There are enough different errors here that I suspect a memory problem.
There are some that can be ruled out immediately. All the "NTP" errors occur because there's no available NTP server. The "BITS" ones may be benign, but aren't explained by the one Microsoft Knowledge Base article, Q314862, that I found. All the "bad block" errors associated with the CDROM device suggest some kind of data corruption. CD's don't do that!
My experience has been that diffuse errors with no apparent common element are very often "flaky" memory.
(Thanks for replying, and sorry in advance that everything I try to say expands to a huge paragraph.)
The most common element as far as frequency of errors goes is Internet Explorer. All I have to do is keep opening new pages or just surf the web normally for long enough and I'm pretty much guaranteed to cause one of those annoying "memory could not be 'read'/'written'" errors. But that might just be due to the way Internet Explorer handles memory. Sometimes even notepad causes the crash, though. Games, on the other hand, almost never cause such errors, not including internal bugs (with the exception of the civ3 error I listed, which now that I think about it was probably due to faulty buffer restoration code or something).
Luckily, I impulsively hit Ctrl-S every 2 seconds I'm working on something, so I've barely lost anything due to the crashes so far, but... do you think it would be a good idea to replace all of my RAM? Or do you mean that other types of memory are at fault? Perhaps the memory errors are occuring upon attempting transition to virtual memory on the hard drive (which, come to think of it, is unusually slow for its model although it's well-defragmented and diskcheck continues to find nothing wrong with it). The thing I'm most worried about is that when I try to change something to fix it, the computer will suddenly stop working, and I'll lose whatever was on the hard drive that's a huge pain to replace and not quite important enough to back up onto a hundred CDs (half of which would fail).
The CD problems only happen with CD-RWs and (less often) with CD-Rs. When I put the CD in, it starts spinning, then stops and the drive makes some sort of rude noise, then it starts spinning the CD again and repeats many times more before it tells me something is wrong with the CD. (Maybe it logs an error every time it stops or starts spinning.) 90% of new CD-RWs I've tried do this. A friend with the same model of laptop but that got it with different CD drive options experiences worse problems, with most CD-Rs and CD-RWs not working, or working but with over half of their data apparently corrupted. I think in at least some of these cases it must be the fault of the actual CDs being corrupted during the write process, or possibly being scratched. (The same basic problem happen with floppies, but floppy disks are inherently an abysmally unreliable form of storage.) But maybe the CD drives that ship with the I8100 are frequently damaged or ship with buggy drivers, also.
Another problem that's popped up recently (that it seems many others are having, however) is that Flash for IE simply refuses to install, under any circumstances, no matter what I try uninstalling, reinstalling, and repairing, under any security settings.
For the "BITS" messages, I may have disabled DCOM a while ago (probably in msconfig.exe) (I should really use parentheses less often) and mostly forgotten about it. Could this have any side-effects besides the error log?
Another question: Is there any way I can download a replacement driver for my trackpad? That, at least, must be seriously buggy. Sometimes the driver application crashes when I click, creating a small gray box where I clicked that stays in front of everything until I terminate apoint.exe. More frequently, the mouse cursor will suddenly teleport to the top-right pixel of the screen, automatically right-click, and cause all further left-clicks to be interpreted as right-clicks until I right-click on something twice. And the middle click simulation of pressing both buttons at once usually falls through to the window that is furthest in the background and causes its application to crash. Also, my CPU makes an irritating buzzing noise whenever I move the cursor with the trackpad, which doesn't happen with a mouse.
I should probably mention that, with the exception of the trackpad problems, these errors did not happen at all for quite a few months when the computer was new. Then, for no apparent reason, they slowly started occuring with increasing frequency. (I used to have lots of video problems instead, then after updating my video drivers the video problems got much worse, then after updating my BIOS they were suddenly fixed. But that caused speedstep and fan problems, which took quite a while to get rid of, at which point these errors had become fairly common. Can't say I've had a very trouble-free experience with this laptop.)
(My problem is the reverse - I tend to be too terse!)
The most common element as far as frequency of errors goes is Internet Explorer...
Luckily, I impulsively hit Ctrl-S every 2 seconds I'm working on something, so I've barely lost anything due to the crashes so far, but... do you think it would be a good idea to replace all of my RAM? Or do you mean that other types of memory are at fault? Perhaps the memory errors are occuring upon attempting transition to virtual memory on the hard drive.
That's an ominous possibility, especially for the crashes that occur during system startup. Data's moving from the hard drive to main memory, and if it gets corrupted somewhere along the way, errors like this could happen.
The CD problems only happen with CD-RWs and (less often) with CD-Rs. When I put the CD in, it starts spinning, then stops and the drive makes some sort of rude noise, then it starts spinning the CD again and repeats many times more before it tells me something is wrong with the CD. (Maybe it logs an error every time it stops or starts spinning.) 90% of new CD-RWs I've tried do this. A friend with the same model of laptop but that got it with different CD drive options experiences worse problems, with most CD-Rs and CD-RWs not working, or working but with over half of their data apparently corrupted. I think in at least some of these cases it must be the fault of the actual CDs being corrupted during the write process, or possibly being scratched.
Note that the data path to a CD also involves transferring data from main memory.
Another problem that's popped up recently (that it seems many others are having, however) is that Flash for IE simply refuses to install, under any circumstances, no matter what I try uninstalling, reinstalling, and repairing, under any security settings.
Let's defer that one until things get more stable - hopefully a LOT more stable!
For the "BITS" messages, I may have disabled DCOM a while ago (probably in msconfig.exe) (I should really use parentheses less often) and mostly forgotten about it. Could this have any side-effects besides the error log?
Probably not. You might be able to chase that down through the registry and get rid of the error message.
Another question: Is there any way I can download a replacement driver for my trackpad? That, at least, must be seriously buggy. Sometimes the driver application crashes when I click, creating a small gray box where I clicked that stays in front of everything until I terminate apoint.exe. More frequently, the mouse cursor will suddenly teleport to the top-right pixel of the screen, automatically right-click, and cause all further left-clicks to be interpreted as right-clicks until I right-click on something twice. And the middle click simulation of pressing both buttons at once usually falls through to the window that is furthest in the background and causes its application to crash.
If there are updated trackpad drivers, you should be able to grab them via the "Downloads" tab at the top of the Forum page.
Also, my CPU makes an irritating buzzing noise whenever I move the cursor with the trackpad, which doesn't happen with a mouse.
I've seen that problem reported before. I don't think it was resolved. Like the "BITS" messages, I'd defer that one (triage mode!).
I should probably mention that, with the exception of the trackpad problems, these errors did not happen at all for quite a few months when the computer was new. Then, for no apparent reason, they slowly started occuring with increasing frequency. (I used to have lots of video problems instead, then after updating my video drivers the video problems got much worse, then after updating my BIOS they were suddenly fixed. But that caused speedstep and fan problems, which took quite a while to get rid of, at which point these errors had become fairly common. Can't say I've had a very trouble-free experience with this laptop.)
I still like the main memory hypothesis. I'd replace all of it.
Crucial's a good source for laptop memory. It sounds like there were overheating problems during the troubled history of your laptop. There may have been latent damage resulting from overheating.
Another possibility is problems with video acceleration. There's probably a "Performance" tab under the advanced properties of the video adapter. Try reducing the performance setting. It'll likely slow things down, though. Another variable affecting video performance is DirectX acceleration. While troubleshooting a Java-related Win2K system crash, I turned that off using Microsoft's "dxdiag" utility.
I think I'd suggest trying to derate the video subsystem and see if that stabilizes things as a first step.
Well, found the download for an updated Alps driver and installed it, the trackpad works much better now. It seems to be buzzing less too, although maybe not... that doesn't really matter anyway.
Looked into the RAM on Crucial... for some reason I thought memory was cheaper, it's almost $80 just to replace mine and I don't even know if it'll fix the problem. But the fact that virtual memory seems to be used so often suggests that I would benefit from more memory than I already have, but I would think 256 MB should be enough (then again, conserving memory is probably the absolute last priority of most programs these days). I don't even know how much the I8100 has room for, though.
Found something that suggested the error could be caused by having a "dual LAN" enabled when one wasn't used, and there did appear to be two LAN connections in my network settings, one of which was unused, so I disabled it. Also defragmented again, and ran the F12 startup diagnostics, which couldn't find anything wrong although the last test it did took a huge amount of time to finish. Tried the "repair" feature on Internet Explorer just in case something was wrong with that. Of course, it's still crashing anyway, but it seems to be happening less often now (i.e. once a day instead of every 5 hours) although maybe I'm just opening new browser windows less often.
My hard drive has been slightly problematic in the past. For instance, files used to occasionally disappear -- one time I even encountered an error something like, "Windows could not start up because the following file could not be found: 'System'". But once I got it working again and ran diskcheck, which said it found and fixed some errors, I haven't had any obviously-hard-drive-related problems since. (It's happened the other way around with 3 other people's laptops that I know of: no errors at all for the first few months, then the hard drive suddenly and irrepairably fails.)
I don't think the video acceleration is the problem, since I run demanding DirectX-accelerated apps all the time with all the performance settings maxed out and they never cause these system crashes.
I have had overheating problems once or twice when playing games, at least I assume they were overheating problems because the computer refused to start up after a sudden shutdown until I'd waited a few minutes. It just seemed to be happening because the maximum temperature allowed was too high, so I got FanGUI and told it to cool down sooner and that problem never happens anymore. What type of permanent damage might have been caused, though?
Regarding memory capacity - according to
the service manual, it will take two DIMMs with a maximum size of 256 mb each.
As you found out, catastrophic disk failures are actually more common than subtle ones. That's why I keep coming back to data paths. Video acceleration is an example - in the case I encountered, the video subsystem wasn't being exercised particularly hard. The problem was in fact a (still unresolved) bug in the ATI video drivers. There was a workaround incorporated into the Java run time code that prevented the bug from being triggered. So I wouldn't rule out a problem with timing involving the video subsystem without altering the timing using the adapter's performance settings and dxdiag. Besides, anything that might affect the frequency of failure without spending any money on component replacement is worth checking out.
I'm not qualified to attempt to comment on what might fail as a result of overheating. Two catastrophic disk failures I've dealt with were in fact electronics failures on the daughterboard on SCSI disk drives. We never found out what had actually failed, but we were able to recover all the data by swapping daughterboards and copying data off the drive. There was physical evidence of overheating in both cases - the spindle motor was discolored.
That one was physically obvious, but only after removing the hard drives from the machines they'd failed in. But not all thermally related component failures are visible.
The memory replacement suggestion isn't based on any specific incident I've dealt with. But I've seen a number of systems that were exhibiting a multiplicity of symptoms that seemingly pointed nowhere which were resolved by replacing memory.
In summary, the suggestion of derating the video subsystem is an attempt to change the timing of one of the elements involved in the transfer of data within the machine without spending any money. The suggestion that it's memory is a hunch, but it's based on my experience.
It looks like Crucial has a
"no-fault" thirty day return policy, so the financial risk may not be that much of an issue. I'm surprised by that, because there's a risk of electrostatic damage associated with mishandled memory, and it's unusual to have a policy that permits anything other than an exchange. So I'd check with them about the return policy first.
I haven't dealt with Crucial, but others that post here have had good things to say about them and their products.
(edit) An easy way to affect timing is to run the laptop off the battery for a while! Do the various crashes occur often enough that you'd be likely to know if running off the battery affects the failure frequency?
(edit #2) Although this machine's problems don't match most of the reported symptoms of spyware/malware, we should rule out that possibility. See
ChrisRLG's posting for details.
jwatt
4.4K Posts
0
January 24th, 2004 04:00
There are some that can be ruled out immediately. All the "NTP" errors occur because there's no available NTP server. The "BITS" ones may be benign, but aren't explained by the one Microsoft Knowledge Base article, Q314862, that I found. All the "bad block" errors associated with the CDROM device suggest some kind of data corruption. CD's don't do that!
My experience has been that diffuse errors with no apparent common element are very often "flaky" memory.
Jim
asterisk
1 Rookie
•
8 Posts
0
January 24th, 2004 06:00
(Thanks for replying, and sorry in advance that everything I try to say expands to a huge paragraph.)
The most common element as far as frequency of errors goes is Internet Explorer. All I have to do is keep opening new pages or just surf the web normally for long enough and I'm pretty much guaranteed to cause one of those annoying "memory could not be 'read'/'written'" errors. But that might just be due to the way Internet Explorer handles memory. Sometimes even notepad causes the crash, though. Games, on the other hand, almost never cause such errors, not including internal bugs (with the exception of the civ3 error I listed, which now that I think about it was probably due to faulty buffer restoration code or something).
Luckily, I impulsively hit Ctrl-S every 2 seconds I'm working on something, so I've barely lost anything due to the crashes so far, but... do you think it would be a good idea to replace all of my RAM? Or do you mean that other types of memory are at fault? Perhaps the memory errors are occuring upon attempting transition to virtual memory on the hard drive (which, come to think of it, is unusually slow for its model although it's well-defragmented and diskcheck continues to find nothing wrong with it). The thing I'm most worried about is that when I try to change something to fix it, the computer will suddenly stop working, and I'll lose whatever was on the hard drive that's a huge pain to replace and not quite important enough to back up onto a hundred CDs (half of which would fail).
The CD problems only happen with CD-RWs and (less often) with CD-Rs. When I put the CD in, it starts spinning, then stops and the drive makes some sort of rude noise, then it starts spinning the CD again and repeats many times more before it tells me something is wrong with the CD. (Maybe it logs an error every time it stops or starts spinning.) 90% of new CD-RWs I've tried do this. A friend with the same model of laptop but that got it with different CD drive options experiences worse problems, with most CD-Rs and CD-RWs not working, or working but with over half of their data apparently corrupted. I think in at least some of these cases it must be the fault of the actual CDs being corrupted during the write process, or possibly being scratched. (The same basic problem happen with floppies, but floppy disks are inherently an abysmally unreliable form of storage.) But maybe the CD drives that ship with the I8100 are frequently damaged or ship with buggy drivers, also.
Another problem that's popped up recently (that it seems many others are having, however) is that Flash for IE simply refuses to install, under any circumstances, no matter what I try uninstalling, reinstalling, and repairing, under any security settings.
For the "BITS" messages, I may have disabled DCOM a while ago (probably in msconfig.exe) (I should really use parentheses less often) and mostly forgotten about it. Could this have any side-effects besides the error log?
Another question: Is there any way I can download a replacement driver for my trackpad? That, at least, must be seriously buggy. Sometimes the driver application crashes when I click, creating a small gray box where I clicked that stays in front of everything until I terminate apoint.exe. More frequently, the mouse cursor will suddenly teleport to the top-right pixel of the screen, automatically right-click, and cause all further left-clicks to be interpreted as right-clicks until I right-click on something twice. And the middle click simulation of pressing both buttons at once usually falls through to the window that is furthest in the background and causes its application to crash. Also, my CPU makes an irritating buzzing noise whenever I move the cursor with the trackpad, which doesn't happen with a mouse.
I should probably mention that, with the exception of the trackpad problems, these errors did not happen at all for quite a few months when the computer was new. Then, for no apparent reason, they slowly started occuring with increasing frequency. (I used to have lots of video problems instead, then after updating my video drivers the video problems got much worse, then after updating my BIOS they were suddenly fixed. But that caused speedstep and fan problems, which took quite a while to get rid of, at which point these errors had become fairly common. Can't say I've had a very trouble-free experience with this laptop.)
jwatt
4.4K Posts
0
January 26th, 2004 01:00
The most common element as far as frequency of errors goes is Internet Explorer...
Luckily, I impulsively hit Ctrl-S every 2 seconds I'm working on something, so I've barely lost anything due to the crashes so far, but... do you think it would be a good idea to replace all of my RAM? Or do you mean that other types of memory are at fault? Perhaps the memory errors are occuring upon attempting transition to virtual memory on the hard drive.
That's an ominous possibility, especially for the crashes that occur during system startup. Data's moving from the hard drive to main memory, and if it gets corrupted somewhere along the way, errors like this could happen.
The CD problems only happen with CD-RWs and (less often) with CD-Rs. When I put the CD in, it starts spinning, then stops and the drive makes some sort of rude noise, then it starts spinning the CD again and repeats many times more before it tells me something is wrong with the CD. (Maybe it logs an error every time it stops or starts spinning.) 90% of new CD-RWs I've tried do this. A friend with the same model of laptop but that got it with different CD drive options experiences worse problems, with most CD-Rs and CD-RWs not working, or working but with over half of their data apparently corrupted. I think in at least some of these cases it must be the fault of the actual CDs being corrupted during the write process, or possibly being scratched.
Note that the data path to a CD also involves transferring data from main memory.
Another problem that's popped up recently (that it seems many others are having, however) is that Flash for IE simply refuses to install, under any circumstances, no matter what I try uninstalling, reinstalling, and repairing, under any security settings.
Let's defer that one until things get more stable - hopefully a LOT more stable!
For the "BITS" messages, I may have disabled DCOM a while ago (probably in msconfig.exe) (I should really use parentheses less often) and mostly forgotten about it. Could this have any side-effects besides the error log?
Probably not. You might be able to chase that down through the registry and get rid of the error message.
Another question: Is there any way I can download a replacement driver for my trackpad? That, at least, must be seriously buggy. Sometimes the driver application crashes when I click, creating a small gray box where I clicked that stays in front of everything until I terminate apoint.exe. More frequently, the mouse cursor will suddenly teleport to the top-right pixel of the screen, automatically right-click, and cause all further left-clicks to be interpreted as right-clicks until I right-click on something twice. And the middle click simulation of pressing both buttons at once usually falls through to the window that is furthest in the background and causes its application to crash.
If there are updated trackpad drivers, you should be able to grab them via the "Downloads" tab at the top of the Forum page.
Also, my CPU makes an irritating buzzing noise whenever I move the cursor with the trackpad, which doesn't happen with a mouse.
I've seen that problem reported before. I don't think it was resolved. Like the "BITS" messages, I'd defer that one (triage mode!).
I should probably mention that, with the exception of the trackpad problems, these errors did not happen at all for quite a few months when the computer was new. Then, for no apparent reason, they slowly started occuring with increasing frequency. (I used to have lots of video problems instead, then after updating my video drivers the video problems got much worse, then after updating my BIOS they were suddenly fixed. But that caused speedstep and fan problems, which took quite a while to get rid of, at which point these errors had become fairly common. Can't say I've had a very trouble-free experience with this laptop.)
I still like the main memory hypothesis. I'd replace all of it. Crucial's a good source for laptop memory. It sounds like there were overheating problems during the troubled history of your laptop. There may have been latent damage resulting from overheating.
Another possibility is problems with video acceleration. There's probably a "Performance" tab under the advanced properties of the video adapter. Try reducing the performance setting. It'll likely slow things down, though. Another variable affecting video performance is DirectX acceleration. While troubleshooting a Java-related Win2K system crash, I turned that off using Microsoft's "dxdiag" utility.
I think I'd suggest trying to derate the video subsystem and see if that stabilizes things as a first step.
Jim
asterisk
1 Rookie
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8 Posts
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January 26th, 2004 04:00
Well, found the download for an updated Alps driver and installed it, the trackpad works much better now. It seems to be buzzing less too, although maybe not... that doesn't really matter anyway.
Looked into the RAM on Crucial... for some reason I thought memory was cheaper, it's almost $80 just to replace mine and I don't even know if it'll fix the problem. But the fact that virtual memory seems to be used so often suggests that I would benefit from more memory than I already have, but I would think 256 MB should be enough (then again, conserving memory is probably the absolute last priority of most programs these days). I don't even know how much the I8100 has room for, though.
Found something that suggested the error could be caused by having a "dual LAN" enabled when one wasn't used, and there did appear to be two LAN connections in my network settings, one of which was unused, so I disabled it. Also defragmented again, and ran the F12 startup diagnostics, which couldn't find anything wrong although the last test it did took a huge amount of time to finish. Tried the "repair" feature on Internet Explorer just in case something was wrong with that. Of course, it's still crashing anyway, but it seems to be happening less often now (i.e. once a day instead of every 5 hours) although maybe I'm just opening new browser windows less often.
My hard drive has been slightly problematic in the past. For instance, files used to occasionally disappear -- one time I even encountered an error something like, "Windows could not start up because the following file could not be found: 'System'". But once I got it working again and ran diskcheck, which said it found and fixed some errors, I haven't had any obviously-hard-drive-related problems since. (It's happened the other way around with 3 other people's laptops that I know of: no errors at all for the first few months, then the hard drive suddenly and irrepairably fails.)
I don't think the video acceleration is the problem, since I run demanding DirectX-accelerated apps all the time with all the performance settings maxed out and they never cause these system crashes.
I have had overheating problems once or twice when playing games, at least I assume they were overheating problems because the computer refused to start up after a sudden shutdown until I'd waited a few minutes. It just seemed to be happening because the maximum temperature allowed was too high, so I got FanGUI and told it to cool down sooner and that problem never happens anymore. What type of permanent damage might have been caused, though?
jwatt
4.4K Posts
0
January 26th, 2004 05:00
As you found out, catastrophic disk failures are actually more common than subtle ones. That's why I keep coming back to data paths. Video acceleration is an example - in the case I encountered, the video subsystem wasn't being exercised particularly hard. The problem was in fact a (still unresolved) bug in the ATI video drivers. There was a workaround incorporated into the Java run time code that prevented the bug from being triggered. So I wouldn't rule out a problem with timing involving the video subsystem without altering the timing using the adapter's performance settings and dxdiag. Besides, anything that might affect the frequency of failure without spending any money on component replacement is worth checking out.
I'm not qualified to attempt to comment on what might fail as a result of overheating. Two catastrophic disk failures I've dealt with were in fact electronics failures on the daughterboard on SCSI disk drives. We never found out what had actually failed, but we were able to recover all the data by swapping daughterboards and copying data off the drive. There was physical evidence of overheating in both cases - the spindle motor was discolored.
That one was physically obvious, but only after removing the hard drives from the machines they'd failed in. But not all thermally related component failures are visible.
The memory replacement suggestion isn't based on any specific incident I've dealt with. But I've seen a number of systems that were exhibiting a multiplicity of symptoms that seemingly pointed nowhere which were resolved by replacing memory.
In summary, the suggestion of derating the video subsystem is an attempt to change the timing of one of the elements involved in the transfer of data within the machine without spending any money. The suggestion that it's memory is a hunch, but it's based on my experience.
It looks like Crucial has a "no-fault" thirty day return policy, so the financial risk may not be that much of an issue. I'm surprised by that, because there's a risk of electrostatic damage associated with mishandled memory, and it's unusual to have a policy that permits anything other than an exchange. So I'd check with them about the return policy first.
I haven't dealt with Crucial, but others that post here have had good things to say about them and their products.
(edit) An easy way to affect timing is to run the laptop off the battery for a while! Do the various crashes occur often enough that you'd be likely to know if running off the battery affects the failure frequency?
(edit #2) Although this machine's problems don't match most of the reported symptoms of spyware/malware, we should rule out that possibility. See ChrisRLG's posting for details.
Jim
Message Edited by jimw on 01-25-2004 11:47 PM
Message Edited by jimw on 01-26-2004 08:59 AM