Give Our Abilities Time

(This article is the third in a fascinating series which includes analyses of my work laptop and my Media Center PC.)

Though I've had Vista at work for longer than I've had it at home, the longest-lasting OS install is my home PC, a Dell XPS 710 with the factory load. Reliability & Performance Monitor on this PC has data going back to May 2nd or just about 8 months. Here are the application crash statistics collected in that time:

… and 11 other one-off crashes.

DllHost.exe:
I can explain this. I was testing various software to convert videos from my camera to YouTube-suitable format and also to iPod MP4 format. One such piece of shit software called Apex Video Converter installed some ancient-ass xvid.dll that basically threw these errors every time I opened an Explorer window in a directory containing some videos. That was an annoying couple of days until I tracked this down.

Firefox.exe:
As I said before, I think Firefox can be unreliable on Vista, particularly with a bunch of add-ons. But at least it saves state periodically so it's not such a big deal. Lately the problem has gotten worse, but, without going into too much incriminating detail, I have started leaving something called NOVA running which runs up Firefox's RAM usage from its usual 200MB to numbers as high as 600MB or however high it gets until I catch it. So it's easy to blame Firefox but it probably is poorly written code in the NOVA interface. Or Java. Seriously, whenever sites launch the Java tray applet, I cross my fingers against a crash.

VideoConverter.exe:
This was the winner in the video conversion testing but mostly for convenience reasons that I won't go into and are probably the cause of the crashes. The less said, the less trouble I get myself into.

iexplore.exe:
I only use IE7 at home to check my work email through OWA 2007. And, if left running for some period of time, IE won't restore and instead shows the title bar with whatever is behind it, behind it. I don't know if this happens with other websites because I browse everything but work stuff with Firefox.

wmplayer.exe:
I have a slight suspicion that the indexing process that Media Player uses is not stable or handles ripped audio and video material from, er, various sources without much grace. Most of the time wmplayer is doing something with its database when it crashes.

Explorer.exe:
See the first (DllHost) explanation.

Acrobat.exe:
This is standard Acrobat Reader. A program I hate with a passion.

HP_IZE.EXE:
This I think is the HP Image Zone (or whatever) thing that installed with a photo printer I bought. I actually thought it might be nice to try another tool besides Windows Photo Gallery to manage my photos, particularly if it offered features like printing four wallet-sized photos on 4x6 glossy paper, but every time this thing indexes my pictures it gets about 96% through them in 10 minutes and then crashes. I have a lot of pictures in my \Users\me\Pictures folder but Pictures\Public Pictures are the ones from my camera. (The rest are my digital artwork and found pictures (mostly source material for art).) So something is not in whatever format HP_IZE can handle, and it crashes. Sloppy...

mcproxy.exe:
I had to look this one up to find that it's the McAfee Proxy Service. My feelings on the McAfee security products which came bundled with my Dell are in a previous blog entry so there's not much more to say about this piece of crap software.

Others:
Several crashes are related to the bad xvid.dll that I got from the wonderful Apex Video Converter -- they're other video conversion products that presumably called upon xvid.dll to try and convert the sample file (a downloaded episode of Grey's Anatomy for my wife to watch on her iPod, if you must know). The rest are just random crashes that you pretty much expect. I also averaged one "disruptive shutdown" a day from early August to early September, which I determined was due to problems with SATA Native Command Queuing. And, I've had five blue screens. Can't remember what I was doing and Reliability Monitor doesn't say much about it.

There you go. This concludes a fascinating examination of problems with my three computers. Stay tuned for an analysis of my event log, followed by the contents of my Start Menu. I hope I'm kidding...

--sbreck

I have blogged before about my problems with my work laptop, a Lenovo ThinkPad X60 Tablet, but not so much about the probably more serious problems I've been struggling with on my relatively new (May 2007) Dell XPS 710. The XPS 710 is both the most expensive home computer I've ever bought and the most problematic. Put succinctly, it frequently locks up, hangs, freezes -- whatever you want to call it -- and I have to hard power it off. As I was using this blog entry as research to build my tech support call, I noted the following symptoms:

• Things weren't too bad until I applied the latest series of patches, specifically the two Performance and Reliability patches
  
• Lockups have occurred while searching from the Start Menu and choosing See All Results
  
• Often a lockup would start with one app, and then spread to the rest -- I've seen this with things like filemon on multiple Vista machines and figured that was a cause, but at work I've seen Outlook and OneNote hold each other open and then get all the other apps to join their freeze-up party
  
• I had more than one lockup when changing "Use this folder type as a template" and checking "Also apply this template to all subfolders" (as an aside, I wish I could default this across the board to "All items" -- what can I say, I'm just used to sorting by date)
  
• Maybe it was a bad hard drive -- I began to notice Event ID 129 warning messages from nvstor32 in the event viewer stating "Reset to device, \Device\RaidPort0, was issued." Often these preceded the lock-up.
  
• I also saw ACPI Event ID 6 messages stating "IRQARB: ACPI BIOS does not contain an IRQ for the device in PCI slot 2, function 0." Besides slot 2, this also happened with slot 5, slot 4, slot 19, and slot 24.
  
• Switching in and out of full-screen mode in Unreal Tournament 2004 could lock up the machine
  

This latter led me on a quest that I think was a dead end but I'm not entirely sure. When I first bought the PC and ran it for a number of days straight I had the occasional lock-up. This seemed to go away, maybe with successful nVidia (graphics) driver updates, but after applying the Performance and Reliability patch (I think) it caused the lockups again, and so I started looking at video card temperature as a possible reason. I downloaded MonitorView and nTune and found that my nVidia 8600 GTS did in fact seem to be running pretty hot (124°F from a cold start in 2D mode), and also noticed that the fan was at its lowest setting. Using nTune, I could set the fan to the maximum and achieve a temperature of 115°F in 2D, though it would increase to 130°F or so during games. Turning the fan up and decreasing the GTS's temperature seemed to reduce lockups, though I would still have a few a day. And nTune was annoying, because it couldn't automatically set the temperature, so I put it in Startup and manually set it every time. What a pain in the ass to set this four or whatever times a day, and still have lockups.

After some searching on the nvstor32 129 errors, I found this MS Forums post and follow-on searches turned up this blog entry, which pointed me in the right direction. I turned off Native Command Queuing in the "nVidia nForce Serial ATA Controller" for my hard drive to see if that helped, and so far I have had my computer on for almost 30 hours without a freeze and reboot, whereas it hadn't lasted two hours for the last few weeks. I assume that by posting this I tempt fate and perhaps my computer will "hear" me and begin to freeze again, but hopefully others who have this problem will see my blog post and have similar success.

Now to figure out what exactly is Native Command Queuing, and find out why it would cause such a problem and why it only became such a problem recently. Did a Performance and Reliability patch turn it on? Did some nVidia driver update do it? Why was I plagued with this? Would Dell have known if I had just called them? So many questions, so little time in the day to answer them…

--sbreck

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