Frequent crashes, what to look for?

Check out the latest edition of SW Express. Thought I say an article in it regarding this issue (See bottom right corner).

Deleted my email link and I can't find the latest edition on the SW website.

Len

Thanks for the pointer, the July '05 has a pretty good atricle, I'll check it out after lunch.

Whit

snipped-for-privacy@edatasoluti> Check out the latest edition of SW Express.

The July Article is pretty good. If you plan to reinstall SW then the March article will help. The first thing that came to mind is deleting the hidden temp files SW writes.

How does SW do on benchmarks like SpecAPC? That can sometimes turn up flaky hardware. See below.

XPTC will help in making sure XP is up and humming correctly.

I ran Mikes Ship-in-a-Bottle, slowest time was ~32.2 sec, fastest ~24.4 for

I did the Star 2.1, Level 5, 51.83 sec, rebuild in 4.31 sec

I'm DL'ing the SPECapc, at 131Mb just what the heck is this?

Thanks

T> The July Article is pretty good. If you plan to reinstall SW then the

What is your CPU chip?

In your case SpecAPC will thrash your system for an extended period. SpecAPC is one of the oldest benchmarks around. It changes from year to year though. It generally takes some time to run and it is primarily graphics oriented. The advantage for you is that it will stress your system over time so that if there is a flaky power supply, memory, cpu, etc. that are affected by built up heat you may only get through 1 or 2 iterations of the test instead of all 5.

Benchmarking won't always show why you crash, but it will eliminate some types of hardware problems as the culprit.

AMD Opteron 148. The numbers looks pretty good IMO, I suspect it's just something gone a bit flaky in SWX, maybe its time I upped to WinXP sp2...

Thanks for the > What is your CPU chip?

Maybe, but go through XPTC procedures first.

Shut the machine down, yank the cover, and re-seat *every* cable, card, memory stick, and of course, the cpu...

I wouldn't install anymore software until you solve the crashing problem. It's possible to make it even worse if it is not a hardware problem.

Try Matt's article "Troubleshooting Crash Prone Systems" in his Rules of Thumb.

I am a little miffed at the extensive debug instructions that float around all over the internet for Windoze. The assumption is "spend days reading my epistle, and then hours or days debugging the software/hardware with all this information you have just absorbed."

I believe we would have a lot less downtime if we as users maintained a backup hard drive with a known good working state of our applications. If you boot on another hard drive and the problem goes away, then you have a real major boost in debugging.

If we also keep all data on another hard drive, it can be accessed by any good hard drive with the OS & Applications.

It would help immensely in understanding if we are working with a software problem versus the hardware box (excluding data hard drive/s).

Hard drives are virtually "cheap" compared to the cost of days of debugging and fixing each year, so they ought to be used intelligently by any CAD professional to increase productive output.

Bo