Tuesday, January 27, 2015

Technological Computer Hell

As some may know, I have a fairly powerful second computer that I purchased back in November so I could create higher quality content, ideally in an even shorter time frame. . . it has not gone as such. Below you will see my error report that I sent into Asus this morning, which explains some of the wonderful issues I have been getting over the last few months, and have been trying to solve on my own, or with a little help from my father, over said time.

Apply date : 2015/01/27 14:36:19(UTC Time)


[Contact Information]
Name : Joseph ******* (EctoSage)
Email Address : ********@*****.com
Phone Number : ***-***-****
City : **** *********
Country : United States

[Product Information]
Product Type : Motherboard
Product Model : X99-DELUXE
Product S/N : ************
Place of Purchase : Amazon.com
Date of Purchase : 2014/11/17

[Motherboard Specification]
Motherboard Revision : What the hell is this? Your "How to find Motherboard Revision?" button just opens a blank Asus page.
Motherboard BIOS Revision : Version 1103

[VGA Card Specification]
VGA Card Vendor : EVGA
VGA Card Model : 04G-2982-KR GeForce GTX 980 Super Clocked
VGA Card Chipset : ???
VGA Card Driver : Version 347.25

[CPU Specification]
CPU Vendor : Intel
CPU Type : Intel Core i7-5960X Haswell-E 8-Core 2011-v3
CPU Speed : 3.0GHz

[Memory Specification]
Memory Vendor : G.Skill
Memory Model : Memory Model F4-3200C16Q-16GRKD
Memory Capacity : 16GB (4 x 4GB)

[HDD Specification]
HDD Vendor : Samsung
HDD Model : 840 EVO (MZ-7TE500BW)
HDD Capacity : 500GB

[Add-on Card Specificatio]
Operating System : Windows 7 64bit 

[Problem Description]
BSOD, BCCode: 1000007e
Link to Twitter picture of BSOD recover message: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/B8UbHbxCQAAHC79.jpg:large

Nvidia Kernel has stopped working & recovered. Link to Error message: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/B8JtIekCMAID2kW.jpg:large

This happens when playing Warframe, and have had it happen at least once when playing another high system usage game.

Almost more annoying, is an issue I have had for- ages. Upon starting the system from a completely powered down state, and if it has been in this state for at least 30 minutes the computer will freeze at "Starting Windows" - forcing me to push the power button to restart it. I will have to restart 2-5 times before it finally doesn't freeze, even though it will still have a half a second hickup where the spinning orbs that form the windows Icon freeze for said half a second before continuing. (They usually just freeze, or don't show up at all, leaving the Starting Windows message sitting on screen all alone.)

I also cannot boot from the Windows Install disk any more, if I attempt to do so, it freezes at the "Starting Windows" screen for that. The error code for these freezes on the mother board is AE.

System tests, diagnostics, fix attempts. In order as best I can remember them.

-Windows Memtest, no errors
-Checked all power/SATA connections, at least twice.
-Re-installed Windows, was able to get it to boot from the windows install disk & re-installed windows. Problems obviously returned.
-Updated Bios to v1103- will update to v1203 after I am done sending this. (Had been updating before & after the RMA of the video Card, neither that nor the video card replacement made much difference.)
-Fiddled with the Bios, turned off legacy systems because the computer wouldn't boot at all with them on. 90% failure rate at windows loading, or it would just sit with a blinking _ at the top left of the screen. This was done not just here, but bit by bit throughout all of our testing/troubleshooting of the system.
-Startup Repair, "Startup Repair cannot repair this computer automatically" "Problem Event Name: StartupRepairOffline" . . . incredibly confused at all of this. "Problem Signature 01: 6.1.7600.16385"
-System Restore, no changes, two successful restarts just to see if my issues were gone, third one once again failed to get past "Starting Windows"
-Checked PSU output in BIOS to see if it was fluctuating, it was not, very stable, at correct power output. PSU is "EVGA SuperNOVA 1000G2 1000W ATX12V/EPS12V 80Plus Gold Power Supply 120-G2-1000-XR" btw.
-RMAed & replaced video card.
-Downloaded as many of the correct drivers I could find from, The Intel Website, Asus Support Website, and even installed drives off of the Asus Install Disk that the computer had come with, that I had already done before, but more selectively. (This time I just told it to install "recommended")
-Disabled non-windows startup programs to try to prevent BSOD, didn't fix BSOD, didn't fix Startup issue. (Had to turn a few on obviously to be able to run Warframe, Adobe CC programs.)
-Windows Performance rating test failed, found a hotfix to fix this- issue was something to do with Intel Chipset having a high buffer, or whatever you call it, my mind is mush, too much stress from all of this over the last months.
-Virus Scans, not that such a thing should be needed, when the only things I had done on this computer the first time these issues appeared was install Google chrome, steam, & start installing Adobe CC programs. After the clean install, the problems came back before I installed anything if I'm remembering correctly, as I wanted to rule out as much as I could.
-MemTest86, no errors, passed.

At this point, I think it goes without saying that I have tried Googling Error codes to no avail, and done anything I could do when I did find someone with a slightly similar problem. I still don't know if the BSOD is mainly just a Warframe issue, but I do know that the startup issues, and the fact that it doesn't want to boot into a startup disk so I can run Windows Repair is incredibly disconcerting. Now that I'm done with this, I'm thinking of sending it to Intel Support as well, but not sure. I'm for sure going to update the bios again, then probably go check to see if there are any Hard Drive specific drivers that possibly did not download automatically, even though I'm not getting any errors that I can see, I still feel like double checking this, even though it seems like it shouldn't be an issue. After that, well.. I guess I will try to get some work done, and hope that if I find myself in need of a system restart, or taking a break, playing a game, my computer doesn't decide to lock me in a wonderful "Start Windows" loop.

Since sending this to them, I have installed the new bios update, found it unhelpful, even though I did get into the StartUp Repair on the install disc once, but because I had yet to have tried just booting at that point, I closed it out, went to bios, booted from there into my OS, all went well. Attempted to restart, changed fans in bios, suddenly same issue. Reset bios to what it was before I tweaked the fans, issue persisted, meaning it was a fluke that I was able to boot/run the StartUp Repair tools on the disk at all.

Disabled all legacy systems in the Bios, as everything in the bios had been reset when I flashed/updated the bios, unfortunately disabling all of the legacy stuffs seems to have caused the computer to just black screen with a few white lines... and a bit of static before that. Since then I have re-flashed/re-updated the bios in an attempt to reset it, and that's where I am now.... Writing error messages on here- because I can't send them to Intel because there "Service Request" page won't actually submit my form when I click "Submit" . . . been poking at that for a good 30+ minutes.

Anyhow, that's that, going to send a link to this page to Intel's Twitter, since it looks like Twitter is the only way to actually get a hold of any of these bloody companies now & days. I have little hope for any solutions any more... and frankly am just about ready to roll over & puke my brains out from depression that has been rekindled by this mess. Yesterday my computer might have blue screened, and refused to restart one or two times, but at least it usually started on the third attempt.... This is what I get for trying to fix things. . . even more issues.

Edit: 1/18/2015
Last night after some folks at Microsoft Windows ran a registry fixer, and cleaned up some of my systems, Intel got back to me. They linked me here, to a program which checks your processor for faults, and I can report, my CPU is not the problem with my system, everything that was supported by the CPU passed, so back to Microsoft Windows Support to see if they have anything else they can do to fix this issue. They were pretty sure yesterday that they would be able to sort it out, and the registry fixer didn't fix it apparently, even though the computer restarted once without trouble, after that it's failed 4/5 times. Either freezing on "Starting Windows" or even once with just a _ blinking in the top left corner. Microsoft Windows Support is supposed to call me around 10:00 AM EST today, so waiting for their call now.