Danoff's PC Crashing Adventures

[Danoff]

Ok, so I've been running out of room on my C drive for the last year or so. I created a partition initially for my C drive that I thought would be sufficiently generous, but over time windows has blobbed and oozed out to suffocate the entire drive. I've never been installing programs on the C drive so I couldn't uninstall to help alleviate the space problems. I moved the swap file to another drive. I moved all temporary program cashes to another drive. I moved everything I possibly could, and currently I have a healthy 300mb of space left on my C drive.

Over time, I noticed that my C drive was running out of space. I wouldn't have installed anything or done anything at all to the C drive, but soon I had 200mb free. Then 100mb free. Then 2mb free. Then programs start crashing.

So I investigated. I moved game files out of the C drive, deleted internet cache etc and ended up with 30 mb free. Shortly after I was back to 0.

So, after painfully freeing up another 10 mb I started up filemon to see what the hell was writing to my C drive. The only thing of note was zone alarm which writes an internet log periodically in my /WINNT/temporary internet logs/ directory.

I poked around and found that these logs were only a kilobyte in size. Perhaps I did had a virus or some sort. But wait! What's this? Hundreds of megabytes worth of log archives, created by zonealarm. DELETE!!!

350mb free!!!

But it happens again. DELETE again! Happens again, DELETE again!

That's about the time when my computer started hanging spontaneously. There I'd be, in the middle of a download or playing a game or some sort of activity and suddenly the mouse stops moving. The system is non-recoverable.

I go online in search of the answer. I type in the name of the zone alarm database that was created. Someone else had reported a computer hanging problem much like mine! So I uninstalled zonealarm completely, no more databases or logs or anything in my internet logs directory.

Still hangs.

Ok, I'm convinced. I have a virus. I download the blaster and sasser fixes from symantec and search. I update AVG and search. I update adaware and spybot and search.

Nothing. The computer is clean.

Now the computer is hanging within 20 minutes of bootup. Sometimes hangning immediately following boot. I'm losing data quickly. The hanging is corrupting files - just like that 200mb worth of files I'd recently accessed GONE! Internet bookmarks GONE! WTF!!!!

Scandisk. Check for bad sectors. The hard drive must be failing!!!

Nothing.

Is it the CPU? Is my CPU overheating? The temperature readout says 50C. I check the alarm... it's set for 60C, so the CPU temp must be ok.

Alright time for a stress test. I start up Warcraft III and play for 5 minutes before it dies. Ok, that's a good way to cause the hang quickly. I go into the bios to clock down the CPU. I notice the computer boots at 48C this time. I start up WCIII again and it seems to go smoothly. Perhaps 50C is a bit high for my processor.

I remove my CPU fan, add a fresh dab of heat conducting goo, blow the dust out from in between the fins of the heatsink, re-attach, boot up at full CPU speed. The temperature reads 38C, same as inside the case. Doesn't get any better than that!

No crash.

That was it. Regooping my CPU and blowing the dust out of the heatsink dropped my CPU temp 12 degrees C and stopped my computer from crashing.

Now to reinstall zonealarm and begin to undo the damage.


Edit: Woops, jumped the gun. Still crashing (see below)

 

[dougiemeats]

How big is your hard drive?

If I understood right, you only had 300 MB of free space? That's very low no matter the size of the hard drive. It's best to keep around 30% of the HDD free for optimal performance. It might not be a virus after all, just very low disk space that is causing all of the problems.

 

[Iceman]

Did you read the whole thing? The problem was with the CPU temperatures.

 

[dougiemeats]

I missed that part. Still, 300 MB seems dangerously low.

 

[Danoff]

I missed that part. Still, 300 MB seems dangerously low.

300MB on the C:\ but the swap file isn't on the C drive so it doesn't change from day-to-day. I have a fixed size swap file set up on another drive that has a little more space (though occasionally I dip down to 200 mb on that drive too).

Over 5 drives I have a total of about 1-1.5 gigs free. None of them having much more than 500 mb.

I'll be building a new computer in about a month.

 

[Vasco]

So the CPU was causing your lack of space on the hard drive?

 

[guska]

No, the CPU temps were causing the lockups. The harddrive space was Zonealarm.

Maybe I should check out the goop on my CPU, and upgrade the cooling. Any suggestions for an AMD Athlon 1.2Ghz Socket A? (money is an issue, and 48C is too high for my liking when the case temp is <30, and down to <10 at times)

 

[Danoff]

Maybe I should check out the goop on my CPU, and upgrade the cooling. Any suggestions for an AMD Athlon 1.2Ghz Socket A? (money is an issue, and 48C is too high for my liking when the case temp is <30, and down to <10 at times)

The goop seeps out over time, so reapplying the goop and blowing the dust out was sufficient to drop my temp way back down. However, you might not be bad off with 48C, seeing as how I've found out now that the CPU temp was not causing my crash.

Still Crashing

Today the computer died before windows fully even loaded (it's the first time that's happened). After the computer successfully booted I ran a CPU stress test to see if it would break. 2+hrs and not a crash.

That got me thinking. The computer doesn't last 5 minutes when I'm using it, but the CPU test lasts 2 hours without a crash. How is that possible? RAM!!!

Once the computer is booted and the CPU stress test is loaded additional ram isn't being used. So if RAM was the problem, I wouldn't see it if I weren't opening new apps or storing temporary data. Clearly I can rule out the CPU at any rate, which performed flawlessly through 2 hours of stress testing.

So I broke out a floppy disk I had lying around with a ram checker on it. Booted to the floppy and ran the test. Sure enough, the same address on my ram stick failed 11 times. Not every test, but it definitely isn't working properly.

I'm going to try underclocking my ram this evening and rerunning the memory checker to see if that eliminates the errors and will get me a running computer for the time being.

At the moment I'm 99% sure the RAM (and not the mobo, CPU, or windows) is the problem. Btw - just for background, this RAM stick is at least 4 years old.

 

[amp88]

Underclocking the RAM isn't going to help the problem. You'll just slow down the system slightly. If you can afford to (i.e. if you have two or more sticks of RAM and removing the faulty stick would leave you with an operable machine) remove the faulty stick just now and replace it.

I used to have ZoneAlarm and it didn't create any log files of appreciable size. Have you tried downloading the latest version to see if that fixes the problem? Did you change any of the logging options in ZoneAlarm when you had it installed before?

A friend of mine used to do PC repair and servicing and he found a woman who said she had run out of hard drive space but she didn't think she had used much. He investigated (with SequoiaView and found there was a single, 42GB (yes, gigabyte) log file on the C drive).

 

[Danoff]

Underclocking the RAM isn't going to help the problem. You'll just slow down the system slightly. If you can afford to (i.e. if you have two or more sticks of RAM and removing the faulty stick would leave you with an operable machine) remove the faulty stick just now and replace it.

Nope. Just one stick of DDR. I have some SDRAM sitting somewhere gathering dust but I don't know if my MB would run it.

Is there any way to say "hey, don't use this one part of the RAM stick!"?

 

[amp88]

Nope. Just one stick of DDR. I have some SDRAM sitting somewhere gathering dust but I don't know if my MB would run it.

Is there any way to say "hey, don't use this one part of the RAM stick!"?

I believe there are a few boards that can run either DDR or SDRAM but I don't think they were very popular. Check your motherboard manual if you still have it or Google for the specs.

I don't think there's any way to restrict Windows from using specific memory addresses, sorry.

 

[guska]

I don't think there's any way to restrict Windows from using specific memory addresses, sorry.

There is a way, but I can't remember how I did it, and it was limited to restricting a range of memory addresses, not just one or two addresses.

I will try to work out what I did and get back to you.

 

[Danoff]

I tried the different ram settings on my mainboard (Normal, Fast, Faster, Turbo).

Faster pulled down 11 ram errors. Normal fetched 6. Turbo got 5. So I switched to turbo for now. I'm going to mess with the RAM clock speed (if I can figure out how) just to see what happens tonight. The computer is basically out of commission, so I might as well have a little fun in the meantime right?

 

[toyomatt84]

Just so you know, Thermal Paste doesn't "seep out" over time. What happens is, that over very long periods of time, the moisture within the Paste evaporates and makes the Thermal Paste hard and brittle. It shrinks only minutely, but doesn't retain it's thermal properties well, once the moisture is gone. I use Arctic Ceramique, and I've seen it last 4 years on top of a Peltier cooled system. So, it's not like it's the type of Paste that will "dry out" quickly.

Also, try using Avast Anti-Virus, if you're concerned with your Virus problem. It's got a Boot-Scheduler, which allows you to setup a scan before any internal process begins it's run. This prevents virus' that mask themselves on bootup, to be missed in the scanning process. Also, if ZoneAlarm isn't cutting it for you, try Kerio Personal Firewall. It's got just as much configurability as ZoneAlarm, with half of the headaches. It copes beautifully with SP2's unfriendly Security Center. Both Avast and Kerio are free products, you'll need to register with Avast, but it's still free.