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General discussion (archive)A Frankly Bizarre Computer Problem(40 posts)(40 posts)
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This is my favourite topic
Posted August 17, 2014
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hedwards: It's there for debugging when your computer won't boot. Sort of like in olden times when you had those beep codes. I don't think I've ever seen anything other than all four of the lights on, except briefly during power down.

Anyways, in order to view the LEDs you have to be able to see into the case and that often means having the case open.
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rtcvb32: So basically when you're making upgrades and you power on to see if it works before putting the cover on...

The 4 LED's aren't for the CPU. Probably the state of the POST (<i>Power On Self Test</i>), and if they are blinking the order of on/off would give you 16 combinations for what's generally wrong. If it was directly connected to the CPU then if the CPU failed to have power they would never come up or wouldn't be of use until the CPU worked and lots of other details. The CPU won't actually do anything until the BIOS is initialized and passed ROM instructions which is nearly the last step of POST.

I don't recall all the stages of POST, but it checks the CPU, Video out device, Memory, and maybe basic connectivity between all PCI/connections to see if they all return that they are up and running. Memory might run through a quick check of read/writes every meg or so, or do a quick xor read and write of like 4 values in bulk per meg before updating it's counter and printing it out, but that's mostly BIOS programming and can get skipped.
No, they're CPU phase indicators. Indicating which power level the processor is in. From 0 to 3.

I'm not really sure why you would even care about that information after boot as you could always use software to figure it out.
Posted August 17, 2014
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hedwards: No, they're CPU phase indicators. Indicating which power level the processor is in. From 0 to 3.

I'm not really sure why you would even care about that information after boot as you could always use software to figure it out.
Ahh that's different. The power phases are likely when you have it on low/half power, power savings, etc. Some OSes will lower the power the CPU uses or shut half of it down if it isn't needed for a while, which makes it a little sluggish when it has to start from full stop.

And then there's standby states... In the BIOS sometimes there are power settings. S1-S4.

S1 i believe was basically CPU halted but still getting power
S2 same (ram half refresh)
S3 - CPU no power (ram half refresh)
S4 Same as S3 but if not woken within a certain period of time goes to full shutdown?.

I'm incorrect on exactly what they do, but that's the general idea. See ACPI. With Hibernation in OS's it means very little other than how long it takes to get back up and having to re-read from the disk.
Post edited August 17, 2014 by rtcvb32
Posted August 17, 2014
I had an issue with an old computer of mine restarting randomly... did everything from replacing the PSU to the motherboard. Come to find out it was neither.

There was a small board that the power button connects into and this had malfunctioned causing the computer to reset at random. Disconnecting this board from the motherboard stopped the computer from restarting. This probably isn't your issue, but pointing out that random restarts isn't always the PSU.
Posted August 17, 2014
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realkman666: Had the same thing last year. PSU.
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skimmie: So did I a few years back, except in my case it wasn't the PSU, it was the caps on the motherboard. That would be highly unlikely in the OP's case though, since he stated his mobo was from April...
YouTube videos crashing your system? It's just so odd.
Posted August 17, 2014
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realkman666: YouTube videos crashing your system? It's just so odd.
Mine started off with random seeming things (but pretty consistently the same random thing) and just got worse as the cap degraded. I finally got around to replacing the cap after complete failure (the cap top gets bubbled, mine luckily did not leak) and voila it was all better and has been going strong ever since. (~1.5 yrs ago and the box it is in now is 99% uptime)
Posted August 17, 2014
isn't it a matter of cleaning your cooler?
Posted August 17, 2014
Everyone thanks for the help, I did track down the issue after it resetting while playing a game and it was a slightly damaged PSU connector. I was able to fix it by bending the metal casing inside the connector back into place so the connection is solid. There might still be a chance that I will need to replace the PSU but for now, I have yet to see it crash after having my PC on for at least 6 hours.
Posted August 18, 2014
Good to know :)
Posted August 18, 2014
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skimmie: So did I a few years back, except in my case it wasn't the PSU, it was the caps on the motherboard. That would be highly unlikely in the OP's case though, since he stated his mobo was from April...
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realkman666: YouTube videos crashing your system? It's just so odd.
It was even worse than that. Almost everything crashed my system eventually (browsing the internet, doing some light office work, copying large numbers of files from one HD to another), EXCEPT for power-hungry applications like large games or benchmarks. They ran rock solid. No amount of testing pointed to a definitive cause.
I finally got a tip to check the caps on the mobo (specifically the ones around the CPU socket, that are usually part of the power distribution system (is that the correct English term?) for the CPU), and the tops of several caps were bulging.
In the end, I bought a new mobo and that fixed all stability issues.
Posted August 18, 2014
For my computer i've disabled flash and noscript. Cleans up a lot, although Firefox is still a hungry beast; Probably downgrade to a previous version sooner or later.

For a lot of processes you can probably forcibly turn them to low rather than the default normal priority. Windows has really crappy default priority settings... They should have incorporated a 3bit priority setting for executable so when they load they will automatically go high or low depending on the setting (or last setting). Course with scripting like in bash you can forcibly put things in low priority by prepending the nice command to the programs. Prio also does something similar but it seems much more dependent on command arguments...
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General discussion (archive)A Frankly Bizarre Computer Problem(40 posts)(40 posts)
(40 posts)