I'm not expecting much to come from this, but I thought I'd ask around.

When I play LFS, after about 8 laps, my PC will hard-reset with zero warning.

It does this so well, that it doesn't even realise its crashed, it just wakes up as if nothings happened, nothing in the event log, no messages, zilch.

It only does this while playing LFS, but I've no crash address, nothing. It simply goes immediately from LFS to the boot screen, and boots up as per normal.

It happily plays HL2Ep2 so I can't see it just being a stress thing...

AMD 3200

radeon ra5500 - I'm using older graphics drivers because the new ones black screen source games for some reason :S

1gb reasonably quality DDR in two channels

piles of disk space, no other programs running

I'm a Bsc. computer science student, and, this has me baffled.

Without patronising you, could the memory be dead? (ie a Memtest could be in order), or could the CPU could be overheating?

I had exact same problem with an AMD 3200+

Tried everything, MEMTEST, different video card & drivers etc, different motherboard

Turned out to be a faulty CPU (Corners damaged!)

Thanks for the response Jakg,

I tried taking the case off and whacking a desk fan on "3" facing directly into the case at a distance of about a foot, no change in result.

Passed the memtest no problem (used one from some fancy benchmarking test suite, i can't remember the name), and an 8 hour overnight stress test, no overheating, no problems. CPU temperatures all stay miles below the manufacturers specs, about 48 degrees c, the memory doesn't appear to get overly warm either.

Even my neural net simulation research left running for hours on end has yet to crash it the same way it does with LFS.

I get the impression I'm not going to be able to fix this without replacing things and never knowing what the problem actually was. I was just hoping someone has already done the hard part and knows what I need to replace... a new computer won't be within my financial reach till I've been graduated and employed for a while!

ah right....

think it'll have to wait then! it doesn't make sense to buy another cpu of the same spec, if i'm going to do that i might as well upgrade and have done with it, i'm runnin' out of power for the more recent stuff as it is.

thank you for your info, much appreciated

Psu?

I was in the same position as you, did not want to replace cpu so I ended up waiting about 3 months or something to upgrade ! - sheer hell, every time I started a race, it would just crash

Now have a Nice Q6600 with 8800 GTS Graphics

I'll try and find someone to borrow one off to swap out and test, I've got a 450W in there atm I think, got a feeling its a thermaltake one or something, so would've thought it ok.... trouble is, half the bloody people in my degree all use mac laptop jobbies, certainly all the people I tollerate between lectures! can't borrow anything off them... I don't like using them myself.

tongey - thanks for the motivation, i look forward to the sheer hell, lol.

hope the halloween race went ok, i wanted to join, but, half a race is only none of the fun.

this might seem kind of like an obvious question but did you make any changes to the hardware before the crashed occured (like adding more hdds or anything) or alternatively did you change any drivers (anything really no matter how unimportant it might seem) ?

it sounds like a psu issue to me as well but considering both hl2 and several stress test run just fine has me baffled
also mem issues should be easily outruled just by looking at the size lfs hl2 and your uni projects take as lfs is probably easily the least taxing

Same pc I've had for the last 2 years now, no changes physically, I may have swapped some drivers out or something... but my initial attempts at solving the problem involved formatting the HDD and installing xp from scratch (all my documents/media are on external hard drive arrays, so its not much hassle to rebuild), since then, and several more rebuilds later, the problem has remained.

one thing you could try is stripping out all unnecessary bits so take out all hdds except the system drive ... get rid of cdrom drives ... all cards except the graphics ... disconnect all the fans you dont deperately need (use that desk fan for cooling)

even if its not a psu issue if you find that it works after getting rid of all that you might find the offending bit by putting everything back in one by one

That's a very good point, I'll do that saturday morning before work if I can get up early enough. I'll swap a go in my e46 for a psu to test with for a couple of hours! (sussex/surrey)

I think that its the failureboot. try to disable it in the bootmenu.

but becarefull. maybe ure cpu is overheating.

BTW : what type of motherboad do you have?

An Asus, but I can't remember the model name. I can't find anything with that description anywhere on my OS or BIOS to adjust.

I'm pretty certain my temps are ok, having put excessive cooling on and it making no difference, and checked the temps with means other than the motherboard info, plus a good and recent re-application of the heat conductive paste.

I would've thought other stressful things would kill it just as good if it was heat related.

Common theme AMD 3200.

I had exactly the same issue.

1 - Make sure System properties / Advanced / Startup & recovery / automatic restart is OFF ( on by default )

If this doesn't work ( and it probably won't )

2 - Partition your disk, put in a clean SP2 install of XP and TURN OFF automatic updates.
DO NOT INSTALL ANY UPDATES TO WINDOZE.
Install video & sound drivers and logitech wheel software if neccessary.

Then run LFS on that partition and nothing else. No AV, bit torrent or browsing !

This fixed my problem which was just like yours.

I think it may be a microsoft update issue but only apparently with 3200's