Teh horr0r ends.

[Silent Warrior]

Phew!

 

History-lesson:

A while ago I posted a thread about my computer behaving... well, wrong. Locking up pretty much everything related to 3D, including Catalyst Control Center. (Put that in your pipe and smoke it!) Since Eurofighter Typhoon: Gold Pack gave me a nice and sparkly blue-screen when I tried to open it, and while others suggested it, I went and bought a new hard-drive. Whee! All's well and good!

 

And then my OTHER harddrive died: It misplaced the partition. That was a pretty well-crammed 120 Gb-HD... Luckily, I could excavate the most vital things (my music-collection :) and LO-campaigns), but the amount of lost gigabytes is, in my eyes, staggering. So, time to buy ANOTHER HD. This time a 180 Gb monstrosity, by the way, so now I'm up to 260 Gb total HD-capacity.

 

And, lo and behold, 3D-games started locking up AGAIN! (It took a little longer until CCC froze this time.) AAAAAAAAAAAAAGH!!! [Gratuitous Fawlty Towers-quote] Thank you God! Thank you ****** much!

It seems that this time, it was my 9700 Pro going on a strike. My favorite computer-hardware-store said I most likely wore out the 3D-section of the GPU. (Is that even possible?? I thought that was the kind of thing that followed the mentality of 'if one go, we all go'!) When I bought this thing, it cost me about $600! Still, there's no way ANYWHERE I don't think I've had my money's worth of twinklies.

So... Now, following a quick emergency-purchase, I'm a proud owner of a 9600 Pro with 256 Mb VRAM who can finally run FS2004 at full blast. Well, until TrafficToolbox made Simviation's archives an inconvenience, that is. Halved my FPS right off the bat, it did.

 

Conclusion: NOW everything works as it should. It's harder to gauge performance-gains in LO (time for a new CPU, *perhaps*?), but at least the texture-load is easier to survive.

 

Also, my machine is ASTOUNDINGLY less noisy than before. Reckon the 9600 not having a fan might have something to do with that? :D The HD that lost the partition was a noisy bugger too.

[Pilotasso]

The 9700 pro was probabaly faster than your 9600 though.

[Silent Warrior]

*Shrug* FS9 doesn't seem to care. Oh well, if it's busted, it's busted.

 

That DOESN'T seem to be the end, though... I've discovered that my X45 sometimes twitch to the left. Not usually the biggest of deals, but if you're flying small stupid planes that snap in two at a mere sneeze, I get somewhat worried... Damn... And my PS2 displays some fascinating behaviour, though I suppose that's disc-related. At least THAT one works pretty much as it should.

[Prophet_169th]

The X45 jumping - If you are mechanical at all, take it apart and clean the potentiometer for the X axis.

 

Maybe you need to build a faraday cage around your house, everything seems to be frying lol :)

[Guest EVIL-SCOTSMAN]

you ever thought that with all that happening to your pc, that it could be a dodgy power supply or messed up motherboard ?

 

thats too much to go wrong on its own unless everything is like 5-6 years old and has been run practically 24/7

 

Test your motherboard or power supply, I had a power supply that killed everything in the pc over a period of time, and the power supply was the last thing I looked at because the sysmptons didnt seem like a psu problem, but i would be concerened big about the number of things that has died in your rig....

 

motherboard or PSU....

[walternowi]

Evil,

 

Welcome back. Glad your exile is over.

 

SilentWarrior,

 

Sorry to hijack your thread.

[Silent Warrior]

Prophet: I'm not sure I have the tools for it - two perfectly ordinary flat screwdrivers and a set of six-sided wossnames for adjusting the saddle on my bike - but I'll have to give it a try.

 

SCOTSMAN: I am a bit worried about the motherboard, yes, but I bought a new PSU a while ago, maybe six months or a whole year. At least the CPU and RAM is still running, there's some comfort in that. I assembled this rig 3-4 years ago. (I also have a '98-era machine that's still in running condition, though it has started getting moody - inventing IRQ conflicts between network-card and built-in soundcard, some weird 'protocol 0'-error...)

[Guest EVIL-SCOTSMAN]

Ok, I am not saying it is your psu, but check this out.

 

I bought a 550 watt psu, ok granted it wasnt leet, then i bought a leet psu, then an uber leet psu.

 

All 3 of them were dodgy from day 1...

 

Jeantech 550watt, jeanetch 600watt, and enermax 600watt, nowI could see the first 2 being somewhat iffy, but the third, not ever did i think they would sell a plum psu...

 

The amount of stuff i had to replace because I was sold psu's that werent upto there rated standard was un-fkin-believeable....

 

Also, the irq conflicts, go into your bios and turn some of the stuff off and free up some irq's, if you dont use the parrallel port, turn it off, if you dont use serial port, turn it off, this will free up irq's and hopefully stop yoou getting irq conflicts...

 

The motherboard, it could be faulty, but in order for it to kill anything, then that has to be traced back to the psu....

 

Another thing worth mentioning.

 

The power supply to the house... Is it stable, is all sockets and particulary the one you have the pc connected to, is that one in perfect working order ?

 

bad socket killed a whole pc of mine, never again will I attempt home d.i.y with live electrical wires :p

[Silent Warrior]

Um, in the IRQ-conflicting PC I don't think I can change all that much... It IS an old-timer, and the spooky thing is that it worked perfectly before, same configuration, same BIOS-settings...

 

The PSU I switched FROM is a noisy chinese half-breed, it says 150W somewhere. You'd think that would be much more prone to frying gear than whatever it is I have now... but it does bear consideration.

 

As for the house's power-stuff, although it was built in 1975, it seems to be well in order. No other PC in the house has had these problems. Then again, few other home-PCs in the district has seen more use... But the first HD to falter started to do so well before the PSU-switch. (If I did a reset via that smaller button on the front I'd sometimes get the message that the drive just wasn't there. A proper restart - power off, wait, power on - put it back in action.) Bad feeling in me tummy.

As for the X-45, I opened it yesterday to have a look. I'm not sure I found the correct doohickey to remedy ('elp!), but I blew hard on one of them, and it seemed to take care of FS9 and LO. Well, not that LO is responsive enough to have the problem in the first place, and I haven't flown a risk-zone plane in FS9 yet, but no problems yet. Falcon 4, however, is still only barely playable. I mean landing in particular, in-mission it's not all that problematic.