Programming hard on the computers?
Community Forums/General Help/Programming hard on the computers?
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| Hi, I have a pretty nice laptop with great specs and when I bought it, I assumed it would stop giving me BSD's and crashing all the time like my older computers. Unfortunately I was wrong. At first all runs fine, but after a few months of intense programming, it is slowing down and crashing at least three times a week. After talking to some friends, we came to the conclusion that programming/testing graphics and CPU intense games and simulations that use up 80-100% CPU is too much for any computer and simply messes stuff up eventually. Does anyone else have problems with their computer crashing very often after programming and constantly testing CPU and GPU intensive apps. I understand that all computers have a limit, it just that every computer I've ever programmed on has followed this same path and I was wondering if any other programmers had experienced this? I am currently having my harddrive and CPU and possibly even GPU replaced under waranty because of this problem. The problem is, it will start happening again soon enough so is there any way to prevent this? |
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| No. I have not had this problem myself. |
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| I've programmed on dozens, if not hundreds of computers, including some extremely CPU-stressing data analysis programs that would thrash the CPU and hard disk for *days* at a time, but I've never had failures like you're describing because of it. Have you tried running a system cleanup utility like System Mechanic ( http://www.iolo.com )? Windows tends to accumulate a lot of clutter and temporary files and registry errors over time, and these will definitely cause slowdown, BSDs, and other odd behaviour. ~ Lindsay |
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| That is just not true. I have once cpu, working since 1998 non-stop, and it´s still working pretty well. This laptop where I´m writing from, more than a year, and I´m doing just about everything with it, and no problems whatsoever. Do you run scandisk and defrag on your computers? Have you tried system restore, or a repair install to try to fix some corrupted OS files? Updating drivers? What about firewalls, adware programs and virus scanners? Or maybe you're getting bad HDs... try buying HDs from other brands and test them out. Even more: if you're assembling your computer and buying parts - make sure to buy good ones. The cheap ones tend to give problems every now and then, while (usually) the good stuff (I'm mainly talking about motherboards, with a few onboard things as possible) tend to last much longer. Also: if some problems appear, google for them. Usually you can find a simple solution to your problem, like changing a registry key, or reinstalling some files. Always worked for me - I never had to reinstall a system since 1998! (Thinking back... maybe even more, I don't recall ever reinstalling Win95 either!) |
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| Thanks for the link lindsay I dont think that is the problem but ill give it a go. It happens consistantly on most modern machines I use after about 6 months of programming.. maybe it is the brand. I used to use dell but I got fed up with the customer service and crashes and switched to HP and Lenovo which are both great except this one problem which is also persistent in my old half dead dell machine. :( So I was thinking, using 100% CPU on both CPU's for extended periods of time could possibly just wear it out over time and make some of the wires and microscopic components go bad which would cause the crashes for sure. If the iolo doesnt work then I guess this must be the problem. Thanks again. |
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| sorry slotman, didnt see your post earlier I have tested this a little and observed/researched some stuff. Here are some of the things that point to my problem with computers always crashing being related to programming. 1. I have the same kind of computer as my parents. The only thing different about them is the fact that I program on mine. Theirs never gives them a bsd but mine does regualrly 2. I LOVE running rediculous programs that I make to find all of the possible chess games up to 70 moves and other rediculously hard and nigh on impossible feets 3. My computer is almost ALWAYS running something, a simulation or something of that sort. 4. Every computer I have ever programed on does this |
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| Do you think it could be some type of virus? If you have documents/software that you have transfered from one of your old machines, it could have spread to your new one to cause the problem again. |
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| Do you think it could be some type of virus? If you have documents/software that you have transfered from one of your old machines, it could have spread to your new one to cause the problem again. I doubt its a virus but that is certainly possible I guess. I haven't transferred any file from my old computers. Most have crashed with no way of recovering anything useful from the harddrive. I am trying out that System Mechanic thing and it seems to be working pretty welll for now. I'm not sure if it will solve my problem in the long run but for now it works great! Thanks! |
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| Well I've never found anybody with good words for Dell! I had several HPs here for a few years and they were OK, but as Slotman correctly says, clashing internal components and/or their drivers can destabilise (or in some cases, completely break) Windows, which I experienced first-hand when upgrading them. Fragmented drives shouldn't causes crashes but they will cause slowdowns, so defragging is a good idea. Other than that ... next time you have crashes, run System Mechanic again and see if the crashing continues. If not, you'll know you're dealing with a software, not hardware issue. ~ Lindsay |
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| Dust. You have dust in your cooler. Never run any computer without mbm or another utility that shows the temperature of the CPU. When it starts to rise, vacuum you cpu cooler, fan and any other grills. I've seen this happen 1 gazillion times. (worth a look anyway ;-) ) |
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| there are many potential causes for system instability: it could be a a hardware issue: dust buildup or bad fan bearings leading to overheating, cheapo powersupply fritzing out on you, bad capacitors on the motherboard, or generally dimished lifespan due to overclocking (which pushes the components past their rated settings) It could also be software related: Installing / uninstalling a ton of programs bogs down windows over time. you could have picked up some spyware or a virus. Are you up to date on your security patches and have a decent antivirus program installed? Scanned for spyware recently? It's been about a year since I installed my current OS (Vista 64), before that I ran XP for a few years without a re-install. I don't even remember the last time it crashed on me... |
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| Well I've never found anybody with good words for Dell! Dell's lines of business PC's are fairly good -- it's the consumer lines that suck. Same for their technical support: OK for large companies, horrendous for their home use systems. |
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| Does anyone else have problems with their computer crashing very often after programming and constantly testing CPU and GPU intensive apps Funny you guys should be mentioning Dell ..On my dev laptop, a Dell XPS Gen 2, the graphics card has half-died. I now get lots of ")" characters on bootup (at the dump screen) and I can only boot into safe mode. It happened after I was contantly tweeking the BlitzMax Pocket Invaders game. The gfx card must have been getting hotter everytime I ran the game. All of a sudden the BSOD kicked in. I restarted the PC and that was the end of the functional side of the card I believe it was down to the 2nd fan for the gfx card. This always ran at a slower speed compared to the CPU fan |
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| Nailing your keyboard to the back of the front door will not be helping. |
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| Unless you are an incredibly BAD programmer doing dangerous/sloppy lower level system calls then i doubt its your programming. Windows 98/2K/XP does tend to slow down over time, usually when you install and remove stuff a lot because it doesnt always clean up properly. I have not yet had this problem in vista, but have not ever had it installed for longer than 6-12 months at any one time anyway. I usually have to re-install my windows XP machine once every 6 months to get them going smooth again. I liken it to the calcium deposits in a showerhead, it gets 'cloggy', why? and with what? is anyones guess :/. Also, NTFS has a flaw (or is it a 'feature'?!:/) which allows it to get heavily fragmented which doesn't help either. If you do have a badly fragmented drive you sometimes need to run the windows defragger 2-3 times before it gets nice and defragged (it seems it's own defrag is not that clever) Doesnt explain the bluescreens ("its windows innit!":), but seriously, it is possible your HDD or other HW is on the way out. Its (usually) HW or driver related. |
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| @ D4NM4N I dont do any dangerous low level system calls... well I have done some pretty stupid things. One time I made a program that randomly generated executables and ran them. That was a long time ago and I am lucky they didnt do anything terrible like delete my c drive or registry. :p But you may be right about windows not cleaning up after itself. I cleaned it up and it works ok now. Its not like new but it is pretty good. thanks |
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| have you tried adding a Delay( 1 ) in the main loop this will release the system to make it easier for windows to do what it wants, on my games without it it runs 80-100% with it I rarely hit 5% :) |
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| Have a looky here http://www.tucows.com/preview/410051 :) |
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| The problem is your broken operating system. Ubuntu should be a better alternative. |
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| Lol! Ubuntu as an operating system. Funny! |
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| After talking to some friends, we came to the conclusion that programming/testing graphics and CPU intense games and simulations that use up 80-100% CPU is too much for any computer and simply messes stuff up eventually. No more like dodgy hardware, a corrupt files, viruses and lack of system maintenance. @Nate the Great A word of warning about System Mechanic (and other tools like this). Back up your registry hive before using any registry tools as it can mess things up. One thing about System Mechanic, make sure you set up the remove system clutter tool to avoid any files/directories that you don't want it to mess with or you can kiss them bye bye. |
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| I have an 11 year old machine running Windows 98 that is my main development machine. It used to crash a lot when I was coding, which led me to believe it was over heating. I took the sides of the case off, and everything worked much better. Now I think it was probably a dust problem. I still have the sides off so dust won't accumulate on the machine... whenever it gets bad, I can see it and quickly vacuum it off before it becomes destructive. My other suggestion would be that if you have two machines, one for coding and one for general purpose (as I do) then leave the development machine disconnected from the internet, so you never have to worry about viruses or excess clutter on your system. |
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| puki probably buggered something up when he was swiping your media. |
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| Dell's lines of business PC's are fairly good I think this depends on the country... here on Brazil Dell sells ridiculous overpriced machine, using the cheapest hardware possible! They used to sell the same thing sold on USA, but to lower their prices a bit and still make profit, they started selling machines with bad hardware (read: PC Chips, or other "general unbranded" motherboards) which even when configured and installed right, still gives problems here and there. Several "brand" computers are like that here. When buying pre-built computers, one should be really cautios to know what will come inside. So, if you really want a computer to last, the best option is to built it yourself. Or at least get a full list of what comes inside the computer you're buying (not only system specs, but also brands) - which will make a difference in the long run. When I bought this laptop, altough from a strange brand (e-max, never heard of it before), I made sure it used a good motherboard (same one from a good line of Toshiba's), good memory (Kingston), a good HD (Seagate), a good graphics card (ATI Radeon X1300, with dedicated memory) and it even came with XP (original) pre-installed. It's been working wonderfully for over an year - much faster than most laptops I've seen so far :) So, for a computer to last, you have to: - clean it from time to time (physically, to remove dust and rust that may appear after some years) - clean it from time to time (scandisk/defrag) - scan it from time to time (adware and viruses) - make sure everything is working (specially the PSU and fans) - let the computer always with a no-break or something to protect it against eletrical surges, which could damage it. and as a precaution, always backup as much as you can :) Most have crashed with no way of recovering anything useful from the harddrive. After reading that - make sure if your HDs are 7200RPM or higher - to have a cooler on them, otherwise their lifetime will be greatly reduced. |
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| Sometimes formating and re-installing windows could solve mysterious problems... |
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| Lol! Ubuntu as an operating system. Funny! Yeah real funny. :PUbuntu is more of an OS than windows will ever hope to be, (as far as the OS itself goes) its is "re-born" from a far better designed & structured system, (that being Unix which is still the -daddy- of the interconnected age.. DOS + Windows 3.1 and its legacy spawn simply are not.). For those of us who buy the right quality hardware (instead of from cheap MS b***hes) have a problem free stable experience. Almost everyone i know who use it -dramatically- prefer it once they actually learn how to use it. IT and Web professionals included. Anyway, back on topic slightly, @edzup (taken from your link) Slow down, freeze, crash and security threats are over. Dunno, sounds like a mighty bold thing to say! - on any system :D |
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| Yeah real funny. Ubuntu is more of an OS than windows will ever hope to be, (as far as the OS itself goes) its is re-designed from a far better designed/structured system, (that being Unix which is still the -daddy- of the interconnected age.. DOS + Windows 3.1 and its legacy spawn simply are not.). For those of us who buy the right quality hardware (instead of from cheap MS b***hes) have a problem free stable experience. Almost everyone i know who use it -dramatically- prefer it once they actually learn how to use it. IT and Web professionals included. Lol! Yeah Ok! |
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| Well, apple saw the 'light' so did every other major operating system designed for desktop/laptop computers. I am sure MS would LOVE to re-design windows on a UNIX derivative as it would solve a multitude of filesystem, stability and security flaws but cannot do it for past-political and legacy reasons. Actually i am serious, almost any security professional will tell you that many of window's security and stability flaws come from its single user 'isolated use' legacy dependence. Originally it was never designed to be interconnected to the extent it is required to be now. Since those days it has been patched and rehashed and rushed out to keep up. However Unix was designed from its very foundation to be both multi user and extremely interconnected. Therein lies the major difference. They all have security flaws, put an in idiot in root's chair and it soon falls, however none are quite as 'eye-rollable' as some of the windows ones which could catch out anyone. |
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| Hmm ok! I guess I'll download Ubuntu then and see what all the fuss is about. I have a spare partition with nothing on it so will give it a go now and report back. Apolls for the thread hijack! |
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| Try it. Hopefully your hardware is all up to it (usually the reason for most peoples humph :) good luck @ nate the great, Have you tried putting a temp monitor on the CPU? Sometimes if your laptop is full of fluff a bluescreen can start occuring when they get hot. Theres bound to be a few freebies that can do it around (try that thing edzup suggested). This happened to me recently, windows would blue and ubuntu would show a "dazed and confused" and do an emergency power down. I put a monitor on it and it was showing 75' just after booting up!! |
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| @edzup Slow down, freeze, crash and security threats are over. Dunno, sounds like a mighty bold thing to say! - on any system :D When did i say that? every os has security issues but nix is easier to fix being open source |
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| Lol you didnt, that was on the advert for the software link you posted :D |
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| lol |
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| ok I gave my laptop to the "computer guys" for a day as well as some screenshots I had managed to take of all the errors... some errored out on displaying the error!?! weird... anyway they found that it was because my first blue screen had happened at the wrong moment and corrupted my registry because spybot was monitoring it or something like that... anyway all is well now. :) |
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| @Amon Just a little suggestion about using linux. Check that all your hardware is supported, that includes any external hardware and modems especially so as only windows and Mac's are mostly supported. If you connect to a router by wire then it's not an issue. On more thing if you install to a machine that was factory built make sure you have a recovery disk that will restore your machine to factory defaults as it alters the boot sector and you wouldn't be able to use the recovery partition. I've used many linux distros and found that Ubuntu and is sisters (Kubuntu/Xubuntu etc.) are easy to maintain and a excellent for linux noobs. And if you need to use a windows application then most can be run using WINE. |
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| Just a little suggestion about using linux. Check that all your hardware is supported, that includes any external hardware and modems especially so as only windows and Mac's are mostly supported. If you connect to a router by wire then it's not an issue. I made the mistake of not doing that. |
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| At first all runs fine, but after a few months of intense programming, it is slowing down and crashing at least three times a week. Are they hardware or software problems? You could try a clean install of your OS. I have had similar problems with XP computers - not because the hardware dies, but because I install, unistall and run so many programs. Eventually all the registry and filesystem errors seem to be too much for the system. Vista has been better, but not perfect: no blue screens, but some crashing and way too many error messages. |
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