Availability 2010

[Chainsaws]

Enjoy your holiday, we'll see you when you get back.

I'll be on Monday night.

[Fix]

Well, I'm definitely around tonight a bit later on, so I'll be on Steam and Mumble if anyone is around for a game. On Monday as normal.

[Machine]

I'll be around tonight, if for no other reason than to be tipped into the bucket of disapointment by my brother again.

[Machine]

GG's last night, very close to doing that last map! Online tonight, should be from about 7:30 onwards.

[Fix]

We were pretty solid all the way, until the last map. Probably lost it due to AS fatigue as the games I had after that we weren't too successful either. Online tonight!

[Machine]

Great speedruns last night, can't believe we clocked them all in half a night! Good work!

[Fix]

With a bit of planning it was borderline easy - We didn't get 'stuck' attempting on any mission. Well done everyone!

[Machine]

Can you imagine trying that with randoms though? At least we could all talk about it during the briefing and accepted each others ideas.

I'd like to get the normal difficultly no-deaths one, and a few of my last hacks. The only ones I'm not bothered about are the "kill x bugs" ones.

[Machine]

On tonight.

[Chainsaws]

I rebuilt my pc last night. I was leaning towards it being a memory issue but after adding each stick one at a time and performing a memory test and then rebooting and running Memtest86+ for an hour gave me absolutely nothing. It's possible that the memory wasn't seated right or there was dust in one of the slots or something because it has been booting up fine. I'm just going to have to run it and see what happens though, it may take ages to track down.

I've put a second drive in and installed Windows on that so that at least if the hardware issue trashes Windows again it will be a quicker re-install.

[Machine]

Remember my memory issues only happened on a "cold" boot, the only way to determine the issue in memtest was to boot up after nearly 24 hours of downtime and run memtest right away. If you booted, even into the bios, then turned off and on again memtest wouldn't pick it up (which is how I played games whilst I had the duff sticks)

Your right though it could just be seated wrong, you are rather weak so your flimsy little stick fingers might not have had the strength to get all 240 pins all the way in.

How dusty is the PC on the whole? I thought it was new and I guess being in a cupboard 6000 feet in the air should mean it stays dust free.

Took me nearly 4 weeks as you know, I actually took the memory back to scan on the 27th day of the 28 day return period :p

EDIT : Feel free to bring the memory over if you think it's duff, we can try in this PC.

[Chainsaws]

Some of the heat-sinks are a bit caked with dust. The thing could probably do with a vacuum but it doesn't overheat that I've noticed. I'd happily bring it over and try the memory but it can run for hours with no problems and then all of a sudden blue screen and refuse to boot for ages.

I'll get things re-installed and see how it runs. If it starts crashing again I'll take a look at the other components or probably start with stripping it completely down, cleaning it all and putting it back in. I'd rather avoid having to do that unless I have to though.

[Machine]

When your PC won't boot, what exactly does it do? Where does it "stick"?

[Chainsaws]

Well the blue screen is always random messages, not one dll say.

When it reboots it will often stop on the BIOS logo that covers the POST information several times but will at least once get half way through a boot before auto-resetting. When it freezes on the BIOS it's just locked. When I've got in the BIOS and checked voltages and temp they always look fine.

[Machine]

Ok, I ask because it may not be memory.

Remember my last PC that used to crash randomly, that was down to a faulty HDD, what would happen if I "knocked" the PC, either by kicking it by accident or even occasionally wobbling the desk or jumping on the floor the Hard drive would just stop and the computer would reboot.

Upon post it would stick, trying to detect he hard disk too a long time and occasionally it just wouldn't play and you'd have to reset it a few times. I never discovered this till I begun transferring stuff to the new PC and the Hard disk literally had to be held in a particular orientation in order to work. I was quite surprised I hadn't noticed it earlier. (investigating heat, dust, seating and memory issues like yourself)

So a possible thing to try is a new, clean hard disk on it's own. I know you can aquire these given your line of work.

Beyond that It might be the PSU but I know yours is fairly decent isn't it? Well, my version of yours did "pop" during Crysis! My new Corsair has a lifetime warranty!

[Chainsaws]

Hmm....you might be onto something there!

Well the system is now on a new (120gb) hdd and I'm going to put all my games on the old (750gb) drive so if the old drive is the issue I should see games occasionally crash but the system remain up.

[Machine]

To properly test I wouldn't use the other drive at all. Your system should remain stable, up to you though.

[Machine]

GG's last night, hows the PC holding out?

[Aggamemnon]

Aye, thanks for the first few speed runs and scrambled eggs. Yum.

[Chainsaws]

PC seems ok so far. It's going to take a week or two to really know though. I'll just try out one or two games and see how things run, I'm starting to wonder if you didn't hit the nail on the head with the hard disk suggestion though...

[Machine]

Give a week, see if it holds out, hopefully it will and you can get a replacement sorted.

[Machine]

Online tonight.

[Aggamemnon]

Can't make it tonight. Have a good one.

[Chainsaws]

I'll be on but my pc may crash. I've made a few config changes so I'll see how it goes.

[Fix]

I'm online - no problems.