Constant Blue Screens

Branan wrote on 2/18/2012, 3:43 PM

I bought this new system ONLY because when I upgraded from Veg 9 to 11 it would not work on my win XP machine workhorse which is super reliable and has edited and rendered hundreds or hours with never a problem. You'll see that I have been a loyal client for many many years.

So I upgraded to 11 and it just wont work. Sometimes I can get a full render, sometimes it blue screens during a render or WMV or MPG1 or MPG2, sometimes in the middle of loading in content. I've turned off GPU, turned on GPU, tried all sorts of project options, made sure nothing else was running, tried to use it after a cold start, I've really tried everything I know and I cannot get it to work. Super fresutrating. I bought this new fast pc so I can be more productive and render faster but no luck. so now I use the old XP veg 9 which is good, but of course just slow.

The new machine is:
Win 7 Ultimate SP1
AMD Phenom II X6 1090 T Processors 3.83 GHz
8.00 GB RAM (3.25 usable)
32 bit OS
NVIDIA GE FORCE 9500 GT

Comments

johnmeyer wrote on 2/18/2012, 3:58 PM

First of all, I would recommend you edit your post to remove or "hide" your email address and phone number. Otherwise the spambots will be all over you.

As for the Blue Screens, having read pretty much everything posted in these forums over the years, especially since V11 was first shipped, I haven't heard about many blue screens, and therefore am inclined to think that this may not be directly the fault of Vegas. Instead, since it is a new machine, and the problem only happens during render, I suspect some sort of heat problem. The easy way to test this theory is to disable all the other cores prior to render so that only one core is used. After you start the render, you can check on whether the system is only using one core by using Windows Task Manager.

Other people may have better ideas on how to limit core usage, but I think you can get most of what you want in the Vegas Preferences.

Finally, you might consider downloading one of the free temperature monitoring utilities and see what temperature is reached when you render with all cores enabled.

If you can render with the cores disabled, then you need to contact your vendor and have them modify the system to add better cooling.

Terje wrote on 2/18/2012, 5:40 PM

Blue screens appear when something really, really bad happens to your computer. A regular application should not be able to blue-screen your PC, if it was able to, the Operating System would be amiss in its task.

Regular applications run in user-space, and from user-space you can not blue-screen a PC. Drivers (video and sound for example) runs in a more privileged space since they need more rights. This also makes it possible for them to make a real mess, and therefore a blue-screen.

So, what is the problem here? Two possibilities really. Either you have a bad driver or you have bad hardware. The latter is probably the most likely. First though, update all your drivers to see if that works If it doesn't you might have a bad motherboard, or more likely, some bad RAM. RAM goes bad all the time, also in brand new machines.

"Yeah, but this only happens when running Vegas" you might say. Possibly. Vegas, as most demanding apps, tax your PC more than most other software though. Vegas just triggers the problem.

pwppch wrote on 2/18/2012, 9:59 PM

Where does the blue screen or the log tell you the fault occurred?

Peter

Steve Mann wrote on 2/18/2012, 10:15 PM

"Otherwise the spambots will be all over you"

John, this is really an old internet fable. Spambots don't "scrape" forums, web sites or emails for email addresses any more. Since 2003 it has been illegal, and it's really unproductive. Spammers have a much more lucrative and legal source of email - they become "affiliates" of all those sites where you click on the "accept" to get access, not realizing that you just agreed to share your information with their affiliates.

From the honeyPot Project:
'While CAN-SPAM has been criticized as generally weak on spammers, one area where it is clear is in the prohibition against harvesting. Specifically, the law defines every message sent to a harvested address as "spam" and imposes potential liability on the sender.'

The full article: http://www.projecthoneypot.org/law_of_harvesting.php

PeterDuke wrote on 2/18/2012, 10:27 PM

"Since 2003 it has been illegal..."

Would legalities be of concern to people offering you products to improve your nightly performance, or "super cheap" (i.e. pirate) software, etc., or identity theft? I think not.

johnmeyer wrote on 2/19/2012, 12:32 AM

John, this is really an old internet fable. Spambots don't "scrape" forums, web sites or emails for email addresses any more.Really?? Then I guess that "parallel universe" forum that contains the entire content of this website, but with all our names changed to some fictional characters was not "scraped," but was done with Sony's cooperation and assistance.

Here, I'll do a little test.

If any robot wants to contact me, here's my email address:

jmeyermailbox-test@yahoo.com

I can turn this off as soon as it gets picked up. The only place in the entire world it appears is in this post. We'll see what happens.

craftech wrote on 2/19/2012, 6:41 AM

Branan,

Peter (Sony PCH) asked the right question.

Where does the blue screen or the log tell you the fault occurred?

At the top of the Blue Screen (Stop Error) there will be a message that tells you.

Example.

Terje said:
Blue screens appear when something really, really bad happens to your computer.

Don't be alarmed by that post. He is incorrect. For example:

Let's say you got the error message MACHINE_CHECK_EXCEPTION which is almost always a hardware error. That error can occur if you have incorrect timings for the ram set in the BIOS.

The timings are usually set automatically, but they need to be set manually for some types ram if you change the CPU or if the original CPU required it and it was never set properly. So why, you ask, wouldn't it have occurred before?
Incorrect ram timings will often run just fine until some process that is heavily CPU intensive or GPU intensive taxes it. Then you get a BSOD and an error message.
Possible solution: Lower the ram timings. Example: From 9-9-9-24 to 8-8-8-24 or whatever the ram manufacturer recommends.

So as Peter asked:

Where does the blue screen or the log tell you the fault occurred?

John

paul_w wrote on 2/19/2012, 6:51 AM

"I bought this new fast pc so I can be more productive"...

Alarm, could read as 'may be overclocked'..

+1 to explaining what the error shows as during the Blue Screen Of Death.

and .. check for any overclocking, turn them all off if any. (CPU and GPU)

Paul.

JJKizak wrote on 2/19/2012, 8:02 AM

Old drivers, hardware conflict, overclocked memory, overclocked CPU.
JJK

amendegw wrote on 2/19/2012, 8:16 AM

Here's something that has helped me in the past... BSOD Dump analysis software: http://nirsoft.net/utils/blue_screen_view.html (be careful to download using the link entitled "Download BlueScreenView with full install/uninstall support" as you can be fooled into downloading junkware).

YMMV,
...Jerry

Terje wrote on 2/23/2012, 6:03 AM

>> Don't be alarmed by that post. He is incorrect

When I said really, really bad, I meant from a software perspective :-)

In other words, it is a hardware (memory etc) or driver failure. It is most likely not the fault of any software you are using.