[64studio-devel] Going crazy: div. apps exiting without preventing me - loosing my work

[R.Wolff]

Quentin Harley schrieb:
> Quentin Harley wrote:
>>
>> Otherwise you could deinstall "Houdini" ;-)
>>
>>   
> PS: not referring to the 3D animator package...  Rather to the 
> mysteriously disappearing magician!
> 
> Quentin


Never heard about the 3D package, so I think I understood this one right ;)

Well, it could very well be hardware related I guess.
Since 2 or 3 months I have a problem with my mainboard. Something like 
short or I don't know, really. And what's really strange in there is, 
the had not moved the 3 years, always standing at the same place, no 
change of hardware and such stuff. I can not really nail it down, first 
I thought it's my AGP card (ATI RADEON 7000VE), so I changed it for a 
Matrox Millenium G550 Dual-Head. Things got a little better, but the 
problems didn't totally disappear.

Then I had checked all my HDD's very thoroughly with the help of a 
little utility called "Spin Rite". It's not free, but it's capable of 
some real magic and could save your butt when no other app can sort your 
trouble.
There were no problems with my disks.

Next step was to test my memory, using "memtestx86", and even though I 
don't understand all the jargon it's talking about, the final result 
seemed to indicate that things are allright. I also tried to swap mem 
sticks around (2x512MB DDR 2100 CL2 from TakeMS, which give 10 years of 
warranty!!!). I used first 1, in any/all slots, then the other in 
any/all slots, both together in any/all slots and in any possible 
configuration. All that had no affect on the stability.

Then I tinkered with the BIOS settings and found out that if I set 
hardware interface to PIC instead of APIC, the PC would at least boot 
again and stay with me.

I've found since then a combination of BIOS settings (Video aperture, 
mem speed, PCI-, AGP- and memory voltage and then some) which seems to 
work for Linux. Under WinXP I can't do heavy stuff like audio recording, 
because the frickin' PC just freezes then.
Linux on the other side seems to access/treat/handle the hardware very 
differently from Windows i.e.
I've tried several distros in the last month like Kubuntu, Fedora Core 
5, SusE 10.x, MusiX/GNU, Apodio etc., and they all seem to work, incl. 
64-Studio.

So I really don't know where it's at, what to do, what to change 
hardware wise. Ah yes, I also changed Power supply twice to ensure I've 
got enough juice for my components.

Anyway, sorry for this lengthy post. And thanks for your assistance Quentin.

If someone's got any other ideas, I'm in 'listen-mode' :D

Cheers
Raphael ;)