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NOT a Happy Camper


Hana

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See, there ya' go, Dwip. A hard drive failure to compliment the memory failure we were talking about, right on cue. ;)Sorry for the bad luck, Samson, at least if it was still running XP you know you got your money's worth out of that computer. whistle.gif

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For the record, I despise Windows reinstalls on old machines. God damn.Also for the record, old WD warranty return drives are noisy. Cheap bastards.

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Think on the bright side. Remember how much Win95 and Win98 sucked to install?Also for the record, old WD warranty return drives are noisy. Cheap bastards.I fixed your sentence for you.

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Yes, Windows installs have gotten better over the years, but Vista threw in that phone home during install thing just to regress the process. :(:lol: I don't know that WD is all that bad, Dwip, in fact, they're a lot better than some of their competition... :chuckle:

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:lol: For what it's worth, over the years I've probably accumulated far more Maxtor, Seagate, off-brand, etc hard drives than you have, and almost all of them are dead at this point. Eventually, every hard drive dies no matter who's name was stamped on it. :shrug:
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Let us say that I have Stories about WD.Granted that they are from the days when getting a 4 gig HD in replacement for a 3.2 gig HD was a big deal. Remember when we measured post-gigabyte hard drives with decimal numbers? Which we used to store data and plans about fighting the dinosaurs with our bone clubs? Yeah.

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I bet I have at least as many stories of WD drive deaths. They are an awful company.

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I've had WD drives die too, but I've also had plenty of others die as well. Maybe it's one of those mileage variance things. :shrug:And, yes, Dwip.. I may even still have an old drive or two around here that had under 32 megabytes total capacity from back in the day when most programs were run from floppy and hard drives were basically meant to run your DOS and store your data files only.. All my dinosaur battle plans had to be saved to 8" floppy diskettes and cassette tapes though because when I was still using my club to fight them we didn't have bigger capacity disks nor hard drives yet. :P (and, yes, I may still have a few of those in my computer parts cabinet too.)

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I haven't replaced any of my RAM yet, because oddly enough, I can't replicate the hardware issue report during the mem test diagnostic.Everything had been running smooth over the past couple of days until today. Firefox has been crashing on me about every 2-5 mins. This was the first symptom that led to my crying about what the hell is going on and running the mem test in the first place. I've been doing it all day today, at 7 loops per cycle, and nothing. I've run it over 10 times. So, how can I replace supposedly defective memory when I have no way of telling which stick it is.Does this look normal?mymem.jpgI ask because, when I looked at this earlier this morning, the 'cached' was at about 2200, even after numerous reboots and mem tests. Also, is 25% of physical memory in use normal? With no apps running? (except FF when it's not crashing - I had to write this out in notepad first because FF crashed about 5 times while writing)

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I dunno about the task manager thing (although it's not far off from what I have now), but I am going to say right now that what you're describing to me is precisely what happened to me, and is certainly indicative to me of at least one bad RAM stick. I've got a whole host of blog posts describing my initial finding of bad RAM, and inability to find it out. Kept going with instability for months until it finally died. Which is to say, don't be that person.Though you might try physically taking out and re-inserting individual RAM sticks and re-running the memtest stuff. Helped on my end.

So, how can I replace supposedly defective memory when I have no way of telling which stick it is.
Roughly like this:1. Your old RAM is probably still under warranty, if OCZ has policies anything like G.Skill does. Go start that process.2. Go buy some more RAM. The cost of the RAM is going to be less than the cost of the time you're going to lose dealing with an unstable system, believe me.3. Get your warrentied RAM back. Hey, now you have twice as much to play with.
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Ok, re-ran ram tests on each stick, no problems detected. FF continued to crash on each stick. So guess what the problem was?Yep. Updated FF and haven't crashed yet.I am still concerned about the memory because of the first BSOD. I just can't prove it's bad.

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What version of FF were you using prior to update? It's pretty unusual for the browser to have that much of a fit and cause that much of a problem, but it seems safe enough to assume that your memory is fine if repeated memory tests say it's ok. We'll ignore the trust issues I still have with the accuracy of such things while still in the Windows environment.Also, you guys, on that "recent posts problem" thread, I'm still waiting to see the thing break. It hasn't yet.

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Well, I knew I was WAY behind in updating FF, for a reason. The latest I just got is 3.6.19, I had a version 3.0.something. So yeah..fits, lol.I hadn't wanted to upgrade because the latest version can't handle the Norton add-ons.Oh well, at least it's stable, so far.

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Yes, that task manager readout looks reasonably close enough to normal. It can vary pretty widely from machine to machine, let alone between Windows versions, but generally it's not really unusual for Windows itself to eat roughly a gig of your memory. Especially if you don't actively kill extraneous processes and such immediately after startup.Buying extra ram while you're waiting for replacement sticks from the manufacturer may work to double your ram in the long run, but it takes more effort than just buying the extra ram and either method is useless if the motherboard doesn't have open slots for the extra ram. :rolleyes:Hmm, guess we need to post another 15 new responses to that thread to get it to kick in. I told y'all it wouldn't show this time because it was a thread discussing/reporting the issue. ;)Wow, big upgrade jump, usually you're upgrading x.x.## at a time rather than x.#.## with Firefox, there may very well be enough changes in FF since then to be the resolution by itself. Of course, you could always check Mozilla's site to see what changed between those versions and if any of those changes were to counter the problem you ran into. I do recall at least one upgrade in that span that was released pretty quickly behind a previous one for something "critical", but I don't recall what it was anymore. :shrug:

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There would be far too many changes to look through between 3.0 and 3.6 to know what might have done it. Especially now that 4.0 is right around the corner.

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There would be far too many changes to look through between 3.0 and 3.6 to know what might have done it. Especially now that 4.0 is right around the corner.
What version of FF were you using prior to update? It's pretty unusual for the browser to have that much of a fit and cause that much of a problem' date=' but it seems safe enough to assume that your memory is fine if repeated memory tests say it's ok. We'll ignore the trust issues I still have with the accuracy of such things while still in the Windows environment.

Also, you guys, on that "recent posts problem" thread, I'm still waiting to see the thing break. It hasn't yet.[/quote']Told ya' so! :tongue:Bad RAM can only come up once in a full moon, then go away and hide as a normal piece of hardware for the rest of the month though.... theoretically you could run memtest 1,000 times and not tag it, though statistically that's very unlikely.In better news.....Having combated a bad OOO install I THINK I am back up and running, at least I am able to use the CS again, so I'll do another mark up of Bruma tonight (yay).It's going to be a little while before I show you any more tomb stuff though, I have to extract and kitbash those meshes with nifscope again first.

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@Samson: You have a point there, and given that 4.0 is coming soon, it might not even matter. On the other hand, if she could figure out what in FF changed that had caused it, she'd know her ram and hard drive are both okay for sure...@Dwip: So, did it break it? When I got there Samson and you had already posted to the next page. :(@Sigurd:I agree, it's nothing but a bit of wishful thinking to assume that upgrading the browser truly resolved the issue if you're not willing to follow-up and make sure one of the changes in that version was to address that issue, and bad memory can be a biotch to diagnose with certainty without hardware testers that most folk don't have access to. On the other hand, it's a fairly safe assumption that even if it's a ram issue, if the upgrade seems to have resolved it then she's probably safe for at least a while until the problem returns.Gratz on getting back fully up and running again. :grinning:

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Didn't break it for me. Dunno if it did for Samson or not.I don't suppose any of you has any experience with Shockwave and multiple user accounts. *shoots Adobe*

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Welcome back, Sigurd! lolYeah, I'm not so naive to be 100% confident a simple FF upgrade fixed the problems I'd experienced but it did 100% fix the FF crashing problem. :lol:

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Nope, Dwip, thankfully I've never tried dealing with multiple accounts under shockwave but I know what you're talking about regarding it.Sounds fair enough, Hana.

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