Crashy on Win7

[blave549]

I have had this issue on and off for quite a while. It just happened again, and so I thought I'd mention it. It has probably happened ten or so times over the last few weeks, and this is all with Ripley. I have all updates installed.

The issue is that my Win7 (64 bit) laptop will shut off with no warning when I'm doing "stufff" in PI. I don't mean it reboots, I mean it shuts down with no prior warning or error message. I have analyzed the Win7 system logs, which in most cases will provide some kind of clue as to what caused things to go pear-shaped and cause a system crash, but in these cases there's nothing.

I have never seen this before on my laptop, and it only happens when PI is running. This most recent event happened while I was playing around with the settings in Morph. Transformation.

I have done a Win7 Check Disk, thinking that it might've been a hard error on the drive, but that was about a week ago and I've had at least a couple of these shutdowns since.

I'm not a programmer, nor do I portray one on TV, but I'm wondering if it's some kind of illegal memory access. Or, I suppose it could be some defective memory location(s) on my laptop, but again it has never happened with any other application.

The laptop has 4GB of RAM.

Thanks,

Dave B.

[Juan Conejero]

No similar problems have been reported by other users with version 1.8 on any platform.

A couple of similar issues have been reported long time ago and were due to overheating problems. If I remember well, in both cases the machines involved were laptops. Usually heat management is much more of a problem with laptops than with desktop systems.

Bear in mind that PixInsight does exploit all the resources in your CPU. Other applications maybe not.

[georg.viehoever]

If its heat problems, it might help to reduce the number of threads used by PI. In PI, go to "File/Global Preferences/Parallel Processing and Threads", and reduce the maximum number of threads.

As for the hardware: It sometimes helps to clean the ventilators. For my laptop, I just blew away the dust from the outside by using "canned air" that you should be able to buy in any hardware store (just dont use air from your lungs: too much stuff coming with it...).

Georg

[pfile]

to prove that the problem is heat related, you could download the mersenne prime search program, which will really stress your computer.

http://www.mersenne.org/freesoft/

if your computer dies under this load, then it's probably heat-related.

rob
 

[blave549]

Thanks for all of the replies folks. Overheating had not even occurred to me. I will blow out my laptop's cooling slots; perhaps some airborne dog hair has taken up residence.