I think later today when I wake up I’ll get some spring cleaning done. I really need to rearrange things in my closet so things stop falling all over the damned place. Maybe even make a sub sandwich and go for a walk somewhere. The weather is supposed to be nice.
Fact: Video capture hates me.
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.
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).
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.
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. 😀
This is why you don’t shop over the phone.
Last night I got a weird call at work. I had to deal with a man calling on behalf of his wife who wanted to know how well Carhartt jeans fit compared to Levis and Wranglers. The conversation involved me repeating myself over and over again, getting creeped out by the guy in general, and me trying to keep utmost patience.
First, I had to explain that we no longer carry ladies sizes in Carhartt, and that if she wanted any she would require a man’s size. He wanted to know if they came in a size 8 and I had to explain to him that men’s pants are not sized that way (they go by waist and height rather than just a number). I had to repeat that a few times. He wasn’t deaf or anything, he was just trying everything he could to shop over the phone.
Then he wanted to know if I would know how they would fit compared to other pairs of jeans and I told him there really wasn’t a difference for, but that’s just me. He thought this meant that these jeans would fit perfectly for ANYONE and I had to explain no, people have personal preferences. What one person likes could be what another person doesn’t fit into. And with sizing varying from country to country and company to company it would be best to have her try them on herself (I had to repeat that 17 times. I counted). He wanted to know what size I wore, and I tried to give an example but couldn’t remember if it were 30×32’s or 32×30’s that I wore. “So you’re a medium size right? Are you a heavy medium or a thin medium?”. Then he told me that his wife was 5 ft 4 and wanted to know my size. When I told him he said “Wooow you must be all leg” I tried not to barf… Then I had to explain to him that she might have issues finding a size that she won’t have to hem. I again recommend coming in and having her try them on, and at that point he held the phone up to his wife so I could explain this to her. Because apparently him just telling her “Lets go shopping and try pants on tomorrow” was too difficult to of a phrase to speak of. What was really creepy though was that when I tried to talk to her I heard no female voice. She didn’t speak, I didn’t hear any breathing, it was just the guy telling me “Don’t worry she can hear you!”.
After 20 minutes of repeating myself and him asking me about my dimensions and height he finally decided to give it a rest. He asked what our closing time was and I told him we were closing in 30 minutes. After wondering if they would make it down on time he decided that they would just go shopping in the morning.
That’s assuming said woman actually exists and that he wasn’t actually just getting his jollies. I guess he makes regular calls to the others asking about young teens pants and wants to speak to workers who wear them… Oh well, I guess it’s cheaper to call stores rather sex hotlines.
realRiven is being ported to the DooM engine!
Read more at the Starry Expanse. Oh! Also April fools. 😛
*snap* back to reality
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:
Oh well, time to reschedule it I guess. 😛
Computer status update.
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?
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.