PC locks up

[drew]

running a Sony pc P4 1.5gh 512Meg dedicated no network no AV
Mach ver 3.043.062 MSM ver 2.0 plugin for shuttlepro clean install on drive C

after a few hours pc locks up it was idle at the time I had used a turn wizard earlier but had only done some edits to the code and not ran it. it also locked up yesterday
previous ver of Mach 2.63 still on drive D
I used this ver 2 month ago for 10 hours a day for 3 days

[DaveCVI]

Hi Drew,

Alas, there are many things that could cause an idle PC to lock up after several hours. From my past experience, the typical causes for such situations include heat related effects and intermittent memory and/or disk errors. These can be tough to pin down as heat related things can be effected by changes in the PC’s environment and that makes it hard to spot cause and effect patterns. I’d start by running some good PC diagnostic tests for an extended period (I’ve run memory and disk test for days before getting a handle on what hardware component was the problem source).

There are also major differences between the mach 2.x and 3.x series of releases – including changes in the Mach Parallel port diver (which is how mach accesses the PC hardware for PP based mach systems). So we’re talking about a huge number of variables with the change from mach 2.x to 3.x.

Honestly, I’m unaware of any reports of MSM being the cause of locking up a PC. In fact it would be pretty hard for MSM to do so since (as a Mach 3 add-on), MSM only has PC hardware access via Mach itself.

I don’t have a magic bullet suggestion to offer for intermittent PC hangs; and I don’t see how CVI can be of much assistance with this since testing and debugging PC reliability is not something that CVI does.

Dave