but within hours of hooking it up at my Mum's house, it had crashed with the screen covered in a mishmash of colours. I'm using the onboard IGP, which can be set to Sideport (to use the onboard 128MB sideport RAM), UMA (to use the system RAM) or Sideport+UMA, which is what I had it on initially, so that it could use the faster Sideport RAM and the system RAM if it needed more (the Sideport RAM runs at 1333Mhz, same as the system RAM, although it can be set to lower speeds in the BIOS). Then I changed it to Sideport only and a few days later my Mum reported that it had locked up again, so I changed it to UMA only. It turned out that it hadn't actually locked up, her mouse had just stopped working and unplugging it from the rear of the PC and plugging it into the front USB sockets got it working again but she reported she still had problems with it, so my Dad swapped his mouse with hers and didn't have any problems and she didn't have any with his, so they've swapped back now and it seems to be working (still plugged into the front socket at the moment). Anyway, it still locked up whilst on UMA, with the same colourful mess on screen. Once I saw it lock up with only a few smudges of colour, as we were doing Windows Updates and thought it was stuck on 0% until we realised it had locked up but most of the time it covers the entire screen. I'm losing track but I think I've set it back to Sideport only again now but I'm not sure if it's already crashed whilst on that or not, so I'll have to see what happens over the next few days. Occasionally, the monitor goes blank and then comes back on, which could be a problem with the monitor or the PC but it didn't do it with her very old P3 system she was using with Thinstation up till now. My Dad was using an ATI HD4650 512MB PCI-E GPU, rather than the onboard IGP, as he needed it for X-Plane but my Mum doesn't play any games like that so I was hoping the IGP would be sufficient for her. To top it off, the onboard audio has stopped working now! When I was testing it whilst building, despite having an HD Audio lead to the front I couldn't get anything out of the front socket unless I set it to AC'97 in the BIOS but it was working at my Mum's until the other day but now neither the front nor rear sockets are working. It's a VIA VT1708S, which does have Win 8 x64 drivers available, albeit quite old, one from 25-07-2012 and another dated 7-11-2012, which is the one I installed initially http://download.viatech.com/DriverDownloadSubmitAjaxSvl . My Mum's speakers are pretty rubbish but I plugged them into my phone and they worked, so it's definitely the PC. I've tried changing the drivers between the two and sometimes it seems to initialise with a thump (well, as much of a thump as flat speakers can make) and the right-channel will start working for a bit but nothing from the left one. I've disconnected the front panel header, just in case it might help but I did buzz it out when I was building just to make sure everything was connected and there weren't any shorts, so I don't know why it never worked when set to HD rather than AC'97. So I guess I'll have to buy a cheap external soundcard for about £8 (it seems rather hard to find cheap internal cards and perhaps an external USB one will be a better option anyway) and put the HD4650 back in. I'm a bit worried about how many things seems to be going wrong though and don't want to waste money or risk anything else getting damaged if there's a fundamental problem with the hardware that's causing all these problems. Temperatures are fine as I'm using a mini Ninja tower, which keeps it between 30-40c under normal use, so I'm not sure where the problem might lie.

OK, I seem to have fixed it by using the DP for the touchscreen and DVI for the U2412M, so basically swapping them over. Now I get the screen filled on 1920x1080p and touching the touchscreen only affects that screen as it should. Tablet PC settings now says the correct thing about each monitor as well. God knows why I had to swap the cables but hey, at least it's working now

I've just got a Dell P2314T touchscreen monitor (1080p) and have connected it in place of my old Dell ST2220M (1080p), as a secondary to my Dell U2412M (1920x1200). However, when I set it to 1920x1080 it only fills about 20" of the 23" screen, leaving a large border. I tested with a few resolutions and none of them fill the screen. If I boot into Windows 7 however, it fills the screen normally at 1080p. I had a look at Catalyst Control Centre and that looks the same in Win7 and Win8, showing under Desktop Properties all resolutions up to 1680x1050 under Basic and higher resolutions under HDTV. The U2412M doesn't separate them like this but that's probably because it's connected via DP. The other problem is that when I touch the touchscreen, it moves the cursor or scrolls the webpage on the other screen. If I go to Control Panel - Tablet PC Settings, it says that the U2412M has "Full Windows Touch Support" (it doesn't) and for the P2314T it says "No Pen or Touch Input is available for this display". If I click Setup, which prompts me to touch the screen if it's the touchscreen or press Enter if not, I do this to get the prompt on the P2314T and touch it (which shows a pulse on the U2412M) but it doesn't change what it shows under Tablet PC Settings or what happens when I try and use the touchscreen. I tried this under Windows 7 as well and had the same result. Anyone know how to sort either or both of these problems out, so that I can play with my new toy over the weekend?

Thanks. My brother is coming to visit for a week or so but I'll try that when he returns home and let you know how it goes.