Classic British Flight Sim

A couple of weeks ago I began to get 'not responding' messages. Programs would hang up and I would be left having to exit and restart and maybe go through the whole process again and again. This happened on line with CBFS, Simviation, Flightsim.com and AVSIM and towards the end, even Internet Explorer refused to work. Off line both FS9 and FSX were affected as were Word, Windows Mail etc - in fact anything I worked on gave up the ghost at one time or another. Very frustrating.

I took said PC to our local shop and they kept it for 10 days and then gave up with the suggestion that it was Vista based and I would be better off with XP that, or it was my AVG Professional antivirus that was doing the damage. They had given it a full check for viruses using Panda and it came up clean.

Needless to say that once home the PC was as bad - if not worse - because I could not send or receive emails and if I got onto the internet at all everything seemed to run in treacle and many sites just timed out before I could get past the front page. So guess who is not going back to the shop.

Today I have managed to get my emails back and Internet Explorer working again and back to normal. However, I had a blue screen on start up tonight and have run the Vista DVD in repair mode which says everything Vista is ok.

I think I seriously need to get my PC looked at by a competent repair agency and the only one I can think of is PC World because they are the original supplier. Anyone have any ideas what might be causing the problem, more importantly anyone know a good reliable PC workshop in the Scottish Border area in the Coldstream to Berwick area.

My PC is a HP Intel Core Duo E6600 with 4GB RAM, NVIDIA GEForce 8800 GTS graphics and 2 x 250 Gb HDs with one HD solely running Flight/Train sims. The only change made to the PC was the upgrade of the RAM from 2 to 4 GB in July and the PC ran perfectly afterwards.

As ever, any advice would be appreciated.

Have you checked the error logs. They usually give a good indication, although I have to say given the range of apps it sounds memory related. It could be one of your DIMMS is failing?

You could start by taking out the 2 new dimms and see how it goes. If its no better, try putting the new ones in and remove the old ones. If the fault is still there, then try reseating all your riser cards... any PCI or AGP cards you may have, just take them out and push them back in again.

Thanks Ben. Tried that early on, I replaced the new RAM with the original kit and there was no difference. At the same time I made sure that all the cards were well and truely in position. Will check on the error logs though to see if there is anything I can understand.



ATB



Allan

If an application Crashes, it will write an event to the application log. It will also (depending on the circumstances) write an event to the system log.

Some thoughts off the top of my head, both hardware and software - might be crazy but so what!

Is the CPU fan working? If not, the CPU might be in power saving mode to avoid overheating and hence running slowly.

Could a hard disk fault prevent files being read quickly enough - with my USB hard disk attached, the whole system takes a few seconds to kick into action if it has gone to sleep. So just wondering if something similar would cause what you are seeing? There are programs that can read the health of a hard disk from the SMART parameters (Speedfan is one).

Despite the apparent clean bill of health from the virus checkers, open up the Task Manager (Ctrl-Alt-Del in XP - might be different in Vista) and look at the Performance Tab - if your PC is doing little, then the CPU usage should be a few percent.

If not, something is eating CPU cycles, so take a look at the Processes Tab and click on the heading "CPU" - that sorts the processes by CPU use. There will be System Idle Process at around 98%, and probably a few other processes appearing at 1% or 2%. On my 6750 CPU with Firefox, Chrome, Winamp, AVG, Spybot, Zonealarm all running in the background, nothing is more than a few percent of CPU. Yes they are all eating RAM but not CPU.

If there is anything using lots of CPU, that could be the problem. And you might want to keep the Task Manager open while you run a program to see if anything changes. But once open, the CPU use should drop back again.

If that doesn't show anything, another option is to do the antivirus scan in Safe Mode after a reboot. From reading on the web, some malware seems to avoid being detected during normal scanning. I was also reading about an addon to Firefox which might also help to detect the bad stuff - I'll find and post info.

AVG ver 8 I think is known to be a problem which is why AVG is keeping the updates for ver 7 going until at least december, even though updates for that version were to be discontinued in june, might be a big part of the problem.

AVG 8.1 Free is running ok on all my systems. The change over was not as smooth as it might have been. Just like changes to versions of ZoneAlarm and Spybot.

Got down to the physical stuff this morning and had the side off to check all the conections again. All ok except the TV card which was loose - now tightened.

Installed the CPU temperature monitor and have readings of 39/36 C for the two cores on idle and 55/64 C running FSX. So I think we are ok on the CPU cooling side.

Have had a look at the CPU loading and activities - Vista providie a swish set of instant graphs which are nearly idiot proof - well I can understand them. At idle the CPU is at between .9 and 2% use and the list of programs running in the background are the usual culprits. The graphs also covers the HDs and memory they seem to functioning ok.

As for AVG 8, it seems to be a bit strange in that it works perfectly on my P4 running XP and yet caused all sorts of mayhem on my older PC. So far I have not had a recogniseable problem with it on Vista.

So, I guess its back to more detective work...........................

Thanks for the steers, sometimes the most simple solution can be so easily overlooked without a nod in the right direction.


Allan