Fafhrd on 17/6/2011 at 05:07
ARGH. Godamnmotherfuckingpieceof...
Okay. So, rolling back the drivers didn't actually work, so on Saturday I went out and grabbed a new sound card. Soundblaster X-fi Titanium, PCI-e (because apparently highish end regular PCI soundcards don't exist anymore). Install it, everything seems fine. Crackling sound is gone. BUT: now the computer has taken to just rebooting itself randomly while running Vista. And when this happens the USB ports are no longer powered until I do a manual restart. I looked at the mobo manual and realized that maybe since I plugged the new soundcard into the spare x16 slot instead of the two available x1 slots (because one of the x1 slots would put the soundcard flush with one of the fans on the video card, and the other puts it right above the north bridge heat fins) that I should probably plug in the 12-volt PCI-e connector (especially since the whole 'unpowered USB' thing would seem to indicate a power issue at work). Did that. Computer still reboots itself, USB ports still dead on reboot.
I haven't found any solid connection between any of the occasions when it reboots. Initially I thought it had something to do with PowerDVD, but the most recent occasion it happened I was watching flash video and the computer had only been on for about five minutes. Previous occasions it happened when I was changing the refresh rate in Catalyst Control Center, but I updated the drivers and that stopped happening, and the first time it happened I was just web browsing (after having watched a movie in PowerDVD, hence that connection).
So I don't know what the fuck is going on anymore:
* It's not the RAM, since the memory test came back clean.
* It's not an underpowered PCI-e slot or mobo, since I've got an 800w PSU and everything is hooked up properly
* I thought maybe the network card's slot was bad, since I did switch it's slot with the old soundcard to see if that was causing the crackling sound, and the crackling persisted, so the slots are the same.
* I'm having Avira do a scan in Vista now, but I'm pretty sure that'll come back clean since the daily scan in XP hits the Vista drive, too.
So that leaves what? Vista's HDD is fucked? It is a really old 40gig drive, but the amount of usage it gets is really low (other than the daily virus scan), since pretty much the only thing on it is Vista (all games, music, movies, etc. reside on a separate 1TB drive), and Vista isn't my primary OS.
Sulphur on 17/6/2011 at 09:39
If you don't get the reboot problem in XP, it's probably not a RAM issue at all. Has XP been running all right since you installed the new card, though?
If you want to isolate whether it's an HDD issue (I doubt it though, unless you're getting other signs of HDD failure), pull out the card and see if Vista runs right for a good enough period of time without it.
If your machine doesn't randomly reboot after that, try putting the card back in one of the x1 slots for a little while and see if it was the slot causing your problem. It shouldn't be, but it doesn't hurt to check.
Fafhrd on 17/6/2011 at 20:14
It seems it's an issue with Flash. Or websites that try to use flash even when I don't have it installed. The reboot always happens within a couple of minutes of loading a site with a flash embed.
Al_B on 17/6/2011 at 20:33
Have you tried alternative browsers to see if the problem is isolated to one browser's plugin?
Fafhrd on 18/6/2011 at 22:37
Tried two different versions of Firefox and IE7. Same results.
Fafhrd on 10/8/2011 at 03:10
Well, seems it was the vista drive after all. It's dead. Unfortunately, since it was my boot drive, i can't seem to get into XP any more. I've tried fixmbr, fixboot and bootcfg through recovery console, and the bet I've managed is to get 'ntldr is missing.' Any thoughts?
NM, got it. Now I just need to figure out how to power up the Vista drive, re-partition my 1 TB drive without erasing any data on it, clone the Vista drive to that partition, and then rebuild the boot record so I can dual boot properly again. Should be easy...
