[ale] Memory or Software?

Greg Clifton gccfof5 at gmail.com
Sun Nov 22 13:24:32 EST 2009


As a hardware guy I suspect software. Generally if you have bad video ram,
you see corruption on your display and if you have bad system ram you get
system freezes or spontaneous reboots and probably kernel panics. I don't
think you would have these sorts of problems from hardware, at least not the
ram component of your hardware. Your mouse could be 'sick' and suffering a
slow death. Do you have the latest video drivers? If so, maybe trying
rolling back a rev., if not, go with the latest.

Gigabyte makes good boards and as far as I know, Diamond makes quality video
boards. If your system has been built a while you could try reseating your
RAM and video card. Also, check for dust build up and slow fan speeds on
your mobo, video card and CPU, but I would be surprised if that is our
problem. I suspect software/drivers.



On Sun, Nov 22, 2009 at 12:38 PM, Scott Castaline <skotchman at gmail.com>wrote:

> Can anybody tell me whether I'm experiencing a software bug or if it's a
> hardware issue?
>
> I've noticed that certain functions over a period of time stop working
> or become erratic. It became very noticeable with Songbird where
> intermittently my "Last Played" Date/Time would be blank, even though
> the track had played. If I restarted Songbird it would display correctly
> for a while and then start again. It seems almost like a heat related
> problem as it intensifies the longer the system is on. On first morning
> boot, all is well, but later the problem comes to play.
>
> I've had also for a while, but never thought too much about it until now
> have lost my scroll wheel function when switching desktops. Not a big
> issue, but when it happens I have to actually point to the desktop I
> want and then click. Then of course, there was the issue that I asked
> about a few months back that affected my display and someone pointed out
> that I probably hadn't set the fonts settings correctly for my LCD
> display. This problem periodically returns even though the settings are
> correct, but if I open and close the dialogs the problem sometimes stops.
>
> I have a Gig-a-Byte MoBo (GA-MA790FX-DS5) with an AMD Athlon 64 x2, 4GB
> RAM (OCZ 800MHz), 1ea Diamond PCIe x16 HD3650 Video w/1GB VRAM. I have
> never seen memory usage reach 2GB or above, but, the problem seems to
> happen when I have a large # files open in say OpenOffice or especially
> Adobe Reader. I have also seen where if I have a OOo Calc sheet open to
> max. window display and I am using the calc to verify a formula, when I
> switch back to calc part of the calculator remains displayed on top of
> my spreadsheet. Could this be a driver issue? Or could it be ATI chips?
> Or maybe just bad VRAM or RAM?
>
> Any opinions?
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