The problem is that if you buy a new PC you don't get any documentation either on its HW or its SW. Only a leaflet in 25 languages with some hints.
Tullio

Sadly, Apple isn't all that much better. Apple has a very good support site that you can find most anything you want and I hear if you go to an Apple store you get very good support but the manuals are the pits. As the newer systems are going away from DVD drives except as an add on, I don't know if they still ship with a software disk set. With Apple it is possible to use the drive on another system so you do have two options in order to obtain the software if you have the disk in the first place.

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I remember when working in Area Science Park in Trieste some friends with a SUN workstation asked for my help after crashing the system. Since I was a BULL employee and knew nothing about SUN, I asked for a manual. We only have a CD, they said. I had no CD reader on my BULL/MIPS minicomputer running UNIX and so could not help. Then I went to another laboratory which had a SUN workstation and read the CD. My UNIX system had printed manuals. When working in SGS (now STMicroelectronics) in Agrate, near Milano, I printed all UNIX System III documentation on an Olivetti dot matrix printer. Old times...
Tullio

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I have been running first cpu only Seti load and now gpu only Seti loads.

I think it has to do with the fact that the cpu frequency speed was staying solidly at 3.7Mhz whereas it was not staying at that when the GPU was active.

3.7 Mhz or 3.7 Ghz? :)

It is certainly 3.7 GHz. I have been running ATLAS@home on it since yesterday at noon and have completed 38 units of about 2 hours each. Amazing.It must use two cores on a single unit.
Tullio

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The problem is that if you buy a new PC you don't get any documentation either on its HW or its SW. Only a leaflet in 25 languages with some hints.
Tullio

I helped set up an HP laptop earlier this year. I think it came with more paper material than just that. Anyway, online docs.

Dena, at least HP (or Win 8) can put the recovery "disc" into a USB stick.

The problem is that if you buy a new PC you don't get any documentation either on its HW or its SW. Only a leaflet in 25 languages with some hints.
Tullio

I helped set up an HP laptop earlier this year. I think it came with more paper material than just that. Anyway, online docs.

Dena, at least HP (or Win 8) can put the recovery "disc" into a USB stick.

I have a stacks of blank DVD's single and double sided. USB sticks are in short supply and I am uncomfortable about them being good for long term storage. It boils down to use what you are comfortable with and I use CD's and DVD's for long term storage and USB for backup and file transfer between systems.

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Your HP has a recovery partition almost certainly. Mind did. You just need to make sure you create a "complete" recovery image. I didn't so when I back-graded to Win7 to see what was "really" going on it took some serious poking around to get Windows8 re-installed.

Tom

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A proud member of the OFA (Old Farts Association).

I wasn't able to create a full recovery disk on the flash drive. Make sure you create a FULL recovery setup.

Tom

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A proud member of the OFA (Old Farts Association).

Yesterday night, while running 4 ATLAS@home units, the screen (my Samsung LED TV) went blank. No signal. I had installed a USB cartridge which allowed the PC to see both my wireless keyboard and mouse, and it was flashing, so the PC was alive. The came a blue screen of death saying that Windows had tried to update my Windows 8 and failed, so it reverted to its prior state. Now it is crunching again 4 ATLAS@home tasks but it seems to me it has slowed down.8 hours instead of 2.
My SuSE Linux 13.1 gets updates too but SuSE asks me if I want to install them. Who gave Windows permission to install something on my PC? I think I shall install SuSE Linux also in it. Wait and see.
Tullio

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Who gave Windows permission to install something on my PC?

By default, you did.
If you don't want it to update automatically, go to Windows Update & set it to notify you instead of just installing any updates.

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Grant
Darwin NT

Several different SETI users have noticed that Windows8 becomes un-responsive or re-boots because of video driver crashes.

There are 2 registry fixes for that. One extends the time delay before Windows8 gets panicky (which didn't always work for me). The other disables the ability of Windows to even notice that the video driver is staying too busy, too long. Search for Windows8 to find some references. Yes, unless you tell the GPU to suspend when you are using the PC the GUI will be jerky.

If you are running Radeon based video cards you can also set a parameter in the mb_cmdline*.txt files that seems to help partially.

I have done both. One to stop the crashes which halt gpu processing completely and the other to make the GUI a little more pleasant when I am forcing the GPU to run. As I understand it the mb_cmdline*.txt also decreases the number of video card crashes. But it didn't completely stop them even with very large numbers (150).

See the OpenCL doc/txt file for what the details are.

If you are running an A-10 with an external ATI video card then this may not apply.
If you are running an A-10 with an external GTX video card then I am baffled.

Tom

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A proud member of the OFA (Old Farts Association).

Several different SETI users have noticed that Windows8 becomes un-responsive or re-boots because of video driver crashes.

There are 2 registry fixes for that. One extends the time delay before Windows8 gets panicky (which didn't always work for me). The other disables the ability of Windows to even notice that the video driver is staying too busy, too long. Search for Windows8 to find some references. Yes, unless you tell the GPU to suspend when you are using the PC the GUI will be jerky.

If you are running Radeon based video cards you can also set a parameter in the mb_cmdline*.txt files that seems to help partially.

I have done both. One to stop the crashes which halt gpu processing completely and the other to make the GUI a little more pleasant when I am forcing the GPU to run. As I understand it the mb_cmdline*.txt also decreases the number of video card crashes. But it didn't completely stop them even with very large numbers (150).

See the OpenCL doc/txt file for what the details are.

If you are running an A-10 with an external ATI video card then this may not apply.
If you are running an A-10 with an external GTX video card then I am baffled.

Tom

There have been some issues with Windows thinking the video driver has crashed. Modifying the Windows Timeout Detection & Recovery settings seems to be helpful.
Here is the whole MS write up on the options for the video Timeout Detection & Recovery.
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/hardware/ff569918%28v=vs.85%29.aspx
I set TdrLevel to 0. Because I would rather the driver crash, locking up the system, rather than Windows thinking it has crashed and restart the driver 15 times.
I don't recall any of my system actually crashing the video driver since disabling this.

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SETI@home classic workunits: 93,865 CPU time: 863,447 hours
Join the [url=http://tinyurl.com/8y46zvu]BP6/VP6 User Group[

My ATLAS@home units were getting slower and slower. I shut down the PC, restarted it, cleaned the Virtual Box environment of failed virtual machines and restarted it. The use of Virtual Box may create problems, especially on Windows PC. It is not advisable to install its latest version, 4.3.14.
Tullio

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My ATLAS@home units were getting slower and slower. I shut down the PC, restarted it, cleaned the Virtual Box environment of failed virtual machines and restarted it. The use of Virtual Box may create problems, especially on Windows PC. It is not advisable to install its latest version, 4.3.14.
Tullio

I had to roll back to VB 4.3.12 on a server at work because VB 4.3.14 was not even running well enough to let me start my VMs. I think they are still providing 4.2 with the BOINC client.

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SETI@home classic workunits: 93,865 CPU time: 863,447 hours
Join the [url=http://tinyurl.com/8y46zvu]BP6/VP6 User Group[

I had to roll back to VB 4.3.12 on a server at work because VB 4.3.14 was not even running well enough to let me start my VMs. I think they are still providing 4.2 with the BOINC client.

Yes, that is the version I am using now on the Windows PC, while my 2 Linux boxes use 4.3.12. I just had a warning that a CPU was reaching 100% usage, but memory, disk read and disk write are normal. The PC is running 3 Virtual Machines while a fourth is waiting.
Tullio

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There have been some issues with Windows thinking the video driver has crashed. Modifying the Windows Timeout Detection & Recovery settings seems to be helpful.
Here is the whole MS write up on the options for the video Timeout Detection & Recovery.
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/hardware/ff569918%28v=vs.85%29.aspx
I set TdrLevel to 0. Because I would rather the driver crash, locking up the system, rather than Windows thinking it has crashed and restart the driver 15 times.
I don't recall any of my system actually crashing the video driver since disabling this.

Since I have set it to disable the time out detection I also have not had Windows8 crash either. When I simply extended the wait time to 8 seconds from the default 2 seconds within the day Windows8 re-booted after too many crash/restarts within the specified limit (another registry setting).

No problems (yet).

Tom

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A proud member of the OFA (Old Farts Association).