PC Problem...

[Buffalobiian]

My brother installed a new mobo, CPU and RAM into his system today. He plugged it up, and pressed the ON switch.

Through the clear side panels, you could see the inside of the computer IMMEDIATELY smoke up (it filled the inside of the chassis and was blowing out of the back end.) Visible, thick smoke. Not the thin wisps of smouldering sizzle that you normally see with frying computer components. We turned the power off as fast we could, and I promptly went inside to look at what happened.

Everything looked fine except for this:



That's the molex-to-floppy interconnect that supplies power to his sound card (which was part of the original setup). A little read around the internet suggests this to be some form of short-circuit problem that put too much current into that 12v cord.

Then we've been trying to get the computer to boot. It goes through BSOD crashes and infinite-reboot cycles. I've currently got it running without crashing for 20 minutes now (we think it's the graphics card, since that's not plugged in atm...). Yet the graphics card was ALSO part of the initial setup.

I hate computer problems.

[Killa-Eyez]

Do you have a spare PSU? Try swapping them, see if that helps. I've found many problems involving crashes and infinite boots most of the time to be PSU related. My first post in this thread discusses the same. If that doesn't solve it, you have a long way of troubleshooting to go. Good luck.

[Buffalobiian]

Do you have a spare PSU? Try swapping them, see if that helps. I've found many problems involving crashes and infinite boots most of the time to be PSU related. My first post in this thread discusses the same. If that doesn't solve it, you have a long way of troubleshooting to go. Good luck.

I do, but I haven't gotten around to trying that yet. Reason is, right now the PC is working 100% fine. The only thing that's left now is to wait for a new floppy-power-interconnect to come through the mail from ebay to connect up that sound card to see if:

1) the sound card is still functional
2) the same problem doesn't happen again

It's not the first time where I've had a PC suddenly fix itself after a period of inactivity. It happened with my own one time when I accidentally dropped my thermometer onto the PCB of my graphics card while it was running, shorting stuff out and causing it to become erratic for ages. Then I slept, came back, and it was fine.

This time, I went to work, came back, and it was fine. :S

While that's good and all, this time I really would want to know the reason behind the problem rather than just have it disappear on me. It's a safety hazard.

[Buffalobiian]

Been having some issues with my new SSD from Intel. Here's what I wrote for the warranty application:

Entire history for your warranty. RA#

Item: Intel 510 250GB SATA III SSD

Applied: 15-08-2011 12:59 pm

Fault Description: Experienced stuttering from audio accessed from the SSD or other drives in the system. Also experienced crashes and reboots. DPC latency when using the SSD with Intel Storage Matrix driver results in latency up to 5000 microseconds when the SSD is accessed somewhat. Intel´s SSD Toolbox diagnostic tools reports Data Integrity Check failure. Emailed PCCG and filling out this warranty procedure was advised.

Hopefully I'm only unlucky enough pick a bad apple and the problem doesn't stem from something from my system/software or the entire 510 series.

What was very weird was that certain songs would skip even without a spike in DPC. They would also consistently skip at the same spot. I decided to do a test by copying the song over to my brother's computer, and it also skipped at exactly the same spots.

BUT - when I replaced the SSD with my original OS HDD, the songs played fine again. Interesting... so it's some sort of read error that's consistent, but isn't reflective of the actual data integrity..


edit: I guess I should clarify that the songs were always on the secondary HDD. The Primary SSD was swapped with the old primary HDD

[Kraco]

You said in the other thread you uninstalled the Storage Matrix driver to make the SSD work properly. I guess your system wasn't usable without it in the end since you now have it reinstalled? Isn't it just the Storage Matrix driver being buggy?

[Buffalobiian]

You said in the other thread you uninstalled the Storage Matrix driver to make the SSD work properly. I guess your system wasn't usable without it in the end since you now have it reinstalled? Isn't it just the Storage Matrix driver being buggy?

I uninstalled the Intel storage matrix yeah (which is used for the mobo's sata controller, not the SSD). That was to fix the audio stutter that was due to DPC latency spikes from the SSD being accessed. But then I noticed later that the sound files were experiencing the above problem which was not related to DPC latency, so I played around with putting the Intel controller's driver back on. I also experienced BSODs after changing the driver from Intel to microsoft's before, but that was most likely due to longer testing instead.

I'm using HDDs now at the moment with the Intel Storage Matrix, and it's been fine, so I've just left it that way.

So to answer your question, the current problem occurs regardless of whether the Intel Storage Matrix is installed or not. I'm unsure whether the current problem and the Matrix/SSD compatibility issue is related.

[Killa-Eyez]

To squeeze in between.

I got lucky. The friend who had the same laptop as mine had his kid drop his (by accident)! He gave me a call asking if I needed parts. I now have a fully functional laptop again. Yaay for me!

That was it.

[Buffalobiian]

Update: it seems that running the diagnostic tool from my HDD onto the SSD as a secondary drive doesn't detect any problems, but running the tool fro the SSD itself comes up with fails. This applies even after I reimage the SSD with a fresh copy of the HDD OS.. Anyway, it's in transit to the retailer now, so hopefully it won't take too long.

[Animeniax]

That sucks to hear your new SSD has been such a terrible experience, though hopefully a worthwhile learning experience and maybe bonding with your brother.

I went with a smaller no-name brand and it's been great success.

[Killa-Eyez]

Hmpf. Re-installed windows for the 2nd time. It seems that installing several other software makes Windows Update almost update no more. Keep getting error code 80072F8F after a while of really slow downloading and it then only installs updates that were finished downloading. If I retry it reports the error almost instantly.
I think the culprit is the new Eset Smart Security 5 RC.
If I do a clean boot with msconfig, Windows Update works fine. The only other things I have installed are all device drivers, Microsoft Office, Acer Webcam App, Adobe components and Winrar.

Edit: Uninstalled ESS 5 RC and installed 4 again, everything's working fine.

[Buffalobiian]

That sucks to hear your new SSD has been such a terrible experience, though hopefully a worthwhile learning experience and maybe bonding with your brother.

I went with a smaller no-name brand and it's been great success.

It turns out my SSD problem was caused by a 4GB piece of bad RAM. Ever since I upgraded my system with the (then new) CPU, mobo and DDR3 RAM, I've noticed that the computer was less stable than my old C2D rig. The most common things to crash were display drivers, firefox, Explorer etc. I've had Steam games tell me that the files did not maintain their integrity and needed to be redownloaded a few times in the past. I never tried troubleshooting it seriously because no one had any compatible parts for me to swap and confirm with. Only recently did my brother buy some PC parts - and even then the only thing swappable was the DDR3.

Turns out the SSD integrity check was much more stringent than even Memtest86+ or Windows Memory Diagnostic tool (which I have used in the past - and all results were satisfactory). It wasn't just the test result of the SSD integrity check that was a problem, but the system experienced the problems that I stated in the previous post as well.

Even that test wasn't 100% reliable though, so I ran in circles a bit during all this and needed to run the Integrity check multiple times on each configuration to be reasonably sure if something was stable or not. And since the full data integrity scan writes random data to the SSD and reads it back for checking, I think I would have written 10TB to the drive since last week.

34nm flash has a p/e cycle of 5000 or so I've read, so the current writes aren't too scary in the overall write endurance of some 1160TB or so.

[poopdeville]

Hey, I've got a bit of a problem. I think I've tracked down the solution, but I need a bit of help making it work. In short, can somebody download a driver for me? I think FTP access is blocked off where I am at, and could really use some help.

I need the Realtek RTL 8101E driver for Linux 2.4/2.6. The URL is

http://www.realtek.com.tw/downloads/downloadsView.aspx?Langid=1&PNid=7&PFid=7&Level=5& Conn=4&DownTypeID=3&GetDown=false#RTL8100E/RTL8101E/RTL8102E-GR/RTL8103E(L)<br>RTL8102E(L)/RTL8101E/RTL8103T<br>RTL8401/RTL8401P/RTL8105E<br>RTL8402

The file ought to be 40kB.

Thanks

[Marik]

r8101-1.020.00.tar.bz2 - Direct Download

[poopdeville]

Thanks Marik, that was a lot of help.

[Buffalobiian]

Does anybody experience, or know how to fix keyboard input delay?

Basically, it's a random, intermittent problem. As I'm typing something at a constant speed, the curser will not move for a fraction of a second, but then all my keystrokes will be applied at once. It pauses -> then fastforwards to catch up. No keystrokes are lost.. but the response is delayed. I'll try typing on a notepad or something later to see if it's just my browser.

I'm not sure if it's simply keyboard, of it it affects my mouse too. Sometimes I do find it weird that a mouse click won't register at all (not delayed) when I'm closing a tab or opening a new link etc.

I don't remember this problem being around before until a few weeks back maybe. I did get a new keyboard some time ago, but the problem wasn't immediately apparent. The only other new hardware addition/change would be getting an SSD for the primary drive. It wasn't immediately apparent when I changed neither, but I was so busy troubleshooting other problems that it could have easily been overlooked.

[David75]

This is some kind of freezing that did happen with jmicron and phison based SSDs
the cause was extremely poor IO with small writes.
Maybe you could track the cause in the event viewer by filtering everything related to disks writes/wait time?
Just to be safe, I'd protect valuable data.
Then I'd erase temp folders and try to clean the system from useless software or software I do not use anymore.
I'd search for software being permanently in ram and loading at startup when you do not need them there

Only then would I try and search for driver related problems and/or check all hardware is securely attached, like the GPU for example. But you'd get bsods in that case, normally.

So summ it up, try the event viewer, it's a tad harsh to get to it at first, but google can be a great help in finding the right filters to try and pinpoint the cause of trouble.

[Buffalobiian]

My controller's a Marvel one.. but I'll look into that. Now that you reminded me about the SSD, I just remembered that I bought some new ram that "fixed" my SSD problem. I also found out not too long ago that the SATA-clips won't work on my SSD anymore. There's nothing wrong with the cables since they work on all my other SSDs. Clip-attachment isn't theoretically essential to reliable drive function.. but it certain helps erase insecurities. It's as securely attached as I can to it, but it never feels secure enough, lol.

I'll try out the event viewer method once I take a break from anime/skyrim have time. ;P. Thanks David.

btw: a brief test with MSword and skype chatting didn't reproduce the problem. Typing this post up does.. and I think typing on mIRC did as well.. have to check up on that last one.

[David75]

Firefox related?
Then clearing firefox cache might help?
Is there a cache for mIRC?

You need quite some time to master the event viewer. So it might not help you for that problem.
But trying it, understanding it will help in the long run.

[Animeniax]

Wireless or wired keyboard? Could be the SSD controller like David75 said.

[Buffalobiian]

Wired USB keyboard and mouse using default MS drivers.