Help with a hard freeze

[Queue]

Within the past 3 or so months my computer (running Win98SE) has suffered hard freezes on me a few times. I didn't really think anything of it; I figured something was overheating (a little unlikely considering the hardware, but that isn't particularly important). Fast forward to this afternoon when I found (by pure accident) an easily reproduced situation that causes my computer to hard freeze and proceeded to test a whole bunch of possibilities.

Right off the bat I was able to determine, fairly conclusively, that it isn't an overheating issue nor is one of my hard drives failing on me. The issue isn't caused by RP9, Tiny Personal Firewall or Winamp 2.23 (the only abnormal things I have running in the background); I tested with and without all three. Malware isn't the culprit.

Now, to the test situation... it's unfortunately NSFW. I read a news article about controversy over a cinematic viewing of pornography at the University of Maryland, and curiosity got the better of me; I checked the Wikipedia entry about the movie and followed a link from there to the movie's homepage. Upon loading said webpage, my computer froze (completely, no mouse movement, ctrl+alt+delete wasn't functional, etc.). To avoid posting links that violate forum rules, here's a link to a TIME magazine article over the controversy:

http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,...-inline-sidebar

I was able to use this webpage to test a whole host of suspicions, all which came up negative. Sometimes my system responsiveness plummeted before totally freezing, giving me time to check hardware temperatures, hard drive responsiveness, GDI/user resources, CPU usage, etc.

- Browser didn't matter, both IE and Opera led to me totally freezing.

- RP9, Tiny Personal Firewall and Winamp being running or not all had no impact.

- Both hard drives were responsive (a past experience with a failing drive showed similar symptoms).

- GDI/user resources were largely free (over 60%).

The only real clue I have is CPU usage was at essentially 100% for whichever browser was in use leading up to the freeze.

Simply putting a heavy load on my CPU (or video card for that matter) doesn't cause me to freeze.

What's perplexing is a few times I've had the computer freeze (in the past 3 months) when under very different circumstances (as examples, playing Rockman7-FC and cheating at it using TSearch, playing Stick Ranger at dan-ball.jp, playing Warcraft 3). It's worth mentioning that of those 3 examples, they've each caused me to freeze only once out of quite a few uses. This system is 8 years old and has been running near 24/7, and I'm wondering if electron carry could have just taken its toll on my CPU, or if there's some means of diagnosing this situation.

Queue

Edited July 19, 2009 by Queue

[dencorso]

Queue, I've been to the site you indicated, watched the whole movie preview (which loads automatically when you access the movie's page) and also whatched a "back-stage documentary" offered there. In both cases there were CPU surges up to 100% and it kept at 100% for, perhaps, one full minute, before coming down again. But my system didn't crash. So, there really *is* something with your system, all right. Let's pursue it: download and install CPUBurn. Its automagic install (direct download link) is the only file you need. Now let it taste some five minutes of CPUBurn, in high priority mode (while keeping an eye on the CPU temperature, of course... if it gets too hot, stop). I bet CPUBurn will freeze your system in a SFW way, while telling us your problem really is with the CPU or with overheating. Then open the machine's case and run it again with the case open, for us to exclude overheating, OK?

Simply putting a heavy load on my CPU (or video card for that matter) doesn't cause me to freeze.

But I sincerely hope it doesn't cause you to freeze!!!

[Queue]

Alrighty, I gave this a whirl, for over 10 minutes. My idle temperature tends to be around 45C and CPUBurn got me up to a toasty 60C, but at no point did performance dip in the way caused by the website; namely, the mouse cursor remained 100% responsive (it moves jerkily before freezing when that website is loading, assuming it doesn't freeze immediately). My CPU is an Athlon 1.3 GHz, and has a critical temperature of 90-95C, part of why I've never been concerned over the CPU itself overheating.

I also ran Memtest86 earlier and it had zero errors after running through two full passes, so I'm fairly confident RAM isn't the issue (I have seen errors before on other computers using Memtest86 so am familiar with what RAM errors do look like).

I am ''glad'' to hear that website causes the same weird spike in CPU load for you as it does me, as it may be pointing to a software error that your computer is managing to cope with while mine isn't.

Any thoughts on what causes a computer to freeze completely rather than have program crashes or a blue screen? I've only associated freezes, really, with hardware failure, particularly overheating, but that really doesn't seem to be the case here.

Edit - More, potentially relevant information: checking RAM and swap file usage when loading the website showed nothing weird. Something like 3 months ago when the freezes started, I had replaced a failing IDE drive with a SATA drive (plus SATA PCI card). Like I mentioned, both hard drives (one IDE, one SATA) are fully accessible when the freezing starts which is quite different from when a hard drive is failing, so I've been ruling out them as the problem, but I suppose there's potential for the new card and drive to be somehow related to my trouble (though I'm less inclined to think that since you get a CPU load spike from the website).

Queue

Edited July 19, 2009 by Queue

[dencorso]

OK. Now, which Flash and Shockwave do you have installed? If you're not sure, go here to find out. The Shockwave version is displayed below the logo, while to see the Flash version you have to hover the mouse pointer over the "About" tab in the Flash area.

[Queue]

Flash 9.0.159

Shockwave 8.5.1

I think I got the numbers right. I'm not using KernelEx so don't have Flash 10. The version of Flash I'm using with Opera is slightly older and the same problem occurs.

Queue

[dencorso]

0. Back-up your system!

1. Update Shockwave to 10.2r22. Do not use a higher version.

2. Cross your fingers and navigate again to that NSFW site.

3. Let me know what happened.

[Queue]

El zilcho, rather, that website still makes me freeze.

Going to see if I can find an alternative heavy-load situation that makes me reliably freeze. I have a few games that bring this old system to its knees that should give me testing options.

Queue

[eidenk]

I think this website is as badly optimized as the girls' breasts, peaks at 50% CPU here in Opera, as for the silicone there is probably one ton of it alltogether, explaining the CPU load

[Queue]

So, I've been trying to sort things out systematically (well, even further).

- This computer's roughly 8 years old.

- For a good 7 of them, it was practically heat-proof. It's operated with ambient room temperatures of 90F+.

- Something like 3 to 6 months ago a hard drive failed and was replaced with a SATA card and drive. The card has an updated BIOS and drivers.

- Freezes MAY have started from that point forward, but I honestly don't recall them before the past couple months.

- The weather was cool up until a month or so ago, so if this new SATA card or drive is heat sensitive, that would theorhetically only have come up recently.

- However, I also got an AC unit for this room and have kept the temperature at or below 80F.

- When the computer freezes, sometimes a short random sound loop is played out the speakers, even when there was no sound playing up to the point the computer froze.

So, some more things to consider... could my sound card be related to the trouble since I'm getting sound when I freeze? maybe a conflict of some sort related to the SATA card?

I'm going to try disabling the sound card and testing, and then the SATA card (after I copy some stuff from D to C to test with =P).

Edit - Ok, so, with my sound card disabled, I haven't yet encountered a hard freeze again (it's been a half hour with conditions that usually freeze me in 2 to 3). Going to give it a little longer, then start persuing options on that line of thought.

Could my PCI bus be overloaded? I have 5 PCI slots and 4 are occupied: sound card, network card, modem, SATA card. Also, according to diagnostic software, my bus is running at 132 MHz (instead of 133). Could that sort of abnormal setting interfere with PCI card operation? I'll likely be removing the modem (haven't used it since 2002 or so to dial in when broadband was out for half a week).

Edit 2 - Possible success. I removed the modem, moved the sound card to where the modem used to be, and so far I haven't frozen even after going under extremely heavy load for an extended period (EverQuest, which was freezing me on its own, plus a flash-based streaming video in IE6, a second flash-based streaming video in Opera, Rockman7-FC, Photoshop 6; yes it all ran horribly, but everything was functional and I didn't freeze). I'm going to give it time though, as I had dry spells where I wouldn't freeze for a while (which is why I came here asking for help only recently even though I've frozen every so often for the past couple months). I'd like to point out, however, that removing the modem (which was sharing IRQ 11 with the sound card, on-board networking port and USB controller) and changing the sound card slot didn't change any IRQ assignments (at least under Windows), it just meant one less thing on IRQ 11.

Queue

Edited July 20, 2009 by Queue

[dencorso]

I think this website is as badly optimized as the girls' breasts, peaks at 50% CPU here in Opera, as for the silicone there is probably one ton of it alltogether, explaining the CPU load

@Queue: I think you've maybe hit jackpot! Look up in your motherboard's manual which slots share IRQs with which other slots. Then rearrange the cards, making sure the SATA, Sound and Video Cards dont share the same hardware IRQ (they are usually described as IRQ A, IRQ B, etc.). If you tell me which board and which SATA card you have I may get the manuals, take a look and propose an arrangement.

[Queue]

The motherboard is an ECS K7S5A.

The slots go:

Radeon 9550 (AGP) [5]

Empty

Network Card [5]

Sound Card [11]

Empty

SATA Card [5]

Current IRQs according to Windows listed in brackets, obviously different than the hardware defined interrupts for those slots. The sound card used to be down a slot and a modem occupied the slot it now does.

Since removing the modem and moving the sound card, I haven't frozen, but that's hardly a guarantee considering I'd had ''dry spells'' without freezing during the past months.

Queue

[Queue]

So get this, I do still freeze (quite rarely now, compared to before), but instead of the speakers screeching, I lose video. Conflict with the video card possibly? It ''feels'' like I'm onto something now though, so I guess it's time to try different patterns for the PCI cards being plugged in. The motherboard documentation doesn't list anything like hardware interrupts for the PCI slots, and it's an ACPI board so the PCI cards / AGP card all wind up on IRQs 11 or 5 (with lots of sharing).

So far:

10111x = Screeching

1011x0 = Lose video

(x = SATA card)

Queue

[dencorso]

Make a backup of the registry, before proceeding.

Although some machines do not accept disabling IRQ steereing, most do accept it. Let's give it a try:

Right-click on My Computer, Select Properties -> Device Manager -> System Devices -> PCI Bus -> Properties, select the IRQ Steering tab and uncheck "use IRQ Steering", click OK until you get back to the desktop and reboot

the machine. After you get back check to see what IRQ are assigned to the various devices.

If, however, the machine refuses to boot into windows, get into DOS, run SCANREG /RESTORE and return to the previous configuration. But I don't think you'll need to do this.

Good luck!