Computer help? - Page 2

Does it ever freeze up when you're not running importers? The SQL databases that PT3/HEM use can get quite large, and tax the harddrive nicely, especially if you have several hundred thousand hands to even millions of hands in your database.

On September 28 2011 19:39 NewbSaibot wrote: Does it ever freeze up when you're not running importers? The SQL databases that PT3/HEM use can get quite large, and tax the harddrive nicely, especially if you have several hundred thousand hands to even millions of hands in your database.

hard to tell, if im surfing the internet, im typically staring at a non moving screeen, so i would likley not notice

seems like overheat

Yah sounds like overheating of something, open up your case and see if there's like whole bunch of dust everywhere and get one of those compressed air things

ok makes sence, what can I do to prevent the overheating? I was thinking about buying a giant fan, taking case off the computer and using the fan to cool it?

i got this problem when i used some 500gig harddisk that went to some kind of sleepmode if not using any program on it

for example, u may have stored HEMhands or some local songs on your playlist or something, and if u dont use any program from that harddisk it will go into sleepmode, and then when u start holdemmanager and import ur first hand, when it saves the backuphand on the sleeping HD its gonna "wake up" for about 5 secounds

what i did was buy a 3rd big HD, to have all my movies and songs and games etc as my mainHD so i never ran any programs from the "sleepmode HD" and only store like pictures and documents there nowadays

and i have no problem unless im like uploading a picture from that disk its waking up to upload the picture

open it, clean the dust.

Try to open taskmanager and see if something is taking too much memory, or if your notice a weird process (if you dont know them or dont have any idea, just google the process usually you will find from what program it is)

Uninstall McAfee, get something like Kaspersky or Nod... Also im not sure, but maybe having 2 firewalls activated at the same time could cause problems.

Search for CCleaner, and clean your registry, temp files, cache, etc (dont forget to make a backup of registry, and your passwords if you select to delete cookies)

Get DriverGenious and update your drivers

do a hard disk fragmentation

If its a mac, put it in the garbage and get a pc

if its a pc, and everything fails, do a backup of your files, format and reinstall, (dont forget to have the disk with 2-3 partitions, in case you only have 1 hdd)

if you dont want to pay for software, use torrents (ccleaner is free btw)

My guess is that a process is failing there.

On September 28 2011 19:20 TheHuHu3 wrote: Video card.

yep! graphic/video card is getting overheated. try to "underclock" it (lower the speed on it etc.)

Check if any pc part overheats by installing speed fan.I had a similar problem which was occured because the cpu fan had moved somehow

On September 29 2011 05:57 MangeJao wrote: Show nested quote + On September 28 2011 19:20 TheHuHu3 wrote: Video card. yep! graphic/video card is getting overheated. try to "underclock" it (lower the speed on it etc.)

What he just described never happens when a GPU gets overheated,
it's clear to someone with experience that this is either one of two things (or for obvious reasons, the combination of both)
1.) A faulty hard drive, what you just described is occasionally accompanied by the hard drive making 'tic-tac' noises for a while before, after or both
2.) A terribly fragmented hard drive, which is more likely to be causing problems in your case than most
since you have massive databases that are constantly being updated and accessed.

The reason we can exclude the GPU, RAM and CPU from being the problem is that the
mouse can not be moved without the CPU functioning properly, the RAM-CPU co-process choking would also freeze your mouse along with everything else and the GPU would not be able to choke at the processing and forwarding of the visual information
of everything but the cursor.

P.s. I assume you're quite the opposite of poor and would pay more than most to have this "minor" inconvenience
stop since a 5-8 second freeze can be quite pricey in a session so I suggest you
research the myriad of solutions technology has to offer you, keywords: Home server, SSD.
The former, with or without the latter, would for example allow you to play poker with your PT3 database
on a wireless laptop without it using your laptop's processing capabilities. (I don't think the actual stream of information between the program and the database is all that large in kB/s, the server would be doing >98% of the work).

On September 29 2011 09:51 taco wrote: Show nested quote + On September 29 2011 05:57 MangeJao wrote:   On September 28 2011 19:20 TheHuHu3 wrote: Video card. yep! graphic/video card is getting overheated. try to "underclock" it (lower the speed on it etc.) What he just described never happens when a GPU gets overheated, it's clear to someone with experience that this is either one of two things (or for obvious reasons, the combination of both) 1.) A faulty hard drive, what you just described is occasionally accompanied by the hard drive making 'tic-tac' noises for a while before, after or both 2.) A terribly fragmented hard drive, which is more likely to be causing problems in your case than most since you have massive databases that are constantly being updated and accessed. The reason we can exclude the GPU, RAM and CPU from being the problem is that the mouse can not be moved without the CPU functioning properly, the RAM-CPU co-process choking would also freeze your mouse along with everything else and the GPU would not be able to choke at the processing and forwarding of the visual information of everything but the cursor. P.s. I assume you're quite the opposite of poor and would pay more than most to have this "minor" inconvenience stop since a 5-8 second freeze can be quite pricey in a session so I suggest you research the myriad of solutions technology has to offer you, keywords: Home server, SSD. The former, with or without the latter, would for example allow you to play poker with your PT3 database on a wireless laptop without it using your laptop's processing capabilities. (I don't think the actual stream of information between the program and the database is all that large in kB/s, the server would be doing >98% of the work).

ahh. he can move his mouse, sorry didnt read properly

nevermind!

let's exclude the graphic card then.

I still don't think your problem is due to overheating. However if it is, there is a program called I8kfanGUI. It's a third party software for Dell notebooks which let's you control the fan speed. For example you have the option to always run the extractor fans (video and cpu) at 100%. I used that program when I used to play poker on my Dell Laptop fulltime.

Here's a link to a forum discussion about the software

http://forums.laptopvideo2go.com/topic/8885-i8kfangui-dell-notebook-fan-control-utility/

and here's the download link

http://www.diefer.de/i8kfan/index.html


also, if it is heat related, give your laptop a cleanup as others have suggested. an easy way to do it is using a vacuum cleaner and blocking the fans (i used a toothpick), to avoid them spinning to fast and getting damaged.

Just to re-iterate the actual description of your problem, TalentedTom:

While it is technically a "software problem", since your hard drive would be functioning properly if it was not
for the software, it's not really in your control to keep it from happening by doing anything software related,
you could find a temporary solution like CCleaning your computer and then defragmenting it (in that order)
but since your needs are just growing with every hand you play you'll eventually need to do something about this,
whether you want to do it now or later is up to you.
(If your computer is really a laptop like they are saying, with a 2.5" 5400RPM hard drive I find it amazing that your computer isn't slow to the point of frozen all of the time, running PT3 and all)

Oh and "by the way" (used quite freely) would LP please, for the love of all that is holy, stop being another one of the forums
where if someone asks for computer help pretty much everyone, no matter if they know anything about computers,
start shouting random, general causes for computer problems, this is as a perfect example of that, here's what happened here posted in order of events:

"Could be memory related"
"I don't know anything but..."
"Overheating?"
"It could be almost anything" (While this reply happened to have the actual cause in it it's still not a true statement at all)
"Reformat bro"
"Overheating, I once had a friend who had a computer problem caused by overheating which is why I'm saying it"
"Video card"
"Overheat bro"
"Yah overheating or something"

Here we get into the "OP is asked to do 10.000 different things which he in all likelihood isn't competent to do" phase, usually happens faster, I'll just list the things he's asked to do, even though zionlll's suggestion isn't terrible , this case doesn't need any actions by OP.

) Complete Windows drive check
) Complete Windows system file check
) Change a fan and then do vast statistical analysis that would take days of logging to complete only to see if it might be heat related
) Check if it's one of the RAM sticks via the process of elimination (Takes n^30 minutes to complete where N is number of sticks...)
) Clean the GPU's dust filter
) Uninstall McAfee with 30 minutes more of statistical analysis
) Now uninstalling any recently installed programs doing statistical analysis after each one
) Memtest
) Benchmarking
) Uninstall your GPU drivers, remove the GPU, install GPU drivers for a new card you got access to,
insert newly acquired GPU, do statistical analysis, then uninstall those drivers, remove the graphics card, reinstall your old ones, re-insert your GPU
) Run Hard Drive Fitness test (wouldn't find any errors and can't exclude the hard drive being overloaded as the actual problem)


This shit's got to stop, not just here on LP, but everywhere on the internet, this is the reason
why I'd never ever recommend to someone to ask for help on a forum, you'll end up wasting so much
time on a random goose chase and also buying random things that people who know nothing about
computers told you you should buy to fix a problem that it's just in no way comparable to taking it to a professional EV wise...

I agree with Taco, clearly a lot of people responding here who have no background in computer repairs. Yeah maybe they fixed a single problem they had with their pc 3 years ago and it turned out to be the video card or a broken chassis fan, but that does not make you an expert to start throwing out random "is teh video card, I underclocked mine and ran a fan speed tester that was only compatible with my make and model card and it worked".

Truth is it actually could be any number of things. It is a computer afterall. As taco mentioned systems arent capable of selectively processing certain parts of the display while the rest crashes. So his mouse could never freely move about the screen with the background frozen because his video card is crashing. (And now we're seeing "lulz I didnt read the symptoms" responses, cmon guys. If you arent going to read his entire problem then wtf are you doing here trying to solve it?)

I see systems that sporadically hitch like this all the time. It's almost always some software related issue. Good luck finding it though, because even if you do it might be something like svchost or any other innocuous background tasks that you'll never be able to trace. Honestly, I see these issues take so long to diagnose that a reinstalling windows would actually take less time. A full reinstall of Win7 takes about 30 minutes. Using Ninite to grab common files like Java and Flash takes about another 15-20 minutes. Reinstalling HEM takes about 10-15 minutes. Boom we're at about 1 hour of time spent and almost finished. Sure there are going to be various things like desktop shortcuts and internet bookmarks you'll be missing. Importing 10 million hands into HEM could also take a couple of hours. But at least you get the benefit of a nice clean healthy system, plus the removal of any number of other pending problems you may or may not have been aware of, or problems that were about to affect your system.

I know it sounds like more work because "reinstall" is such a big word, but trust me, after you start at 12pm trying to fix this problem and you're still working on it 6 hours later, you'll say to yourself "goddamn I would have been completely finished by 3pm if I had just formatted the bitch". I mean I dunno what exactly you use your pc for, maybe you have 100GB of video games and shit installed and it could be awfully inconvenient. You tell us your situations and we can give you the best course of action.

By the way Tom, this is why I heavily recommend you getting a backup system in place of some sort. Something like an external harddrive at least triple the capacity of your used storage space. This way you can use disc imaging software like Acronis to make full system backups of your pc at that moment in time, with all settings and files in place. With a few clicks you can restore your system to an exact moment in time in about an hour depending upon how much data you are recovering.

Disclaimer: I'm a total computer noob

The symptoms are likely caused by windows trying to access a hardware device and not getting a response instantly

It could be a software problem (driver), or a malfunctioning hardware component, like the video card, ram, network device, or hard drive.

Of this, the hard drive is statistically by far the most likely. I recommend running your vendor's diagnostic tools - these would most definitely detect a malfunctioning hard drive or other hardware problems. Contact your vendor for instructions.

On September 29 2011 12:33 NewbSaibot wrote: By the way Tom, this is why I heavily recommend you getting a backup system in place of some sort. Something like an external harddrive at least triple the capacity of your used storage space. This way you can use disc imaging software like Acronis to make full system backups of your pc at that moment in time, with all settings and files in place. With a few clicks you can restore your system to an exact moment in time in about an hour depending upon how much data you are recovering.

how much does soemthing like this cost

Maybe $80 for ~1TB external USB harddrive, $60 for backup software. Under $200. Every 30 days you run a full system backup. Back's up literally every single byte of your system to the backup harddrive. Then when you suffer a virus or crazy system instability or total harddrive failure, you just pop in cd, and tell it to restore from whichever backup you want.

Plus the HD is multi-purpose. I mean you can use it to dump movies/picture/music libraries, take it with you, use it to backup other computers/laptops you may have etc. I dont care to backup my movie/music libraries so I just keep them all on the backup drive. That way my actual system backups are much smaller and take less time. If the backup drive blows up oh well.

Disclaimer: I'm a total computer noob

I think a manual backup to external harddisk is a laborious process and a bit old-fashioned. There are cheap online backup plans available (let's say 5$ / month) with high security, reliability, and user friendly software, which give you access to your data anywhere you have an internet connection (and so long as you remember your password).

Well the type of backup I'm recommending is referred to as a bare metal backup. Meaning you boot from a cd and launch a recovery environment to restore the entire operating system and all files with it. You cant do this with an online service (yet). Depending on your internet speed/bandwidth limits, backing up and recoverying 40-100GB might be problematic as well.