PC Pals Forum
Technical Help & Discussion => General Tech Discussion, News & Q&A => Topic started by: Sandra on February 21, 2005, 16:17
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Most of us know that the answer to everything is 42 :D
Unfortunately when used in conjunction with pcs it doesnt always solve the problem though :(
Quite a few people have posted over the last few months about strange things like when installing XP it hasnt found some files and others saying that when they switch their pc on for the first time that day then it often takes 2 or 3 attempts at restarting before the graphics card initialises and the monitor lights up and windows loads.
If 42 isnt the answer then what could it be :?
I think that I have found one possibility :)
Recently I have come across a pc that was running 98 and crashed frequently for no apparent reason. I decided to try it on XP only to have problems installing it due to it not being able to find certain files that it said were missing :roll:
After running a memory diagnostic check it said that one of the sticks of ram was faulty, I replaced the faulty one and XP installed without any problems and it has been running for the last few weeks without any crashes or unexpected behaviour :)
Over the last 12 months my own pc has been blue screening occasionally with the physical memory dump message a couple of times a week. This was using XP pro with SP1 as its OS. Around the same time I noticed that some days it wouldnt start up correctly for the first start of the day but rebooting was fine or if it had only been off for an hour or so, I assumed that this was sonmehow ambient temperature related and as it wasnt causing too much hassle I just put up with it.
The blue screening recently became a daily event and sometimes a few times per day along with my pc never starting first time the first start of the day :?
I decided that it was time to wipe and reinstall XP, this time with the new Media Centre version.
This made no difference really and over the last few weeks the blue screening was occurring more frequently.
In case it was a problem with the new Media Centre edition of XP I again wiped my pc and installed XP pro inc SP2 on it.
The blue screening continued to happen randomly and still my pc wouldnt start up straight away on the first start of the day. The final straw came a few days ago when it blue screened 4 times in the space of 10 minutes and all I was doing was reading posts on a forum :shock:
I decided to get to the bottom of it once and for all.
I ran the memory diagnostic test which found a faulty stick of ram, I had one 512mb DDR and one of 256 mb DDR, sods law dictated that it was the 512 mb that was faulty of course :roll:
I removed the faulty 512 mb of ram and it hasnt blue screened once and has started first time every time since :)
So it looked like two problems were caused by one fault and I would reccommend that anyone experiencing intermittant or unsual problems such as I had, to test or replace their ram :)
I hope that this may help anyone who finds that 42 isnt the answer to their problems :D
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That's very interesting Sandra and I'm wondering whether that may have been the problem with my old computer with the display problem. That booted up OK but only worked for 20 minutes. After rebooting it would be fine for the rest of the day.
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Well I know that from now on anything that doesnt seem to be a simple bios setting or other obvious problem then I will be sticking my floppy in and running PC-Check on the memory before spending too much time looking for other reasons :)
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Thanks Sandra ! That's very interesting. :)
But let me please be a "Blond" just for a while: :wink:
First: What relation between that story and the number 42 ?
Second: What's called that "TEST", memory test or other test componants? You're telling that it's on a floppy, I've never heard of it, and don't know how to use it?
Thank you...
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Hi Joudi, I wondered who would be the first one to ask about 42 :D
There was a book, a play and a film some years ago called "The hitch hikers guide to the galaxy"
Towards the end of the book, if I remember correctly, someone asked what the answer to the universe and everything was.
The answer was of course 42 :laugh:
If you remember I once modified Clives old sig and added sound to it
http://www.sandrataylor.dsl.pipex.com/clive1.swf
The sound on the first part, before you click on the spinning planet on the right is also taken from that book :)
The diagnostic program that I used was an older version of PC-Check, see here :
http://www.eurosoft-uk.com/pc_check.htm
It runs from a bootable floppy and has lots of test functions and information about the pc system. The main part I have found useful lately has been the memory testing part in the advanced features section but it also does much more :)
There are of course lots of other memory testing programs including Memtest which has been mentioned a few times in various parts of the forum before, available from here :
http://www.memtest86.com/
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Thanks Sandra !
You didn't loose of your greatness. :hatoff:
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For anyone that is interested, there is a new film of The Hitch Hikers Guide to the Galaxy being released this April in the UK :)
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yes but it looks awful... well not so much awful but not right... see: http://hitchhikers.movies.go.com/main.html
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It doesnt look that bad to me Sam, maybe its a nostalgia thing for us oldies, although it did get a bit silly looking towards the end of the clip :?
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maybe... but i have read the books... watched all the episodes...listened to all the radio shows!! nostalagia cant come into it - i hope :-)
I just feel it has been hollywoodised (is that a word!?!) and lets just say i am not sure about their casting but then again they didnt get trillion right in the tv show by a long shot.
well even if that flops.. it is only 86 days to star wars!!!!!!! :-)
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Well, I haven't read the books, watched the episodes, or listened to the radio shows, so to me, it just looks like another american space / alien comedy. I have a thing about american comedies - I just don't think they're funny, so I would probably give this a wide berth, but the effects look good!
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well yeah it looks like an american one thats the problem - its a good british one!!! the americans will have dumbed it down and added lots of effects to cover over the fact. great, not.
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For the past 6 months or so, my life has been plagued by XP frequently crashing. It got so bad that I've even had to rebuild my RAID1 array a couple of times.
All this grief started about the time I did an upgrade last year when I added a Creative ZS platinum sound card, faster CPU c/w cooler, a Firewire external dual drive unit, another 512MB of RAM, plus a bunch of new apps. Then my troubles began.
At first, I put it down to the software from a distributed computing project I was involved with being poorly written. But after removing that, the system was still up and down like a bride's nightie. I tweaked, fiddled, cleaned and reseated my cards and CPU ...BSoD. Then eventually when it wouldn't even respond to harsh language, I took to using my laptop so I could stay afloat longer.
Then I read Sandra's post and it occurred to me that the only thing I hadn't tried was removing the RAM I'd fitted and... Bingo!
Thank you Sandra - you're a megastar! :hatoff:
eBay nil, Sandra 1
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Its surprising how we overlook what is probably one of the easiest and cheapest options isnt it Rod :(
I was convinced that my last problem was either a driver issue or maybe the GFX card playing up until I ran the tests.
Glad you sorted it now Rod :)
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XP didn't help by constantly reporting the problem as an 'unknown driver' error, either!
I'm just wondering what to do with this RAM now, as it looks like Kingston will only RMA memory bought in the USA these days. Perhaps I should track down the person who sold it to me on eBay and insert it in their box. :horror:
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Well I now have one stick of 256 SDRAM and one of 512 DDR here and rather than bin them I may try them in another pc at some point as a friend told me that sometimes they wil work fine in one board and not in another even if they fail the test on that particular pc.
I cant see it myself but seeing as hes messed with pcs for decades and I am only in my 4th year then I will listen to his advice for now :)
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There was another book that came out after the original trilogy, which explained the "42". Pretty funny. I don't know whether the movie will be good, but the books are among the best ever written!
Speaking of oddball problems, I have a good one. This is back in the days of Word 97. I was programming 800 macros for a law firm in VBA at the time. Somebody there reported to me that a document which had a "checkbox" object in it would crash every time anybody right-clicked on the checkbox to change its property (i.e., from unchecked to checked, or checked to unchecked). It would totally crash Word. I was able to duplicate the problem and could not for the life of me figure it out. It was not documented anywhere on Microsoft's site. I spent several hours going through newsgroups, etc., and finally found a fix: Create a macro in normal.dot called "z", and the macro must be empty. That was it. That was the entire fix. And it completed fixed the problem. I always wondered how the fellow figured it out.
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It never fails to amaze me how people accidentally discover these fixes.
Having said though that there must be around 50 % of all scientific discoverys that were made accidentally or as a spin off from what they were researching initially :)
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id say that would be much higher than 50%! more like 90% from my own experience and of the people at my uni...
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To fans of Douglas Adams' The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy it will come as no surprise. They've always known the answer to Life, the Universe and Everything is 42. But in a "delightfully improbable coincidence", the film has taken £4.2m in its opening weekend.
:laugh: :laugh: :laugh:
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Amazing what a bit of clever accountancy will achieve Sandra. :D :laugh: