PixInsight Crashing

mbeeksma

New member
Hey Guys,

Im just after some help if possible?
I brought a brand new Laptop about three weeks ago and my issue is that Pixinsight will randomly lock up and crash, i have had it happen using Photometric Colour Calibration, Deconvolution and a few times just out of know where.
I had my old Laptop for 3 years running PixInsight with no issues, so im confused as to why it is doing it on this computer when the hardware is so much better.
My new Laptop is a:
Dell Inspiron
AMD Ryzen™ 7 5700U 8-core/16-thread Mobile Processor with Radeon™ Graphics
AMD Radeon™ Graphics with shared graphics memory
512GB M.2 PCIe NVMe Solid State Drive
16GB, 2x8GB, DDR4, 3200MHz Memory

Im running the latest version of PixInsight 1.8.8-9 Ripley.

Any help is greatly appreciated.

Mark.
 
Hi Mark,

This cannot be reproduced on any platform and has not been reported before. This is a machine-specific issue. I suggest a thorough memory test to check if you have a defective memory module. Besides this, 16 GB of RAM is under minimum recommended requirements.

We would need a crash report or a more detailed description of the problem. What do you mean by crash and lock up exactly?
 
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okay, is there a specific program to do a memory test?

That's the thing I ran 16GB on my old laptop and no issues?

It will just freeze and stay like that or Pixinsight will just shut down automatically
 
there is soemthing called memtest86 out there - there is a free version. what you do is load it on to a USB stick and then boot your machine from the stick, and there's a whole menu there to carry out memory tests. the reason for doing this is that you can't really test the memory that the operating system is using, so you want to boot this very lightweight dos-based program so that more memory is available to test.

rob
 
Hi Rob,

Okay no problems will give it a go.
How would I find the crash report from when Pixinsight crashed?

Mark
 
i dont know about the windows crash files - i don't use windows enough to know how to find that stuff. i vaguely recall that there is a program called event viewer that can be used to see different application crashes but don't take that to the bank!

rob
 
The Windows dump crash reports can be found here, where <user> is your actual username:

C:\Users\<user>\AppData\Local\CrashDumps

You will see files like PixInsight.exe.XXXX.dmp which you can upload here to share, or view using the WinDbg tool.

And you can also use EventViewer to view system logs and get an overview of why PI crashed, but WinDbg give a much more detailed view of what happened.
 
note though that if you have a bad memory chip the crash info won’t mean too much. i recently had one go bad on my mac and all sorts of stuff was crashing left and right without rhyme or reason. the memory module was really bad though and had many faults all over the place. it’s usually more subtle than that.
 
note though that if you have a bad memory chip the crash info won’t mean too much. i recently had one go bad on my mac and all sorts of stuff was crashing left and right without rhyme or reason. the memory module was really bad though and had many faults all over the place. it’s usually more subtle than that.
The Windows dump crash reports can be found here, where <user> is your actual username:

C:\Users\<user>\AppData\Local\CrashDumps

You will see files like PixInsight.exe.XXXX.dmp which you can upload here to share, or view using the WinDbg tool.

And you can also use EventViewer to view system logs and get an overview of why PI crashed, but WinDbg give a much more detailed view of what happened.

Sorry for the late reply.
I went to that address to find the crash dumps file but says it can not be found? I have attached a screen shot of where it takes me.

I might have to return the laptop instead of running memtest86 as It might void warranty?
 

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running memtest86 would not void the warranty. it's just another piece of software and all it does is write various patterns to memory and read them back to check that was read back is the same as what was written. it can't do anything to harm the hardware.

rob
 
> I went to that address to find the crash dumps file but says it can not be found?

It's possible it's not creating a crash dump. How is it crashing out? PI just exits or you get some error messages?

Also, have you tried going back to the previous 1.8.8-8 release to see if you still have the same problem? I have been experiencing a crash in WBP2 on 1.8.8-9 that does not occur on 1.8.8-8.
 
> Can you report it?

It was in this thread here:

 
Sorry, I didn't identify you. Well, as I explained on that thread we cannot reproduce the problem you are reporting, which has not been reported by other users AFAIK. We need to reproduce a nontrivial problem in order to be able to understand and fix it.
 
Mark,

Please keep us updated. A fellow club member is looking to possibly purchase this same laptop and need to know if it is not suitable for PixInsight.

Thanks,
Dave
 
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