GoneWacko’s Blog

The joys of bleeding edge hard- and software

March 7, 2007 on 12:49 am | In Computing | 8 Comments

My timing with buying a new PC could have been somewhat better, I suppose.

Because the purchase of my new PC with bleeding edge hardware coincided with the purchase of a bleeding edge version of Windows, I’m asking for a lot of trouble. Most of the problems I’ve had are currently accredited to the rather bad nvidia driver.

A list of stuff that’s gone wrong since building my PC:

• Most computer games crash after a while. I’ve tried the following games: The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, Supreme Commander, C&C 3 Demo, Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter. Only GRAW worked without crashes, although I’ve not really stress tested it or anything. Furthermore it’s the least prone to crash because it was bundled with my graphics card. Other annoyances: C&C 3 won’t support Vista 64-bit, so I might end up not being able to play that game at all - unless I install a 32-bit version of Vista as well, which I’m hoping I can get for free through MA3D.com.
• Vista itself has the annoying tendecy to go BSOD on my ass. So far I’ve had a good (or is it bad?) number of BSODs - with different messages:
  • PAGE_FAULT_IN_UNPAGED_AREA - which could mean faulty RAM, if it wasn’t that 6 passes of memtest86+ didn’t result in a single error
  • Unrecoverable hardware error - which could mean anything, but I think/hope it’s nvidia’s fault.
  • System shut down to prevent damage - which could mean anything. I’ve even considered the hardware temperatures, but thanks to the fact that there are plenty of (good) fans in the case, speedfan shows the processor’s cores at around 22°C each, and the System at 45-50 °C.

  The main reason why I’m suspecting nvidia is because the errors only seem to come when I do something with the graphics card, such as playing games.

• One of the hard drives ended up being faulty. Luckily this was not fatal due to the lovely RAID10 setup meaning I could still boot my computer. The hard drive was quickly replaced by the store and now everything seems to be fine.
• Some other stuff such as ASUS software not being vista compatible yet in some/most cases

I’ve taken various steps to try and solve these problems. Firstly, I’m currently verify-and-repair-ing my RAID10 set. It’s currently at 50% and has fixed 37 errors. Secondly, I’ve taken care to look for drivers for pretty much every piece of hardware. I’ve installed some .INF files for Vista to supposedly communicate with my chipset more effectively.
And today some new nvidia beta drivers were released. The changelog doesn’t mention any of the errors I’ve experiened, but I’m going to give it a try anyhow.

Regardless of it crashing a lot, I’m playing Oblivion rather a lot. I had played for some time on my laptop, but the framerate was so tediously low that it wasn’t much fun. The fact that quicksaving is so easy and doesn’t pause the game certainly helps me cope with the frequent crashes. Unfortunately this all also means that I’ve not yet played supreme commander online with anyone yet - the constant crashes wouldn’t make it any fun.