Why is my system hanging ?

iMax

Running an xp1800 processor, Windows XP sp2, with 1.5gb ram & 800gb of hard drive space, have 2 cooling fans on each hard drive, 6 x 60mm fans sucking air in & 2 x 80mm fans expelling air out.

Every time I access images through PSP 9 or try to render video under pinnicle studio 9 the system hangs. Everything else seems fine.

Any ideas ?

Bass.exe

You neglected to mention what sort of Video Card you are using.

Also... 8 fans? Is your system seriously OC'ed or something?

iMax

Nvidia GeForce4 MX 440 - 64MB I think.

It's not overclocked at all, I had to add the fans because of overheating on the hard drive, they're cheap enough to add, anyone considering cooling hard drives though should visit maplins, they have a hard drive cooling bay for €14 (I think).

One other thing. The AV (eTrust EX antivirus) hangs when scanning the entire system but will do drive by drive or folder by folder individually.

Bass.exe

Well, it doesn't sound like an overheat problem anyway.

It works drive by drive, but not all-at-once?
That could be a power problem... what is your PSU rated at, and who is the manufacturer?

Scenic911

Check that the heatsink on the CPU is on correctly. I had the same probs a while back. Heatsink fell off eventually. I would suggest you get some thermal paste and reattach your heatsink.

Scenic

iMax

Checked the heatsink recently & it was grand. The PSU is 300W but I don't know the manufacturer (are some better than others ?)

Bass.exe

It could also be that. But that wouldn't explain why it only crashes when he's viewing images or doing video editing... which seems to imply a video card problem...

The MX440 doesn't use that much power, but if he has a lot of HDDs, then it could be pulling power away from the card. Hrmm...

Edit: 300W... that would be ok if you had a good PSU, but if you are using.. for example, a Qtec power supply, that could be the problem. Some PSUs are very unreliable, and don't provide steady amounts of power. This could be the problem, but don't go replacing the PSU just yet.

astrofool

image processing is also when the hard drives get used alot. tbh when you say you have to add 8 fans to cool the hard drives, it sounds a bit off, might be one of them failing on you. Try and schedule a check disk on them to see if anything is wrong.

8 fans for an xp1800+ is just wrong, and noisy

astrofool

and yea, also try and get a decent quality psu if you're convinced the hd's are fine, they can usually cause flaky behaviour

C Fodder

Just something to check. Could it be one of your memory sticks? It is possible that a memory address only accessed by the two progs could be faulty. remove them one at a time and test system.

Also whats your spyware / virus status ?

jjmax

Could it be DirectX?

CyberGhost

could be driver

Hobbes

It sounds like your overloading your power supply with 8 fans. How many other extras you got (CD, DVD, WinTV, etc)? Pinnicle normally comes with a Firewire card as well.

8 Fans on 300W? Not likely.

You should be able to see the power settings in the BIOS in real time. I forget which ones to check but if you have stuff fluctuating wildly in there that is most likely your problem.

CyberGhost

actually he is not overloading!

use this
http://www.adecy.com/psu/


he needs 260 watts, if he has 300w, he is ok.

jjmax

That's an excellent site.
Is it accurate?

jjmax

I was having similar problems - Game crashing Windows and rebooting PC with no error or crashing to desktop with no error.
Updated Graphics and Sound Driver, and updated DirectX.
Now my system seems to be hunky dory.

Hobbes

CyberGhost wrote:

actually he is not overloading!

use this
http://www.adecy.com/psu/


he needs 260 watts, if he has 300w, he is ok.

How do you know he needs 260 watts? what else does he have in the machine? Also more details on the type of fans.

The brother had a similar problem with hard drive coolers. He put one in and the powersupply couldn't handle it. They are very different to the normal fans in the machine.

He also appears to have 10 fans in the machine.

iMax

Using that site it appears I'm borderline (requires 300W), but this problem began before I added a lot of that stuff. Drivers are all latest signed versions.