I'm running BOINC 6.6.36 on an oldish PC, with an AMD Athlon XP 2200+ chip on default settings in BIOS. Windows XP Pro installed and updated to SP3. It's got 2GB of RAM and plenty of disk space.

My problem is that it seems to freeze the PC completely and only switching it off and on can rescue it. This doesn't happen predictably but seems to occur after a piece of work has been completed. For example today it finished a piece from start to end and then it froze after reaching 100%. After switching the PC off and on the results were uploaded and the next piece of work in queue was started, a few seconds into this it froze again. Similar events happend yesterday. I've been monitoring the CPU temp and voltages and the CPU happily gets up to 59C or 60C and rises no further and can run at this temp for hours with no problem. The CPU voltages are stable too.

Any ideas what the problem may be?

Also yesterday after the last time it froze when I restarted BOINC all the projects had been detached without me doing anything. This has not happened today though. Could this be related?

The two projects I am running are SETI@Home and Prime Grid. I was running the SHA1 project until I noticed it was not getting work and went to web site and saw it had been stopped in May 2009

Many thanks in advance..
Ian

I suppose it's this computer at SETI.

That host shows indeed two task as "Client detached", but also two others "Aborted by user" and no running tasks.

As this is an AMD machine, you could try the optimised applications for SETI. They don't seem to freeze so much with AMD. See the Number crunching forum at SETI.

Gruß,
Gundolf

---

Computer sind nicht alles im Leben. (Kleiner Scherz)

Where do I find this optomised for AMD version? I run SETI and PrimeGrid will it work for both?

What's the Number crunching forum?

Thanks..
Ian

Where do I find this optomised for AMD version? I run SETI and PrimeGrid will it work for both?

What's the Number crunching forum?

Thanks..
Ian

Here is Seti@home's number crunching forum:

Message boards : Number crunching

The optimised applications available here are for Seti only.

Claggy

Hmm, well I can rule out the SETI client. I was running just a PrimeGrid task after installing an optomised SETI application, and it froze again.

So what I want to try to work out is my PC ok and the problem is with BOINC

OR

is there a hardware problem with my PC?

I've run memtest and had no problems. I get varying results with Prime95. The pure CPU test runs fine for as long as I leave it. BUT trying the other tests causes problems at different stages.

Does anyone have any opinions or ideas?

Thanks..
Ian

I had a very similar problem with an AMD FX-60. It used to freeze running boinc and would always fail the Prime95 torture test.

Turns out in the end it was a voltage issue. Used RMClock to boost the voltage by 0.05 and its never frozen since.

Hope that helps
Rob

---