Everest diagnostic utility

Hi! Sorry to interfere but Lynn, your PC evidently has quite serious hardware (physical) problems.

Even under full load conditions, your PC should NEVER be producing the kind of behaviour you are describing.

It is possible that your PC / CPU / RAM is overheating
It is possible that (perhaps) one of your fans is knackered
It is possible that your PSU is faulty or cannot produce sufficient current during sustained peak loads.
It is VERY LIKELY that either your RAM or CPU has been damaged and it
is Very Difficult to tell which has gone wrong (to be sure you'd have
to keep opening up your PC and replacing bits with known good bits). I'd even be worried doing the above as unless your PC is brand new (or else VERY old) neither your RAM nor CPU should have broken without another cause (i.e. a voltage spike from your power supply).

In short, I'm afraid your PC is Physically Broken. With time and
effort one of us could probably help you diagnose it but unless you're doing something crazy and very simple (like having blocked the PC's exhaust) we won't be able to help you fix it (particularly as it would involve messing around in the internals of the hardware and probably
the BIOS too).

i.e. In the end even if we can find out what's wrong you WILL have to take it back to a repair shop (or give to a friend who knows what to do
;) )

Mind you this can be an opportunity – if you'd like to learn about PCs then get yourself a couple of books from the library (I got started
many years ago on "PC's for Dummies" :) )
I seem to remember Dan Gookin was a good author for beginners PC books in general.
I'd be happy to help you help yourself like this (as a learning experience) and answer any questions you might have. You could hardly have a better start than practising on a broken PC as you really can't break it much further!!

My email address is r2_x1 at(@) yahoo.com. (I'm not really worried about spam bots getting this as I already get 50–100 spams a day!

Give us a shout with what you want to do as soon as you like, but for goodness sake stop spamming the poor people who've registered on the forum. :) (And yes I do appreciate the irony of that last comment)

Best Wishes
Adrian

I did download a trial version of Everest Ultimate Edition. But, as I suspected, the instructions seem to be directed at people who are "computerese-hip". Nowhere did I see anything that said (in PLAIN LAYMAN'S ENGLISH), "How To Test Your PC Memory" or "How To Tell If The Test Found Anything Wrong With Your PC Memory". :(

Any chance there might be an instruction manual called "Everest
Ultimate Edition For Dummies" ? :)

???...Was I really spamming?...:(

A bit unfair to call the thread Spam: it has only in the
last few posts become clear that the problem is not
specific to Glidos. I was quite pleased to see the
group getting some use for a change. :-)

My feeling is that probably Lynn's CPU and memory
are ok (Orthos will detect the tiniest problem, and
it seems to run happily on her system in the absence
of 3D graphics).

My bets would be PSU, graphics card or maybe motherboard.

But, as Adrian points out, it does look like a hardware
problem, which wont get fixed without taking the side
off.

Cheers,
        Paul.



But, but, but, how can you not understand that!!! :-)

You joined the glidos smartgroup. I have a message posted
by you, admittedly old but not that old (Sep 2006). When
smartgroups went out of business, jiglu took over the
groups.

I can certainly unregister you, if you are no longer interested
in TR1/Glidos.

Cheers,
        Paul.

In message <(Address removed)> you wrote:

???...Was I really spamming?...:(

In the past 20 or so days, I count 42 posts to this list, of which 18 are from you, and about 39 are directly related to your broken
machine.

I'm sure nobody minds that this list was used to isolate the fact
that your machine has a problem – after all, your first suspected it might have been a problem with Glidos itself, and discussion of such things is entirely appropriate here.

Now that is has been fairly clearly determined that it is something physically wrong with your machine rather than something wrong with
the software however, I'd suggest that continued postings here might begin to annoy other people that subscribe to this list purely to
hear about Glidos.

It is entirely possible that there will turn out to be some simple solution to your problems (I'd still be suspicious of a dust clogged heatsink, or some dodgy RAM (maybe curable by turning a timing
down)). The problem is that trying each possible thing step by step
is going to produce a massive amount of back and forth communication between you and people suggesting things to try. Continuing that communication on this list would almost certainly be counted by many
as spam.

Taking the conversation off-list to private email would therefore
seem like a good idea – especially as Adrian has so kindly
volunteered to help you.

Best of luck sorting your machine.

Robin—
Robin Watts, Email: <(Address removed)>
Warm Silence Software, WWW: <http://www.wss.co.uk/>
P.O.Box 28, Woodstock, Tel: 01608 737172 (or Mobile: 07885 487642) Oxfordshire, OX20 1XX Fax: 01608 737172

Yes, quite, although we shouldn't give the impression
we are blaming Lynn for any of this. I've been keeping
this thread going with replies because the results she's
been seeing from tests were confusing me: Orthos on
its own was fine, but Orthos plus Glidos crashed. In my
mind, that still pointed at Glidos as a possible cause.
It was only the fairly resent info that Wolfenstein
together with Orthos also crashed that absolved
Glidos.

Still, as Robin says, now hardware problems are the
only possibility and that's not realy appropriate
discussion here.

Probably the best advice is clean the cpu cooler/fan
out. Failing that you need to call someone out to
fix it.

Cheers,
        Paul.



Okay, Paul. Thanks to you and everyone else for the advice on the spamming issue. Didn't realize I was doing that. After reading the replies it becomes clearer.

It seems the summary is this: (1) I probably have a problem with hardware or other software. (2) If I want to address issues of how to use or understand diagnostic programs, I need to go to a jiglu space more appropriate for that. (I wonder if there is one). (3) Until I get the problem with hardware or other software fixed, there's really no practical way to know if there's any real problem with Glidos.

Thanks Everyone. :)

No not really.

1) The problem is almost certainly hardware, rather than software.

2) Further use of diagnostic programs is probably not going to
help. You need to get an engineer out who can swap out different components to locate the faulty ones. (Although it has to be
said, it is just daft not to try vacuuming out the CPU cooler
as a first attempt – a little like not checking if the fuel
tank is empty when your car conks out.)

3) Glidos is completely out of the frame. No one else is
seeing similar problems, and you managed to crash your
system with Wolfenstein.

Cheers,
        Paul.