Martin,

On Thu, 05 Aug 2004 19:37:25 +0000, Martin 53N 1W wrote:

Randall Schulz wrote:
...

Also, do you still have the problem for a different WU?

Yes, the problem crops up every now and then. Often over night, just so I
can't notice it right a way and restart the client, of course.

...

[...]

Memtest86 and prime95 (torture mode) reveal no problems, so far. I'll
allow prime95 to run its torture test for the rest of the day to get a
better idea of the system's reliability.

See what you get. Other things to check are the HDD and any other
peripherals that you have connected that might cause some 'glitch'.

For what it's worth, the disk is only about a month old, too (it's been a
very bad few weeks for hardware, hereabouts).

I think the very repeatable pattern of it always stopping at the 70% mark
(when it does exhibit the stalling symptom) in itself refutes any "glitch"
hypothesis.

[...]

Computers should be _completely_ _reliable_, and consistent and
repeatable for their results.

Yes. Yes they should. In principle, they implement the essence of pure
mechanism (a.k.a. algorithm). But, they are not. There are just too many
moving parts (electrons and holes, that is...)

It's all a game of probabilities at that level. It's just that the
probabilities are so heavily weighted that if you are working within spec,
the world will suffer a heat death and the machine be long obsolete before
suffering 'an unexpected' result. However, cosmic ray hits might flip a
bit in your machine once every few years or sooner. ECC is a good idea for
multi-GByte RAMs!

Nonsense. They're just like insurance: A scam!

Good luck for tracing the problem,

Thanks. But I'll probably never know for sure what it is.

Regards,
Martin

RRS