My Apologies To The Einstein Crunchers

Mike Hewson
Mike Hewson
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The memtest is a good idea,

The memtest is a good idea, as with 'quiet' activity only a fraction is use, but as one ramps up activity there is a greater chance of being allocated any dodgy areas. It only takes one crappy pointer, say, and you're belly up. Having said that I've always found Kingston's to be quite a good brand ..... but that doesn't mean they'll never cut a bad chip. I suppose the other question ( which you may have answered already ) is whether there is any overclocking/turbos etc enabled in the BIOS ROM of whatever. If so, cut back to defaults ....

Cheers, Mike.

I have made this letter longer than usual because I lack the time to make it shorter ...

... and my other CPU is a Ryzen 5950X :-) Blaise Pascal

wumpus
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Did you turn off the option

Did you turn off the option to keep work units in memory? That should help you a little. How many projects are you running concurrently on this PC? Do you have the Windows XP /3Gb switch set? Windows XP may be reserving half of your memory for the OS and half is allowed for the application.

Siran d'Vel'nahr
Siran d'Vel'nahr
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RE: When windows bugs out,

Quote:

When windows bugs out, doing a 'fix' isn't always a good idea. Sometimes it's like trying to put a band aid on cancer, you are better off slicking and reinstalling.

You said you had like 172 tasks to report. What about changing your setting to something like only keep 0.2 days worth of work on your system, so that way you are not loading up a huge potential workload and pretty much get a new one as you finish an old one. If you find you are having comm problems then there isn't a bunch of stuff piling up on you.

Just a suggestion.
Thanks for listening.
Aaron


Greetings Aaron,

You make a good point about repair install vs full re-install. But, if I'm going to do a full re-install, I'm moving up to 64 bit.

I don't see how the size of my WU cache is going to have a bearing on BOINC doing its thing with those WUs. I have my cache set large due to the many outages that SETI was having. I wanted to make sure the PC could continue working through those outages.

Thanks for the suggestions. :)

Keep on BOINCing...! :)

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Siran d'Vel'nahr
Siran d'Vel'nahr
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RE: The memtest is a good

Quote:

The memtest is a good idea, as with 'quiet' activity only a fraction is use, but as one ramps up activity there is a greater chance of being allocated any dodgy areas. It only takes one crappy pointer, say, and you're belly up. Having said that I've always found Kingston's to be quite a good brand ..... but that doesn't mean they'll never cut a bad chip. I suppose the other question ( which you may have answered already ) is whether there is any overclocking/turbos etc enabled in the BIOS ROM of whatever. If so, cut back to defaults ....

Cheers, Mike.


Greetings Mike,

Whenever I start having problems with a PC, whether this i7 of my Linux PC, one of the first things I grab is my CD with memtest86 on it. It's much more convenient now that the makers have made it so it can be on a boot-able CD.

I have always bought nothing but Kingston DIMMs. Just as I have only always bought Asus motherboards, Western Digital HDDs, Intel CPUs, etc. I tend to stick with what has always worked faithfully for me. :) I usually build a new PC about every 2 years.

The i7 is running "stock from the box", no overclocking or anything of that nature.

Keep on BOINCing...! :)

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Siran d'Vel'nahr
Siran d'Vel'nahr
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RE: Did you turn off the

Quote:
Did you turn off the option to keep work units in memory? That should help you a little. How many projects are you running concurrently on this PC? Do you have the Windows XP /3Gb switch set? Windows XP may be reserving half of your memory for the OS and half is allowed for the application.


Greetings Wumpus,

Several years ago, I had read, most likely on the SETI forum, that leaving the WUs in memory is not good unless one has an enormous amount of memory. No, I have the WUs removed from memory if not being worked on.

Windows XP /3Gb switch? That's a new one on me. Could you give me a little more info on that?

Keep on BOINCing...! :)

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mikey
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RE: Greetings all, I have

Quote:

Greetings all,

I have now seen something new concerning my i7, something I hadn't seen before or during the current problem. But before I get into that, let me just say...

I ran a-squared, an anti-malware scanner, and all it found were 9 bad cookies. I deleted them and shut down a-squared. Everything appeared to be running ok. I tried to start BOINC and once again, it could not make a connection to localhost. All I had was the tiny window that stated that BOINC was communicating with the client, or whatever it says. I shut down BOINC, which took a bit of time, less than a minute, when a balloon popped up on my task bar saying something about my virtual memory was not sufficient for the operation or some such thing and that it was being re-sized.

Keep on BOINCing...! :) (I am certainly trying to!)

The box that comes up asking you to exit boinc or to cancel when you first start boinc is a normal thing and if you just give it a minute it will go away and boinc will start crunching. My personal opinion, and I have done no checking to prove it, is that boinc is trying to communicate with your projects websites and during the initial startup that can take a minute or two. yes i too have exited boinc and then restarted it and it worked just fine, yes mine has sat there for more than 2 minutes before I exited and then restarted it and it worked just fine, but I still think if you just leave it alone it will work just fine and start crunching on its own.

Your virtual memory is a whole other problem than the slow to start up problem I think. Have you played with your virtual memory settings so they are not the default settings? Specifically moving them to the non C: drive is what I am looking for? This is a 'tweak' that some people say to do, but it can cause some funky problems if your system crashes.

wumpus
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The best description I found

The best description I found on memory in 32 bit windows is
http://www.dansdata.com/askdan00015.htm
Your large (memory) graphics card could also be partly to blame.

Siran d'Vel'nahr
Siran d'Vel'nahr
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Greetings everyone, ***

Greetings everyone,

*** UPDATE ***

Having used the Google machine, I took the suggestion from Wumpus and enabled the /3GB switch in my boot.ini file. Yes, I backed it up first. Thanks Wumpus! :)

Someone, here, mentioned "PAE". "Physical Address Extension" has been added to the General tab in System Properties. From what I have read, doing what I have done above will help prevent virtual memory fragmentation. That's a good thing I would assume.

Ok, the i7 ran for 26 hours with Firefox running with 12+ tabs. Several of those tabs had websites that refresh regularly. I also ran my HTML editor with about 10 files open, one per tab. Plus, I had Notepad going with a file open. I also used my ftp client to do some updates on my website this morning. The i7 didn't even bat an eyelash.

Now I'm going to add BOINC to the mix. It won't be crunching, just communicating with project's servers now and then. We'll see how that fairs when I get home from work tomorrow afternoon. Or, in the morning when I get up for work, should things head south again.

I took a look at Task Manager, with everything running, and the page file usage is less than a GB while the available physical memory is over 2 GB.

If all is well when I get home from work tomorrow, I will open the gates to VP and allow some WU crunching to happen. If all goes well after that, I will open the gates to Einstein again.

Wish me luck, guys! :)

Keep on BOINCing...! :)

CAPT Siran d'Vel'nahr XO
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Siran d'Vel'nahr
Siran d'Vel'nahr
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RE: The best description I

Quote:
The best description I found on memory in 32 bit windows is
http://www.dansdata.com/askdan00015.htm
Your large (memory) graphics card could also be partly to blame.


Greetings Wumpus,

I just looked, and my graphics card is using 0 (zero) bytes of my RAM. It's not listed in the memory section of Device Manager. Woohoo! :)

Thanks for the suggestion about the /3GB switch (please see my previous post).

Keep on BOINCing...! :)

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Ascholten
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another thing you can try as

another thing you can try as you attempt to ramp your boinc work back up is to set it for low processor use and ramp it up slowly so you observe and hopefully intervene before anything goes south on you too badly.

Good luck with everything.
Aaron

If god meant for us not to BOINC he'd have made our #$%^%^ shorter!!

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