The blue "Max Button" is causing BSODS, practically every time I press it!! WHY!?
If this is in the wrong section, sorry, I wasn't sure whether to go with 'General Discussion' or 'Technical Talk', since it is VERY 'technical talk' LOL, but it doesn't really have anything to do with modelling, which makes it a more 'general' topic. So anyway...
Over the last 3-4 days, I've been brought to my *%£$&"£% wits end because of Max causing my PC to BSOD. What is so annoying, and also worrying, is that my PC pretty much never bluescreens, even though I've had it years now. A lot of hardware I buy seems to die within a couple years ($£%^*% PC hardware!...), but I've never really had any BSOD aneurysm's with this particular rig over the 5 or so years I've had it.
I've managed to narrow it down to a problem with the program itself. Im thinking it can't be a hardware failure, since Max 2011 (or ONE button WITHIN Max) is the ONLY thing that causes the BSOD. I can replicate the problem at the flick of a finger, so atleast I know exactly whats triggering it, and it seems to be a 50/50 chance of it causing the BSOD. The only thing I DONT know, is why... "WTF is happening to Max!?" This is AFAIR the only serious problem I've ever had with Max (and I've had it for nearly 2 years). Everything else till now has just been minor faults or me doing things wrong and interpreting it as an error in the program lol.
A lot of people say that BSOD's are mainly caused by faulty RAM and memory leaks, or HDD failures, but if this was the case for me, then I doubt hovering over the "Max Button" would be the only way of replicating the problem. If it was a memory leak, then I would expect to be bluescreening regurlaly, especially when using performance hogging programs like games, music production programs, Photoshop, After-Effects ETC, but its JUST Max.
One time when it BSOD'ed on me, the project I had spent hours building just basically got sent to hell, and I can never open it again (Thanks PC's... Thanks). Every other time though, I was lucky the files open at the time haven't been corrupted.
Heres as much information as I know how to give on the BSOD:-
Anyone who can help me out here will be showered with INSANE amounts of gratitude, because I dont want to have to stop 3D modelling just because of some random, out of the blue BULLcrap like this...
Thanks in advance, hope theres someone a lot brighter than me and willing to spend a few minutes helping a fellow modeller out!!!
For now I'm just gonna have to stop 3D modelling completely, but its infuriating because this is one of my FAVOURITE hobbies.
Over the last 3-4 days, I've been brought to my *%£$&"£% wits end because of Max causing my PC to BSOD. What is so annoying, and also worrying, is that my PC pretty much never bluescreens, even though I've had it years now. A lot of hardware I buy seems to die within a couple years ($£%^*% PC hardware!...), but I've never really had any BSOD aneurysm's with this particular rig over the 5 or so years I've had it.
I've managed to narrow it down to a problem with the program itself. Im thinking it can't be a hardware failure, since Max 2011 (or ONE button WITHIN Max) is the ONLY thing that causes the BSOD. I can replicate the problem at the flick of a finger, so atleast I know exactly whats triggering it, and it seems to be a 50/50 chance of it causing the BSOD. The only thing I DONT know, is why... "WTF is happening to Max!?" This is AFAIR the only serious problem I've ever had with Max (and I've had it for nearly 2 years). Everything else till now has just been minor faults or me doing things wrong and interpreting it as an error in the program lol.
A lot of people say that BSOD's are mainly caused by faulty RAM and memory leaks, or HDD failures, but if this was the case for me, then I doubt hovering over the "Max Button" would be the only way of replicating the problem. If it was a memory leak, then I would expect to be bluescreening regurlaly, especially when using performance hogging programs like games, music production programs, Photoshop, After-Effects ETC, but its JUST Max.
One time when it BSOD'ed on me, the project I had spent hours building just basically got sent to hell, and I can never open it again (Thanks PC's... Thanks). Every other time though, I was lucky the files open at the time haven't been corrupted.
Heres as much information as I know how to give on the BSOD:-
STOP: 0x0000007f (0x00000008, 0xba338d70, 0x00000000, 0x00000000)I've spent a good few hours some days googling these error codes, but nothing it reveals really seems to mean anything. Its all just "it COULD be this", "it COULD be that", "maybe THIS is the cause" or "perhaps its THIS"...
Anyone who can help me out here will be showered with INSANE amounts of gratitude, because I dont want to have to stop 3D modelling just because of some random, out of the blue BULLcrap like this...
Thanks in advance, hope theres someone a lot brighter than me and willing to spend a few minutes helping a fellow modeller out!!!
For now I'm just gonna have to stop 3D modelling completely, but its infuriating because this is one of my FAVOURITE hobbies.
PC Specs:- -WinXP Pro SP4 -3.0GHz Dual Core CPU -HD4870 1gb model -3gb of RAM (should be 4, but thanks to 32bit I can only have 3. Seriously, WTF?) -3 SATA II HDD's of various sizes between 20gb and 1tb
Replies
Is any part in your system overclocked? Overclocking causes all sorts of nonsense as the hardware isn't designed to clock that high. I've seen reports of basic instructions like xor x, x (should always return zero as it flips all high bits in x) failing with as little as a 250mHz overclock on a P4.
I'm going to start taking out the guts of the PC either later tonight or tomorrow. I'll take out a RAM stick, see if that helps. If not, the only other H/W that COULD be dodgy in a serious way is my GFX card (the fan makes an absolutely horrible sound for about 5 minutes after a cold boot), but the temp never goes any higher than around 80*c, which scarily enough, I've heard is normal for a HD4870, but I still worry when I see the card get that hot.
I'll post back when I've made those checks. If it could be a driver issue, what drivers do you think it might be? I'm not even sure where to begin in that respect...
Thanks!
"3gb of RAM (should be 4, but thanks to 32bit I can only have 3. Seriously, WTF?)"
I am guessing you might not have that large of computer knowledge, so you need to go through the logical steps to find the problem.
First off BSOD are almost always never related to a specific program and usually an issue with hardware or your OS.
A good first step is to boot your OS into safe mode and try to replicate the issue in safe mode, if it still BSOD then that is really bad, if if doesn't then you probably have an OS issue.
If the BSOD happens in safe mode then try to run a memory test which you can get free online. I suggest memtest87+. If it fails then replace your memory, if it passes try the next step anyway.
If max doesn't BSOD in safe mode then reinstalling your OS is probably the easiest way to resolve the issue. Unless you want to search google for how to read crash dumps and track the issue through the registry.
Good luck.
At this point I'm not dismissing any possibilities, but if it was a driver issue, then I dont see how the problem would just pop out of the blue like this when I haven't changed anything (such as updated any drivers), software OR hardware for probably more than a month, yet this problem is no older than a week. Maybe if I'd just updated a driver, or added/swapped some hardware then it might have made more sense. Its just like the PC woke up one day and randomly decided Im not going to be using Max anymore.
BTW is it not true then that a 32bit version of a Win OS is limited to 3gb? As far as I know the only other thing I can do to access the unused 1gb without breaking the bank with a new mobo and OS, is to buy a RAMdisk, and like I said earlier about spending ridiculous amounts of money on hardware that barely lasts 2 years...
Anyway, I'll try all of the suggestions given and see if they yield any positive results. I guess all I can do is hope for the best since I'm not a PC genious, Im just a casual PC user who knows a thing or two.
Edit: Just now I tried replicating the problem in safe mode (standard safe mode), but it seems thats not going to be possible, since Max keeps giving me a "License checkout failed" error. Never seen this error before. I guess its just because safe mode only loads essential services, and since the license service of Max probably isn't regarded by Windows as essential, it simply isn't loaded.
What can I do about this? If I knew the name of the process I was looking for I could just run it using taskman, but as of now, I've hit yet another brick wall.
If so, you can restore the old file menu and never click the icon again.
According to this page: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/137539 the stop error is due to a double fault mostly like caused by faulty (or old) hardware.
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/hardware/ff559244(v=vs.85).aspx
It's a little ahrd to understand if your not familiar with it but basically your system is and I quote
So either some hardware piece on your system is failing or you basically have driver conflicts.
[edit]
Oh and as someone who's worked as a tech in the past THANK YOU for copying out only the relevant part of the blue screen and just the relevant part
Monster/Blanka (lol), THANKS for bringing that feature to my attention! You know, if I was able to use the "file" menu, I may be able to completely avoid the BSOD while using Max, just until I figure out whats really going on, so I dont have to completely stop modelling! Yea sorry I might've been a bit vague on what triggers the error, but these are the exact steps that seem to cause it, still seeming to be on 50/50 chance:-
Clicking the Max button is SOMETIMES okay, but its once I start hovering the mouse around in the menu it brings up. Thats like just ASKING for a BSOD! Its also caused me to permanently lose a project I was working on (luckily it wasn't very good)! I'm gonna try this now, and later run Memtest86+ overnight, let it run about 15-20 passes maybe.
Thanks for the info AngryBeaver! Yea I'm not too computer literate, but I try to understand and take in as much as I can. Damn, I really hope its a driver conflict of some kind, and nothing truly serious with my H/W. I just cant think of ANYTHING thats changed on my computer since before these BSOD's started to happen though. No updates and no new installations have been going on. I updated my GFX card drivers, but it was atleast a week or two before the nightmares began. I dont know if its possible to even say, but do you think its more likely to be a RAM problem or something more serious like HDD failure or even a dying processor? I've got my suspicions that it might be my gfx card, since it gets REEAALLY hot (like 80*C+ while playing games & around 70 while idle), and the fan makes a terrible sound while booting up after being off for a few hours (even though thats APPARENTLY normal!). LOL thanks for the love!
Thanks again to everyone. Im gonna let Memtest86+ do its thing overnight and then see what it has to say.
Edit: Well, I left Memtest running for about 10 hours overnight, thinking that would EASILY let it run atleast 10 passes (which seems to be the suggested minimum), but it had only done 6. Anyway it revealed that the problem probably isn't with my RAM. Not a single error was found in 10 hours.
There's a CD tool I use called HiRens, it's a really nice collection of recover repair and diagnostic tools packaged onto a CD. The diagnostic tools on there might help you narrow it down some more. A windows reinstall would only tell you if it was corrupted software as if the problem still persist it may be that you reinstalled the conflicting driver updates again.
Something weird happened today... I was on UDK for the first time in a little while, and as I was browsing through the content browser, I decided to resize the window so I could see more. Well, now I've just found another "happens every time" BSOD trigger, giving the exact same error code as the "Max Button". So, I cant press the Max Button, and I cant resize the content browser in UDK. This gets stranger by the day...
The only thing I can think of that these two programs have in common, in terms of what triggers the BSOD, is they both have thumbnail previews of 3D models in their menus, but how can that be whats causing it!?
id roll back your graphics drivers and see what happens. a combination of ati,old windows and new software is always going to be a worry in my book...
I still get the BSODS triggered by those extremely specific actions in UDK and Max, but USUALLY if I dont accidentally resize the browser window, or dont even LOOK at the Max button, things tend to go smoothly.
I probably should upgrade to a newer OS, but I've used a lot of Vista at my friends house (I find it PAINFUL to use), and my sister has a Win7 laptop (I just cant get used to it), and I swear, I only use them if I'm being held at gunpoint. I probably said the same thing about XP back in the day, but I just think the newer OS's go too far with snazzy graphics and gimmicky features which hogs too much of the computers resources, and its crazy how Vista (and maybe 7 & 8) apparently requires an extra gig of RAM to do anything (judging by minimum requirements for games & programs.
Hope you eventually find a fix other than anything drastic.