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My computer might be broken
2016-Dec-03, Saturday 14:05
So, I think my motherboard is going bad.
Background--I noticed on Tuesday and Wednesday when I went to use my computer after work that it had restarted sometime in the middle of the night. That's not normal behavior, and at first I thought it might be something weird due to the new mouse I bought and the software to configure it, so on Wednesday I uninstalled that, did some basic tests--sfc, chkdsk, and so on--and all of them came back with no problems. Alright, I thought, let's try to hibernate the computer and see what happens.
Disaster, that's what happened.
The computer hibernated. Then it shut down. Then when I booted it up again and logged into my account, Firefox crashed with an out of memory error as soon as it opened. Then the comptuer froze. Then trying to log in gave me a "something went wrong" message and it dumped me into a temporary profile. I ran MemTest and stopped the testing when it passed 5000 errors because even one was too many. This...was bad.
After removing RAM sticks, swapping them around, and testing with MemTest again, I have one 8 gb stick in slot 2 that works fine and returns no errors. But so far I've tested two sticks in slot 4 and each time I got 7 errors, all of which showed up after hours of testing. I'm going to test another stick tonight, and if it also returns 7 errors, either there are hidden errors in the stick in slot 2 that I thought was safe that only show up when the RAM is running in dual channel mode, or slot 4 is bad. Either of those is not good. My computer is fortunately still under warranty, but if I have to ship the whole thing in, especially over the holidays, it'll probably take three or four weeks to get back to me and I have two weeks of vacation coming up soon.
My computer current works fine, though it does run noticeably slower with 8 gb of RAM rather than 32 gb. Fortunately, everything I want to do with the computer can easily be accomplished with 8 gb. Editing LiberOffice documents, putting dialogue in my BGII Let's Play, and playing pixel-art games like Stardew Valley and Pokemon Fire Red do not take a lot of RAM. But it is having serious problems, it is under warranty, and if I can't isolate the problem to the RAM, I'll have to send it in eventually. Just hopefully after the New Year.
I have everything backed up now, both in the cloud and locally, so I haven't lost any data other than my browser tabs. My saved games and screenshots are still around. My RPG work is still fine. I nearly had a panic attack for the entire day on Thursday--at least, it felt like it--but I'm doing better now that my computer is working, even if in a crippled state.
I'm going to update the BIOS today and run another MemTest with the last stick I haven't tried tonight. Hopefully that comes up clean, but if not... Well, I'll deal with that if it happens.
Also, I asked my father to give me some advice, and we had this exchange when I managed to make a new user account and move my old data over after the last one got corrupted:
Background--I noticed on Tuesday and Wednesday when I went to use my computer after work that it had restarted sometime in the middle of the night. That's not normal behavior, and at first I thought it might be something weird due to the new mouse I bought and the software to configure it, so on Wednesday I uninstalled that, did some basic tests--sfc, chkdsk, and so on--and all of them came back with no problems. Alright, I thought, let's try to hibernate the computer and see what happens.
Disaster, that's what happened.
The computer hibernated. Then it shut down. Then when I booted it up again and logged into my account, Firefox crashed with an out of memory error as soon as it opened. Then the comptuer froze. Then trying to log in gave me a "something went wrong" message and it dumped me into a temporary profile. I ran MemTest and stopped the testing when it passed 5000 errors because even one was too many. This...was bad.
After removing RAM sticks, swapping them around, and testing with MemTest again, I have one 8 gb stick in slot 2 that works fine and returns no errors. But so far I've tested two sticks in slot 4 and each time I got 7 errors, all of which showed up after hours of testing. I'm going to test another stick tonight, and if it also returns 7 errors, either there are hidden errors in the stick in slot 2 that I thought was safe that only show up when the RAM is running in dual channel mode, or slot 4 is bad. Either of those is not good. My computer is fortunately still under warranty, but if I have to ship the whole thing in, especially over the holidays, it'll probably take three or four weeks to get back to me and I have two weeks of vacation coming up soon.
My computer current works fine, though it does run noticeably slower with 8 gb of RAM rather than 32 gb. Fortunately, everything I want to do with the computer can easily be accomplished with 8 gb. Editing LiberOffice documents, putting dialogue in my BGII Let's Play, and playing pixel-art games like Stardew Valley and Pokemon Fire Red do not take a lot of RAM. But it is having serious problems, it is under warranty, and if I can't isolate the problem to the RAM, I'll have to send it in eventually. Just hopefully after the New Year.
I have everything backed up now, both in the cloud and locally, so I haven't lost any data other than my browser tabs. My saved games and screenshots are still around. My RPG work is still fine. I nearly had a panic attack for the entire day on Thursday--at least, it felt like it--but I'm doing better now that my computer is working, even if in a crippled state.
I'm going to update the BIOS today and run another MemTest with the last stick I haven't tried tonight. Hopefully that comes up clean, but if not... Well, I'll deal with that if it happens.
Also, I asked my father to give me some advice, and we had this exchange when I managed to make a new user account and move my old data over after the last one got corrupted:
Me: "I think I got it working thanks to legacy workarounds."
My father: "Good. Now go and sin no more."
