Computing

So I guess I’ll be going extreme.

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After taking out my video card I got rid of the black screen issue. I’ll be doing an RMA on the card so I can get a new one (hopefully one with some nice shiny hynix). I still have an issue at startup though where it locks up and makes a high pitched scream through my speakers. Pressing reset doesn’t work either when this happens. I’m thinking the motherboard might have some issues with it. One of the things it likes to do when it restarts is verify the RAID over and over again. Which is strange because the stuff I have isn’t on the operating system. It’s weird.

Since I have my tax rebate though I’m thinking about just upgrading to a hex-core processor and an extreme series motherboard. I mean I already have the R9 290. I might as well go complete balls to the wall insane. Well, maybe not insane. If I was insane I’d go with the newly released R9 295X2 which is basically 2 cards in one with a slightly higher clock speed. I’m happy with just the 4 gigs… For now. 😛

On another note I got another present from my evil friend Yutram (I’m only responsible for 50% of the evil). Hentai Octodad Dadliest. That game is much more difficult than I thought it would be. Can’t wait to check out what people created for it in workshop. 😛

Fact: Video capture hates me.

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I learned something tonight. I seem to crash on any video capture software. ANY. First FRAPS, then liteCam and anything else I throw at it (including MSI Afterburner which wouldn’t even record anything). I uninstalled afterburner and sure enough I haven’t crashed since.

Now I’m starting to think that the VRam on the card (Elpdia) might be an issue. After some more research I’ve found that cards running Elpdia RAM are more likely to have issues (not all of them, but a lot) whereas cards with Hynix RAM are less likely to have this problem. Unfortunately this isn’t something you can choose yourself with any card (including NVidia), it’s all luck of the draw.

There’s a few more things I can try. Reinstalling FRAPS and making some tweaks in Catalyst Control Center (or just uninstalling it and leaving the base driver) are options I can try. But I have a bad feeling it’s the VRAM that’s plaguing my computer.

The post I was too tired to title.

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I’ve run the computer for the last 3 days without a crash. I think tomorrow I’ll add FRAPS back then and only run it when it’s needed as opposed to letting it run at all times. That should be fine until I find a more up to date alternative that I can use.

I looked into liteCam and I have to say I wasn’t really impressed with the trial. It crashed mumble constantly, wouldn’t exit games properly and even in one case fucked up texturing in a DOS game (Tomb Raider). If they improve it down the road I might look at it again. It has a lot of nice options and potential there that could be used, but at present it’s not what I’m looking for.

I might look into using MSI afterburner again and see how that goes.

FRAPS and my R9 290 might need to get a divorce (plus some PAX drivers).

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Despite the reinstall I managed to get more black screens of death yesterday. I was ready to RMA my card in, but then I decided that since it was a fresh install of Windows 7 and I had only so many things installed I could do a process of elimination. What was one of the last programs that I installed? FRAPS.

I uninstalled FRAPS and left the computer on all night without any crashes. I’m even on the winter drivers for AMD which are more sensitive to crashing and nothing has happened. Could it have been FRAPS running in the background causing me grief the whole time?

It wouldn’t surprise me actually. I’ve been back to their website a few times to see if they’ve pushed any updates. Their last update was back on February 26th… 2013.

I find that odd considering in the past they pushed out updates more frequently. In a years time there have been a lot of new video card releases and driver updates, plus games update a lot which require outside companies to fine tune their software in order for it to work with the latest bleeding edge tech. I remember an issue I had with filming any newly updated Source game, and I had to update my copy of FRAPS in order to start filming again. But now, since it looks like the beepa team has fallen off of the face of the earth pretty much, I’ll have to look into something like liteCam.

Update

It seems another possibility for crashes might be the latest PAX audio drivers. Removing FRAPS stopped the lockup’s but continued to fall in and out of black screening and fractals. So far it’s much more stable on an older set.

Results so far.

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Well, I’m up and running on the new Win 7 install. I’ve decided to run it as a test though since one way or another I’ll be migrating my Windows OS drive over to an SSD in the future when there is a nice sale. So far I’ve only had one issue where after restarting the system locked up while making a high pitched squelching noise. At least it wasn’t a blackout. I’m going to leave this running while I’m sleeping to see if it triggers anything (that and I need to repair the RAID anyway).

I’ll head back into the old install later so I can work on a few things. But I’ll mainly be using this install, beating it up accordingly until I can confirm everything is fine.

Oh, and happy weekend to me. 😀

*snap* back to reality

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Enabled the ASMedia controller yesterday and everything seemed fine. Then tonight I got a random black screen while typing a response on another blog. Fuck it, I’ll just torch the OS and start fresh. I hate going through Windows Update Hell but if it has to be done then it has to be done.

So I guess I get to resurrect this photo:

computerwork

Oh well, time to reschedule it I guess. 😛

Computer status update.

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Well, I guess I can cancel my reinstall of Windows for now. Still haven’t had any crashes, and I’ve even enabled my ASMedia controller tonight since I’m pretty sure I’ve nailed what the culprit was. I think tomorrow I’ll plug in a hard drive into the hot swap bay and see if it throws a shit fit.

I had a pretty busy-ish evening after work, so I didn’t have time to really write about anything (or work on anything for that matter). Will try and post more later today/tomorrow.

No crashy?

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I got my Logitech F710 a few days ago, and I plugged it into my main system to test. I also decided to remove the controller program that came with it since it was messing up my buttons in certain games. Since then I haven’t crashed once. Could it be that this entire time it was the software conflicting with something? I’ll have to test this more but I feel like I might be onto something.

Big picture is AWESOME

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Calling it an early night tonight since I’m going in early for work later today. I did take the time to make a nice bowl of mango salsa and test out big picture on the big screen TV. Everything went with flying colors! I even got out my controller and played a few games using it (like Fez, Mortal Kombat and a few others).

When I got home from work we even kinda did a family TV night. Watched some adult swim stuffs from their website. Looked perfect. So far this HTPC idea is working quite nicely. I might have to invest in a wireless controller just so I can chillax on the couch and pretend I’m on an XBox… only like 100 times more awesome.

Open Thread

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We’re building a family entertainment PC to store movies, videos and games. Tonight I streamed games from my desktop to it and maaaan it was awesome. It ran as if the games were installed on the HTPC directly. I’ll post more details about it later. I have many more experiments to run on it. I’m already drooling at the thought of playing TF2 in the living room on a big screen. Good luck doing that on a console…