video output troubles.

[Spectere]

I'm getting random things going unresponsive now. Maybe my RAM got damaged, I'm unsure why I've had so many programs go unresponsive (my downloads folder did, no clue WHY).

and steam goes unresponsive CONSTANTLY. It's a pain.

If things are going unresponsive, it generally is an issue with memory or the OS.

Well, looks like XFX just gave me the trouble shooting bullshit again, so I'm trying that. Going to try and run memtest from my USB drive if I can figure that out, and I'm installing the latest version of PhysX.

ATI aren't supported by PhysX (because NVIDIA feels that maintaining a proprietary physics engine in the age of OpenCL is a good idea), so updating PhysX won't do a thing.

Also I'm unsure how to boot from my USB with memtest, but I've yet to try it.

Usually, you insert the device, boot the computer, and spam F8 or F12.  That should bring up a menu that will show all of the bootable devices in your system.

The hotkey to get to that screen is typically referred to as the boot menu or "BBS popup" on the startup screen.

Hell, I'll post the entire thing they sent me, as I'm a little confused by it (it talks about memory voltage, but then mentions my CPU and I'm too tired to get it all right now. Plus last time I changed my RAM voltage that didn't help).

In a nutshell, they're telling you not to overclock, to make sure that your memory is set at the right voltage, to update your BIOS, and to make sure that your drivers are up-to-date.

I ran mem test about 2 or so times and it passed fine. Also I FINALLY got the Witcher 2 installed and ran it on medium settings for a while and outside of a few framerate issues at times, it looked and ran fairly well.

Maybe some odd loading time between menus, but nothing terrible.

Call an exorcist*.

*Don't actually do this.

[MortifiedocAlot]

I'm super afraid to mess with my GPU voltage. Could my ram be the issue? I know I need to close down firefox and steam to run the Witcher 2 with a good frame rate, but I'm assuming that's because the game requires 2 gigs.

I also reinstalled L4D2 and it seems to run better, but I've yet to test out bad company 2.

[Spectere]

I don't think you can adjust GPU voltage.  Maybe PCI-E voltage, but you would have known if you would have touched that.

I seem to remember hearing a lot of people have framerate issues with the original Witcher.  They could still be getting the kinks out.

[MortifiedocAlot]

I also got random framerate dips in the Battlefront 2 (which should be easily runable) when looking at random parts of levels. Really unsure what that was about, might be physX or something silly.

[Spectere]

Check your video settings.  Antialiasing can be particularly tough on cards, so if it was automatically kicked up to 8/16x, that could cause framerate dips, particularly when dealing with smoke effects.

[MortifiedocAlot]

I think my hard drive is messing up, everything on my C drive works more or less fine, yet trying to launch a game off of steam causes steam to lock up for 20 to 30 seconds prior to it launching.

Really unsure what's going on now, but overall things seem odd. (firefox will also act goofy, I had to restart my PC just to get it to run without instantly crashing).

[Spectere]

If you don't already have it, grab a copy of the Ultimate Boot CD.  Boot to it, go into the HDD category, and select "Drive Fitness Test."  It's made for IBM and Hitachi hard drives, but it works quite well on other manufacturers' drives as well.

Run a quick test, then an extended test.  If both of those pass, hit ALT-E and run it through a few passes through the "exerciser" (it basically performs an extended test multiple times to really stress the drive).  4 is generally the magic number that I use.  Of course, you'll want to run those tests while you're doing other things, as they can take up to a couple of hours to complete.

Finally, always make sure to back up any data that you hold dear before running a hard drive test of any kind.  If the hard drive is starting to fail, the stress of running a test on it could cause it to conk out completely.

[MortifiedocAlot]

I don't see any place to simply download "Ultimate Boot CD". Also I don't really see how one old hard drive could cause this problem (the only reason I suspect it is because it makes a that "this hard drive is old" sound when it gets under load) with programs that run on a different drive completely. Maybe I'll run a longer memory test, or some programs are just now taking up more ram than they used to (I usually run steam, firefox, and itunes constantly, and maybe they updated to be resource hogs).

Also XFX is asking me if I would like to mail my card to them so they can check if it's messed up. I haven't had my system lock up in a LONG time, and outside of some issues (like the current one, and some games running poorly when they shouldn't) I don't see why I should. Fuck it, if it's free I'm definitely going for it, I'm just going to hate wrestling with bios again.

[Spectere]

Go to this link and scroll to the bottom for a list of mirrors (and a torrent link): http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/download.html

I'd check to make sure that it's free.  If it is, definitely send it back to them so that they can have a look-see.  You'd have to do without it for a few days, but at least you'd be able to rule that out.

Firefox is getting better (though it's still a bit hoggish).  iTunes is a bit of a resource hog, and the worst part about that is that it sets all of its services to start automatically, regardless of whether you actually have an iDevice (or, for that matter, regardless of whether you actually need the service -- no iOS device relies on the iPod service, yet that's enabled by default with no official Apple way to disable it).  On my iTunes VM I'm showing 175MB of total memory usage for iTunes -- 122MB for the program itself and 53MB for its additional services.  Steam is pretty hungry, even if it's idling (it requested 100MB of RAM on my system just to sit in the tray and do its background downloads) but it's probably the best of the bunch.

[MortifiedocAlot]

alright, will do that and send my card in anyway. I'm hoping to upgrade to 7 soon-ish (need more ram from what I've been told) also need to figure out how to properly make a partition and install windows 7 without losing anything. Then again I have so much useless shit, supposedly there's a program that shows how much each program takes up space, so I'll look into that.

OR I might just try a fresh install.

[Spectere]

You definitely don't need more RAM for Windows 7.  If anything, you need less.  I used a laptop with Windows 7 and 1GB of RAM daily with no woes or major slowdowns.  Upgrading to 2GB didn't help much.  Vista, on the other hand, needs 2GB or more if you want it to run smoothly.

You don't have to make a partition to avoid losing anything.  You can either do an upgrade installation or a fresh installation.  If you opt for the latter and install it on the Vista partition, it'll move all of your files (the Program Files, Users, and Windows directories come to mind) into a "Windows.old" directory so that you can have a fresh installation without having to backup files, play with partitions, and/or lose anything.  Very convenient.

[MortifiedocAlot]

I was told XP wouldn't be able to upgrade into 7, which seems odd.

Also would having too much shit on a hard drive cause programs to randomy freeze up? my shit has been getting worse (almost firefox 90% of the time) and I'm unsure why.

Going to run defrags and test my secondary hardrive (it's much older and makes noise when under load).

[Spectere]

No, XP can't be directly upgraded to 7.  I thought you were running Vista for some reason.

In that case, it'll do a fresh install and move the system and user files to the Windows.old directory.  It should be pretty easy to pick through it and get your documents and stuff back into place.

[MortifiedocAlot]

I've been told that the current drivers I'm using are horrible, and that the new drivers coming out will either improve or make this worse.

Either way, this seems like a driver issue. My most demanding games (Witcher 2, Arma 2) run well and less resource hungry games run like shit (Monday night combat, Painkiller, BC2 are all almost unplayable).

Maybe I still have something setup wrong, maybe I should just mail it in and stop being lazy. I suppose waiting for the driver update won't hurt, but this shit is just getting old at this point.

[Spectere]

Are you using the latest drivers from ATI/AMD's site?  I think I'm fairly close to up-to-date and haven't had any odd problems with my card.  Even if you aren't using the absolute latest right now, that still doesn't explain why I've had zero issues with the same card.  We had to have overlapped driver versions at some point.

I'd say it's either that the card itself is bad, there is a motherboard issue (if your PCI-E bus is having trouble, it can cause video problems and general instability), or that the drivers just don't play nicely with XP (highly doubt the last one, but that is one major difference between your build and mine).