Windows Crashing - need help in both hardware and software

[Cbs]

Hi, first I've search the whole forum for this problems and rarely found members here using a Connection just like me, and I'm giving u pages of data, so if u decide to read, PLEASE READ THEM ALL, or please just skip this thread.

now, here's my hardware list

- Core2Duo 6420 (2.13GHz x2)

- MB : P5B (with out any surfix) - chipset NB:965 , SB:ICH8

- Ram : 4GB Corsair Dual Channel 677Mhz run @ 533Mhz (Since 4GB ram needed to be remapped in 32bit OS, and bus 677 cause remapping error as far as I tested)

- Lan Card 1G 3Com 3C966B-T 64bit, connected to full 1G port

- Harddisk SATA2 320G x 3, all in 7200RPM, 16M Cache, non-raid, connected to ICH8

- OS is Windows 2003 SP2 RC2 installed in seperated 80GB Harddisk also ICH8

- 450W Case

- No Firewall, NO Anti Virus.

*Yes, my main problem is connection is 1G and uTorrent is running in da*n high speed

*It's multi-user, around 8-9 user with seperated client uTorrent.

*I've configured major function of system cache itself, also uTorrent cache (

- 300MB manual Cache each users

- write immediate after piece finish : ON

- write out untouched every 2MIN : ON

- Turn off read caching when speed is low : OFF

- Remove old block from cache : OFF

- auto increase size : ON

*System Cache with large system file enabled and maximum at 960MB

*Advanced setting - diskio.sparse_file : *TRUE (we're talking about 40-100G torrent and I can't let my user deal with allocating 100G files at once)

Here's what I CAN do

- Download file to each HD with 8M/s while Uploading with 8M/s without any problem, and AS LONG AS I WANT.

- Download file to each HD with 15M/s while Uploading with 2-3M/s without any problem.

- Defragment HDD while above thing was current running. , at fully speed

- Transfer file with full HDD available speed. (100% usage of Harddisk)

Here's what cause my com to get UNRESPONSED

*first please understand what my unresponsed mean, - HARDWARES FAIL, mouse stopped, you can't control ur computer anymore. restart is only option. NOT uTorrent crashing.

(1)

- Download file at 20M/s.... I can download it for a while, may be 5-10 min, then PC get hanged.

- All data flow from Lan -> uTorrent -> uT Cache -> Sys Cache -> Harddisk is no where bottlenecked.

**Lan with 25% load from 1G (30M/125M)

**uT cache with 30-40M/300M(yet it all flowed to System Cache)

**System Cache with 5xxMB/960MB. (which I believe I never seen this thing go beyond 560MB)

**Harddisk with 40-50% Usage. (read from SMART setting, Harddisk tool like Harddisk Sentinel)

**uTorrent is nothing about "Disk Overload", since I've got good data flow one.

**CPU usage at that da*n speed is about 50% / 1 uTorrent

Yes, everything look very fine, everything can do just what they should do, except resulting hanging PC.

(2)

- 2 Users starting to Hash-Checking their own Torrent. while there's a lot file and/or torrent uploading. My PC looks fine until 2-3 min later get hanged.

(3)

- all 3 Combined harddisk starting to get more than 20M/s DL , 20M/s UL, and yet CPU usage is going up around 40-50%, ... for a while, 5-10min, then hanged

so this's what I believe

- There's nothing to do with Harddisk (Tested a lot with small piece of files and big files at full 100% usage)

- There's nothing to do with Lan(Tested transfering with a lot connection, not via uTorrent, at full available speed.. around 70M/s yet bottlenecked at PCI bus or Northbridge bus, something like that)

- Tested CPU, overclocked 10-20% for a weeks in normal temperature (Real Server room's in air conditioned)

- Tested Ram, every 4GB pieces are usable.

I think someone here can just give me a really simple answer which solve all those problem above, I just wanna make sure what I need to do. There's a lot answer in my mind

- Since it's unresponse like I said, I believe this is 99% hardware failure, but I feel it just should be able to prevent by software.

- It's something about northbridge, or southbridge, anyone experienced?

- I'm planning of getting new SATA2 Controller soon, but I need to see you guy's experiences and what you think about this.

- Since my friends've got almost the same set of hardware, but using Intel Server Mainboard, I don't see my friends are encountering these problems.

- Something about 40%-70% CPU load, and high data transferring.

- Write back / Write throught??

----

Please understand, I know about..

- non-linear writing speed, random writing.

- System cache thing.

- Disk overload thing.

- Data flow thing.

to give u the way to threaten this post well, any help is appreciated.

btw, Thank a lot for reading this til here.

P.S. HDD is SATA2, default of DMA thing in Device manager is already chosen (or I shouldn't able to do what I say above)

[5618]

I'm not a hardware expert myself and I've only looked into this superficially right now. The only remote possibility I have found so far was someone complaining about the temperature of the Northbridge on that motherboard (even without overclocking). Since RAM is important here, it may cause instability if it's trashed too much? Wild guess, but you never know.

[Switeck]

Do you know what networking switch or router is "upstream" of your computer?

...I'm a little worried you're totally lacking a firewall or antivirus software, but if there's a router shielding your computer then it's probably not a major problem.

Even if your computer is nearly immune to any viruses through your internet connection, it might still have issues with garbage packets and DDoS attacks...some of which a router might block.

[Cbs]

Thank you for ur worring, my PC is placed in whole Cisco secured data center, I've no worry about being attacking.

In my mind is ICH8 (Southbridge)'s Temperature, but u say Northbridge, that's interesting, but that's gonna give me a big, really big problems lol.

Well my only option so far I can decide is to change SATA Controller, I just need to see people opinion what you guy think, will it able to solve the problems?

I'm now thinking of trying to make my Southbridge get cooler than ever lol

[5618]

If you're going to look into NB and/or SB performance you may actually want to measure their temperature before making rash decisions (they should have some nifty infrared temperature meter, not? ). Hell, it may even be something completely different.

[Cbs]

It's going to be no problem at all if I just sit their and have my hand touch on the chips lol~.

Is their another 'software' way to prevent or reduce this problem? at least have uTorrent consume lower CPU cycle while doing that 50M/s downloading

[Switeck]

net.low_cpu might help...I just don't know.

[funchords]

Added: Any helpful messages in the System Event log (e.g. eventvwr.msc)?

Is their another 'software' way to prevent or reduce this problem? at least have uTorrent consume lower CPU cycle while doing that 50M/s downloading

I seriously doubt that this is your problem, but avoid leaving uTorrent's UI on a page that updates frequently. It will use less CPU, for example, if you don't leave the display on the "Peers" page. You can also reduce the UI updates via the Advanced settings.

This is a hardware problem, and I suspect that your network interface card driver is having a memory leak when some buffer overflows (when the interrupt does not get serviced fast enough).

If your NIC is not integrated on the MB, you may want to physically move it to a different slot. The different assignment it will get may help reduce any device contention that might be contributing to the lockup.

There may also be buffer settings in W2003 that can be adjusted -- the only ones I know about, for sure, involve Windows Networking and not simply TCP/IP or lower. You'll have to Google.

Also, the network card driver itself may have adjustable buffers and other settings that may alleviate the symptom. Right click on the device in Device Manager, choose Properties and look for the Advanced (or similar) tab.

Similarly, check to see if you have options in *which* network card driver -- sometimes later versions do not work as well as earlier versions due to new bugs being introduced.

And finally, a different network card, altogether, may bring different results.

[Cbs]

Event logs leave no logs since it's hardware failure

The previous system shutdown at 20:37:30 on 4/7/2550 was unexpected.

For more information, see Help and Support Center at http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/events.asp.

Code 6008, which is useless

uTorrent UI doesn't anyhelp as far I tried, I think all the cpu reported is from somehow it read up from the Cache for hash-checking before confirm the cache to write-back to HDD, that's why I can Upload 50M/s without a problem but Download 50M/s with a dam* hanging

in NIC Case,

yet Asus P5B already give me on-boarded Gigabit port, which somehow limits my network capacity to just about 45M/s (while 3Com one can give me to 60-70M/s)

And the same symptom as I said happen when hash-checking, I don't even need to use a lan card for that to cause hanging lol

Also this (same) card was used in another PC which give him no problem at all (Intel Server Board), but I'll need to check config as u noticed as well, thx for that. may be my case will not just 1 case.

Edit, here's more info if u can help, I've got a comparation from 2 NIC.

[Pilsener]

I have similar problems. A few minuters after starting uTorrent, the PC locks up. The reset-button is the only way out.

This problem started when I upgraded to SP2 for 2003 Server. I have tried both 2003 Web-edition, and 2003 Enterprise, but they both locks up.

It all worked perfect until the SP2 upgrade.

[sbeaty2007]

Anyone else having problems with the latest release of 1.7, its much faster on my machine than 1.6 ever was, but I get random crashes and the dreaded blue screen?

Sometimes it will go hours before it crashes, sometimes within seconds of starting?

I have AMD 2.4 WinXP pro SP2 netgear DG834G 1gig RAM on board LAN and the rest I reckon are pretty numb standard stuff.

I would stick to 1.6 if I could get the speed out of it - but I have installed and uninstalled both with default settings and 1.7 gets up to 400k and 1.6 rarely goes over 50k?

Any suggestions muchly appreciated

[Switeck]

Tell us more about the bluescreen error messages.

Usually, some DLL or EXE that actually caused the bluescreen is mentioned in the crash info.

Give us that info if you can.

[Cbs]

TBH, there's no blue screen, It's just like you kick up your CPU case and Com get hanged

Mouse just get stopped, freezed screen, that's all

---

NVM

I've found my solution due to overheated Ram, by somehow may be CPU bus and Ram Bus are not really compatible. I'm now running E6420 @ 1600MHz and It works just fine.

not really bad way out

[funchords]

And the same symptom as I said happen when hash-checking, I don't even need to use a lan card for that to cause hanging lol

I guess I missed that part. That pretty much rules out my theory about the LAN cards.

You might see if you can get it to blue-screen instead of locking up on you -- it couldn't hurt, and the blue screen may give you a lead:

http://www.mvps.org/marksxp/WindowsXP/bsod.php

[Pilsener]

I had some hell on my PC running 2003 Server SP2, but my PC has not crashed for 20 hours so far, after I did this:

1. Installed uTorrent 1.7

2. Running uTorrent in XP compatibility mode.

Which one did the trick, I dunno, but everything is fine yet. Crosses my fingers.

[sbeaty2007]

I found the problem elsewhere in this forum, it was a page fault error with the file KmxCF.sys which is a computer associates firewall program, and it turns out that if I disable the firewall then utorrent 1.7 works fine - problem is leaving myself open to hackers with only windows XP firewall protecting me.

Thanks

[man.tox]

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