Ready to race

[Romus]

Yesterday I spent a few hours to install the cockpit and today I took the first full lap in Aston for ages. There is some instability with the PC, have gotten two blue screens, but otherwise everything works. My first lap was 3:19 and I saw from Airio stats that your are doing some 3:01 - 3:04 times. It's going to be great to start improving lap by lap and to try to reach your times!

The PC also has some problems to boot. It does not always even go through the BIOS POST. I have 2x1GB of RAM installed. If I take the other RAM off it seems to work better.. The mobo is Asus P5E with E6400 CPU. It's got WinXP installed on it, but I might buy an SSD drive and install Win8 or Win7 instead. I've gotten used to the speed of the SSD drives already so the old style mechanic HDD feels sooo slow..

So see you on track! I might join you tonight or then some day later the week. Mon-Tue I'm travelling, so then it's not possible..

[Lameduck]

Hi Romus, don't be too alarmed if you find few racers on our server tonight, for if everything is OK,  we will be over at our associates web site DMRacing2,  testing their set up.
For the past few weeks they have been plagued with connection problems during their races, causing unacceptable lags and time-outs. The racing there will be restricted Cars:: UFA/XFA: Track:: K-21 Race one:: 8 Laps Race two:: 28 Laps Password:: NEW
Plenty of set-ups available
I hope your PC doesn't give too many problems and we all hope to race with you tonight.

[Jamin]

It does sound like you have a faulty memory module, if the pc is just for LFS and general surfing then xp is fine, even with 1GB :thumb:

Yes, join us tonight on the monkeys server, I think you'll be up to speed quickly

[Romus]

I've had the PC up just idling in Windows for a week now, and no problems. But every time I power it off and then on again it fails to pass the bios post (screen does not turn on, no error beeps, looks like as if the PC was dead). I need to toggle a small bios cmos reset switch on the motherboard to make the PC start properly again. Then the bios will tell me about the CMOS checksum error and I need to press F2 to load bios defaults to continue. That works and the PC starts normally and Windows starts loading. I have bough a new BIOS battery, because I thought the empty battery might be causing this, but the issue remains. Any ideas on what could be causing the problem? Bad mobo? Why does it not keep the factory settings that it works with after I've used the reset switch?

[atomant]

"Why does it not keep the factory settings that it works with after I've used the reset switch?"

This might help.

"Some bios types really hate major changes to the configuration when the OpSys fails to see changes in step with the user settings. This is particularly acute with a loss of the bios timeclock. As a note - when you're resetting the cmos manually by moving a jumper be sure to replace the jumper into the normal run position before rebooting. This is often overlooked "under the gun" of solving issues.

This type of problem does suggest some type of issue with power regulation across a set or subset of board components.. but.. you might want to try this first, in case its just an issue with a corrupt process held with a power state causing the instability.

Since you were trying various settings in the bios:

Remove all power from the system completely first:
1) A/C removed.
2) 24 pin main power supply removed from the board physically.
2a) All 12v rails (video & board) disconnected physically.
3) Bios battery removed
4) Cmos jumper in proper running position.

Next, Disconnect all drive and other attached devices EXCEPT, a CD Rom. Make it the only device the system can see.
NO USB devices, NO LAN, NO any device add ons. If you have other cards in the PCI bus. Remove those too.

Allow this to sit this way for around 15 mins or so to more completely drain all board caps of residual power.

- Replace the cmos battery and wait about a minute.
- Begin with the power connections for the mainboard & video, and only the CD Rom as the single device.

Next have your opsys CD ready to put into the cd-rom.

- Boot the system. Ignore any bios messages but do note them. If no specific errors are generated, then enter the bios and select defaults.
- Set the timeclock ONLY -- Important. Now FORCE a power off by holding the power button until it shuts down.
- Reboot the system and enter the bios. Did it keep the timeclock setting? If so, exit the bios and allow it to boot to the cd rom.
- Insert the opsys CD when prompted. If it runs up on CD and tries to error for missing storage device, then you can/have recovered the board.
- Next power down and add the Boot HD. At worse it says it corrupted. At best it boots cleanly into the opsys.
- Power off and restore the devices one at time, rebooting in between each attached device until complete.

If you see or have issues other than those noted, then I would replace the mainboard. I would see that as sign of a intermittant board problem."

For more related articles see here http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/286558-30-boot-clear-cmos-time-battery


Ant

[Romus]

Thanks Ant. There's a lot of stuff to try out. I read through many of the posts and then tried some stuff, but it did not help. Then now, as I started the computer today, it started normally for the first time (after having been collecting dust for the past ~2 years). I think I'll just leave it on, never turn it off, or just accept that the startup process is a bit awkward. Or ultimately I could buy a new mobo, cpu and some memory. I've understood that LFS uses just one core of the CPU, so i3 + mobo and 2gb of memory for ~250â,¬ would be a simple upgrade path for me. I need this PC for LFS only..

[Romus]

And for your information: I can only use WLAN for now for this PC, so let's see how well it works when I join. Hopefully I'm not causing any problems, but if you think I'm the one causing the trouble please let me know. My connection is ADSL 24Mbit downstream and using the Speedtest.net this sim PC is getting in 14Mbps in average. Ping time seems to be around 60 to 100 for many of the servers..

[atomant]

YW,
 I run at 100 to 110 and have no issues  with LFS. Look forward to seeing you on the track.

Ant