[h8redv2]

Hi

Am running a HD4550, via dongle to hdmi on my philips LCD.

This is on a clean install of vista 32 sp1 + tvpack, all updates.

Running CAT 8.12


System previously had a HD2600XT and after 2 years of running this card I can´t recall having had these problems.


Problem.....


When the htpc wakes unattended at night or for a recording, it might crash and reboot, sometimes it states that a BSOD was at fault, but sometimes not.

My htpc wakes at night 3 am and 4.40 am, first is scan for OTA 2. is because a previous recording created that task, to be sure the guide is up to date.


Sometimes the PC crashes after the 3 am wakeup and sometimes at the 4.40 am wakeup.


On both accounts it crashes after not more than 2 min. resume uptime.


It never ever crashes when the system wakes alongside the screen. And we use it alot.


But every single night it does, in the windows error reporting tool, there is a video hardware error in the same timeframe as the crash.


I have tried turning off the automatic reboot to investigate the BSOD, once it was just a black screen and once it was a ATIKMDAG error.


I even had a recording missing 3 minutes, because it woke unattended, started to record and crashed. The good thing was that it resumed the recording afterwards, so I only missed 3 minutes.


Again unattended resume !


I tried replacing the card, but the replacement caused the same behaviour.


Am I the only one .... ??


Please help me ....

 

[genro]

Disable the ATI External Events service and see if that fixes things.

 

[h8redv2]

Done.. now I´ll have to wait and see

 

[hceuterpe]

Oh gees, Good point. Every time I resume for the first time in the evening, it complains that it recovered from a system error, and it's often on for no apparent reason early in the morning...


I think it's time I buy the DVI detective Plus, and give up on the video card companies fixing these sorts of issues.

 

[fraggermcg]

I had this problem too. Try changing your standby mode from sleep/standby to hibernate and see if that helps. Worked for me although a bit of a pain as it takes longer to resume now.

 

[jrwalte]

If you can't get it to work do the next best thing:


Shut off system standby and leave it on 24/7.

 

[fraggermcg]

I know electricity prices are cheaper in the US, but doing a quick calc based off a machine using say 100W/h in standby (probably less if you're using on-board gfx card etc, probably more if you're running a quad core!):


1 day's worth of electricity in the UK for the machine costs 22.5p (US 34c)

1 year's worth of electricity costs £82 (US$123)


That's enough for me to think it's worth spending a bit of time getting standby/resume working. But would be interested in other's views on this!

 

[h8redv2]

So far so good, it resumed at 3 am and 4.40 am and it didn´t crash.

I have disabled ati external event service, but also my hdmi device, in devicemanager.


I use onbaord SPDIF for sound and somewhere i read that that hdmi sound also could cause problems.


Will give it another night, crossing my fingers...

 

[jrwalte]



Quote:
Originally Posted by fraggermcg /forum/post/15540447


I know electricity prices are cheaper in the US, but doing a quick calc based off a machine using say 100W/h in standby (probably less if you're using on-board gfx card etc, probably more if you're running a quad core!):


1 day's worth of electricity in the UK for the machine costs 22.5p (US 34c)

1 year's worth of electricity costs £82 (US$123)


That's enough for me to think it's worth spending a bit of time getting standby/resume working. But would be interested in other's views on this!

I see the cost as worth it to insure recordings always work, background tasks (defrag, virus scan, etc) always run and to have superfetch have all those commonly used MCE programs loaded up and ready to go

I also do a lot of overnight usenet downloading and standby will shut the computer down in the middle of a download.


According to my UPS my PC is hogging ~.22kWh, or 220 watts (this is just at bootup and idle with nothing in power save, so if I activate speedstep and HD shutdown, it would be less). For me, during 4 summer months the price is 0.76 cents kWh and for 8 months it is 0.39 cents. That's about $100 per year.


This consumption will get even worse once I install the inevitable unRaid server, though. Maybe I'll consider trying to get standby to work then

Oh, and I did have the occasional video card unresponsive black screen after standby and had to hit the reset button, which can possibly corrupt files.

 

[gazebo]



Quote:
Originally Posted by fraggermcg /forum/post/15540447


1 year's worth of electricity costs £82 (US$123)


That's enough for me to think it's worth spending a bit of time getting standby/resume working. But would be interested in other's views on this!

Good luck on your quest.


I had long given up trying to get a PC to wake up reliably from standby or hibernation. I tried this on all sorts of systems of different motherboard/OS combinations imagainable, including notebooks. One thing that was constant was the inability for the system to wake up 100% of the time.


So for my PVR server I decided to run it 24/7 (for a long time I was running a VIA based mini-ITX systems with a mere 22W of power consumption when idle). For playback I used another more power hungry system which I powered up only when needed. Nowadays you can build a system that can come close to this 22W idle number with desktop AMD and Intel parts, and it will be powerful enough to play back the most demanding videos.

 

[Joseph Clark]

My problem is not BSOD on resume, but when I switch HDMI inputs. I have a rather complex HDMI switching arrangement that allows me to switch between 2 displays (Sharp 32" LCD and Sharp DLP projector) and 2 receivers (Denon 3808 and Onkyo 606), with an Octava 3x2 HDMI switcher in the mix. I sometimes (although rarely) get BSOD when switching, but I haven't picked up a pattern yet. I'm pretty much convinced, though, that it has to do with with HDMI.

 

[h8redv2]

Well it´s not entirely BSOD on resume.


I have now had up to 3 consequtive days of resuming and suspending @ 3am and 4.40 am.


Without a crash, but last night it hung at the 4.40 am, with a black screen, so it didn´t reboot by it self.

This occurs on rare occasions.

The log files does not even show the system resuming, because it was only running for seconds, I suspect a hdmi handshake error right ?


In the mst log i can see the system awakening at 4.40, running for a few seconds and then nothing.


I manually shutdown the system and power it up again, now the event log says that the previously shutdown @ 4.40 was unexpected...


But it seems that turning off the ati external event service and disabeling my hdmi device in device manager has really improved things.


Before I had a consequent crash at night every day.


Hoping that MS and ATi will figure this out.

 

[Fam Money]

Have you tried installing the drivers that came with the card? I'm having the same issue and that's what I'm going to try next.


The reason I suggest trying them is due to this post. sneakerx says it gives him all the post processing options as well.

 

[Fam Money]

I've just installed the drivers with the CD so now the wait begins to see if this solves or at least helps the issue.


For anyone that lost their CD I've zipped and uploaded the drivers that were on the CD.
XP Driver
Vista Driver


I pray it doesn't hang tomorrow, Lost is finally back!

 

[h8redv2]



Quote:
Originally Posted by Fam Money /forum/post/15610089



I pray it doesn't hang tomorrow, Lost is finally back!

Indeed it is

Also here in Denmark

 

[jrwalte]

Worse case you can download it

Not all is Lost.

 

[Fam Money]



Quote:
Originally Posted by jrwalte /forum/post/15611169


Worse case you can download it

Not all is Lost.

LOL. One of the reasons I bought an HDHomerun is because I was tired of DLing my shows. After getting sent a notice from Comcast the second time for DLing eps of Heroes I decided recording them myself was a better idea.

 

[jrwalte]

Did you use torrents? I've read some can be 'tagged' by the digital rights owner and they can track who downloads through torrent.

 

[h8redv2]

Well I still have occasional reboots, yesterday it also happend when the system came out of standby with me at the console, it was live in 4 seconds then it rebooted.

This was the first time this has happened.

I then turned of "automatically restart" only to find that the next tme it did so, was when it resumed unattended. And when it does so, the screen is blank, thus no BSOD to read error codes from... arrgh...

 

[fraggermcg]

Any updates anyone? Since my previous post I've switched to a Denon 2809 amp and the problem is back - BSOD after any unattended resume.


I think though that I've isolated it to the resume after the unattended one. By which I mean it will wake up itself once to do a recording or whatever and then go back to sleep, but the next time it's woken up either unattended or by me, I get the BSOD with an error in atikmdag.


I've disabled the external event service but can't disable the HDMI device as I'm using it for the sound.