TPU's WCG/BOINC Team

[stinger608]

Sorry to hear you had to reinstall Windows @twilyth , but dang it, sometimes that is the only cure.

 

[Bow]

I added another PC at work. 1 at home 4 at work Crunching away.

 

[stinger608]

Doing some backups on my main system. Will be shutting it down to do a bit of an upgrade. Going from a Z87 to a Z97 and an m.2 SSD.

The Z87 board will be put together in the ole Zalman case that I got from @sneekypeet several years ago coupled with an i7-4770 and 8 gigs of ram for another cruncher.

 

[t_ski]

I am down on one of my 2P rigs. It took Windows updates last night and rebooted, and this one has been giving me trouble on reboots. I woke up and found it was stuck on the Windows loading screen, and resetting it of shutting it off and back on would only make it get stuck again. If it didn't get stuck it wanted to do an automatic repair, which says either reboot or it didn't fix anything, or it would give me an ACPI BIOS error blue screen. Googling that said reset the CMOS, and not the damn thing won't finish posting either.

I'm tired of working on it, so it's going to sit for the night. Maybe I'll clean it up tomorrow and pull some parts out and try again.

 

[twilyth]

I had a similar problem although I don't know that it was an update that caused it. I had to reinstall windows 7 ultimate 64. That might be the easiest thing to do. Then create a partition with the boot image and just restore that the next time you have a problem - after all updates are in of course.

 

[t_ski]

For me it wasn't the update that caused it. The rig has been flaky on reboots for a while, and the updates just made the PC reboot and that's when it got stuck.

Fortunately, I was able to resolve it. I read the freaking manual ( ) and reset the BIOS the right way, then it booted into Windows the first try. Had to go back into the BIOS and change a few things (disable on-board graphics, etc), and it went into Windows again. I'm happy for the moment

 

[twilyth]

Well, my dual 14 core rebooted to the login screen which meant that boinc wasn't running. So I finally had to do the 'control userpasswords2' trick to get it to auto login so I don't have to worry about this in the future. I wonder if I have this set up on the Win10 rigs. Will have to check.

 

[manofthem]

Played a little game last night, first time in a while... which means that I forgot to resume BOINC after the gaming session ended

I wish I could have figured out a nice balance doing BOINC would auto stop when gaming started, but I never found a happy place where it would only stop during gaming. Ah well, sucks

 

[stinger608]

I think we are going to have to start putting sticky notes on your forehead when you get ready to play games @manofthem

 

[manofthem]

I think we are going to have to start putting sticky notes on your forehead when you get ready to play games @manofthem

For real. Soon it'll look like this

Spoiler

 

[stinger608]

For real. Soon it'll look like this

Spoiler

Yea, no kidding! Seems like you do that a lot brother. LOLOL

I know, just before you get ready to run a game, toss that picture up as your wallpaper...........Then you'll remember to start BOINC again. Just because of this discussion.

 

[xvi]

I wish I could have figured out a nice balance doing BOINC would auto stop when gaming started, but I never found a happy place where it would only stop during gaming. Ah well, sucks

I've never used it, but is the "Exclusive Applications" feature really that unreliable? Seems like it'd be pretty easy for BOINC to do correctly.

 

[manofthem]

I've never used it, but is the "Exclusive Applications" feature really that unreliable? Seems like it'd be pretty easy for BOINC to do correctly.

The difficulty falls in finding the exact balance where BOINC stops but everythign else runs fine. I haven't found a happy place where BOINC stops just while gaming but doesn't stop during everything else. It's ok though, it'll be fine. Just need to remember to resume after a gaming session.

 

[twilyth]

adjust the memory allocation when in use to 2 or 3 percent. That might choke boinc enough that it doesn't interfere

btw - still looking for someone to volunteer to do pie. Tutoring sessions are free.

 

[manofthem]

adjust the memory allocation when in use to 2 or 3 percent. That might choke boinc enough that it doesn't interfere

I haven't thought about that honestly. I may have to check it out . Thanks

 

[twilyth]

I haven't thought about that honestly. I may have to check it out . Thanks

Just be aware that some projects can get by on very little memory so if you have an 8 core rig you will still have 8 active threads unless you go down to 1 or 2 percent. But other projects with choke on more memory and only run maybe 5 or 6 threads. So depending on which projects are running, you may have to periodically tweak it. So it probably won't be a set and forget solution. But once you get a feel for the memory requirements of each project, you should be able to pick a setting that gives you some breathing room.

And the nice thing about doing that way is that once you step away from the machine, everything goes back to 100% so you only lose productivity while you're using it whether for gaming or whatever.

 

[manofthem]

I think I may have found the easier way for me to game and not worry about BOINC. I'm going to add each game I play to the exclusions list. I have to do it manually one by one, but I tested it this evening either Alien either good success. It does seem to take 30 or so after closing the game to resume, but it seems pretty solid.

 

[twilyth]

I've had an, let's call it 'interesting' experience with one of my rigs. It's an old Fatality z68 with a 2600k that doesn't seem to recognize some of the usb ports. I think mostly the usb3 ports. So I had the bright idea of upgrading the bios. The "latest" version was from 2012 but I think it was still newer than stock so I went for it.

After installing it seemed to have borked the boot drive. After hours of trying to repair, re-image, etc, etc with failure after failure, I finally get a message saying that the drive is locked. Hmmm. Can't re-install win10 so re-install win7. That seems to have worked. Now I'm trying to re-image again.

Any ideas what might be going on? All I did was a bios update I swear.

 

[stinger608]

Wow, that is very very odd indeed @twilyth

I don't have a clue what could have caused that issue. However, Windows 7 installed just fine?

Something that Windows 10 didn't like about the new bios, I have to guess.

 

[manofthem]

I've had an, let's call it 'interesting' experience with one of my rigs. It's an old Fatality z68 with a 2600k that doesn't seem to recognize some of the usb ports. I think mostly the usb3 ports. So I had the bright idea of upgrading the bios. The "latest" version was from 2012 but I think it was still newer than stock so I went for it.

After installing it seemed to have borked the boot drive. After hours of trying to repair, re-image, etc, etc with failure after failure, I finally get a message saying that the drive is locked. Hmmm. Can't re-install win10 so re-install win7. That seems to have worked. Now I'm trying to re-image again.

Any ideas what might be going on? All I did was a bios update I swear.

Ever make progress with this issue? Seemed very strange, I hope you got it earning with Win10 again

 

[twilyth]

No. Couldn't even do a clean install. Had to reinstall win7 and THEN do an accessibility upgrade to win10 which I'm doing as we speak. Then I have to reinstall everything. That will take days at least since I don't use that rig very often. Probably months before I get almost everything back to "normal."

 

[t_ski]

I have seen it where a BIOS upgrade will often reset everything back to defaults, and sometimes that messes up the settings for the hard drives. It is usually a matter of SATA/AHCI/Raid getting flipped to something else. Usually the system will not boot right, often will end up in a BSOD. Most of the time flipping it back to the right setting will fix it, but I think I have had it happen once before where the installation got borked.

 

[twilyth]

AHCI was one problem that I didn't discover until fairly late but even after fixing that and re-imaging it still didn't work. And I've used Macrium Reflect before with no problems so I don't think that was the issue but who knows.

 

[stinger608]

Hmm, what does everyone think that an Intel socket 1155 i3 will put out for daily PPD?

I have a little i3 system that I just came across and wondering if it would be worth crunching on it?

 

[thebluebumblebee]

I have a 3220T running - on Linux - OZ and HST only. System pulls less than 50 watts.
Edit: I should have mentioned that OZ runs real well on Linux. I'm getting ~1000 PPD more than I did when running FAAH2.