System Restore got disabled? Hope it is not a pesky trojan/virus/worm/cryptolocker.
It can also be due to your wonky HDD…
I didn’t put it in, but I only had System Restore active for the boot partition and the program partition and skipped the data partitions. I set it up that way to get a little bit of a performance boost of not having the swap file on the same partition as where the programs were installed. I think I was trying to extend the lifespan of the SSD that has the boot partition. I’m not going to bother with splitting it up next time.
As to whether any malware got in and that’s what disabled System Restore on the boot and program partitions, if it did, it’s been laying low for about 2 or 3 years now. No wonkiness I can detect other than the typical Windows weirdness. Nothing in Task Manager I can’t identify, etc.
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Happened again about a half hour ago, and this time, when I did a reboot, the BIOS started chirping about the CPU temperature being too high, around 74° C. After letting it cool down a bit and rebooting into the BIOS setup area, I was able to watch the CPU temperature slowly climb a degree every 10 seconds or so.
Shut down again, let it cool off longer and it’s perfectly fine again. Currently running at 31° C. Since this is the second processor for this motherboard for the same kind of problem, it has to be something in the motherboard itself. I’ll replace it someday and do the OS reinstall at that time since I’ll probably have to call Microsoft anyway to get authorization due to too many components being changed at the same time.
See now, right when I’m feeling my most disappointed in Apple, when they do something grotesque like killing the Airport base stations, when they refuse to admit to flaws in their ridiculous keyboard designs, it’s little things like that which remind my why I’m so damn happy to keep using macOS.
I really don’t mean that in a smug way I assure you (we have a Windows PC for gaming on, trust me I know how infuriating it really is) it just always throws into sharp relief how utterly shitty Microsoft’s attitude to basic end-user software still is. Change some hardware on your computer? Quick, re-license! Oh, you had the OEM license which included a section about no user-servicable parts? Better buy a new license!
See Redmond, this is why you’ll never win over Unix, whatever flavour it may be. Anyway I digress; I agree with your prognosis, two different chips failing the same way is suspicious. If you fancy a break from x86, there’s fancy new things going on in the world of Power9 that legitimately had me wishing Apple would surprise us all with a PowerMac G9 this WWDC…
Microsoft’s licensing seems much less annoying to me than Cisco’s, but then again I deal with Cisco’s a lot right now. On the IOS-XE devices licensing is divided into 9-ish packages that enable various features, and the right combo is needed to do a lot of things that make the expensive router worth it. If there’s an issue there’s a self-service portal to rehome licenses but it’s well under 20% for actually being usable when I need it, so I make a Field Engineer wait on-site until it’s fixed. Cisco’s paying the FE anyway, so it’s their loss. And my time, patience, and sanity.
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We go through quite a few hardware re-license stuff due to always upgrading one thing or another. Honestly, expect for when they first rolled it out it’s been fine. I call the automated line and re-set it. Takes like 2 minutes now and I never speak to a person (Always a bonus). And I say this knowing that I’m probably jinxing myself. I’m swapping/upgrading the motherboard in the media server next weekend.
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We used to have to do this more frequently with one set of PCs that has now been retired. Similar experience to @Darktan - it wasn’t too bad, just tedious typing in the long string of numbers.
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After talking with an employee at a store I usually get my parts at, they made me aware that the newest motherboards such as the ones with AMD’s Socket AM4 aren’t going to offer good support for Windows 7 in the future. I need to look into this more, but my goal would be just replace the motherboard and CPU so I can re-use the RAM, OS and video card.
It’s early, I’m tired. Totally read that as “After talking with an employee at a store I usually get my pants at…”
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New wrinkle is that one of my hard drives has twice disappeared, but will come back with a reboot, so it’s either the drive or the SATA controller on the motherboard. So, now this becomes an issue to resolve a bit faster.
Here’s the info about that other issue. It’s Microsoft themselves that is doing CPU detection and disallowing Win 7 to run on newer CPUs. From what I can see, the AMD Ryzen processor initially supported Win 7, but the current official stance from AMD is no. To get it to work, you have to install an unofficial patch to unlock the CPU from last year and hope Microsoft hasn’t locked it down again, and there’s problems with USB support during the install. One person is recommending hooking up PS/2 keyboard until you get the correct drivers installed.
Probably the better bet is to find a certified refurbished AM3+ motherboard and a new processor so I can keep as much of this Win 7 setup as I can. In the meantime, I can swap out the drive and eliminate that as a source of the disappearing act.
I’m starting to feel like Apple is being the less restrictive OS developer here. And they don’t support their OS on anything but their own hardware. OTOH, they don’t really try to block it, so it’s usually easy to just edit a list to add a lot of newer graphics cards in.
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Hasn’t that been the case for a while now? I mean yes, you technically can only run it on their hardware (and let’s face it, who wants to use macOS with any trackpad not made by Apple), but it’s not laden with phone home schemes and licensing shenanigans that require you “reactivate” your OS when you make significant changes to the hardware. Even when they were selling macOS, buying one copy covered all of your “personal” Macs (especially once they moved to the App Store for sale/distribution) and you could get a family pack for much less than 5*(Single License cost), unlike Windows.
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True enough… But it always seemed like running Windows on anything x86 was a thing, and Microsoft would nominally support it. If anything, a reaction to the Linux community trying to get it to boot on anything with a half-dozen transistors.
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We’ve made a number of Hackintoshes over the years, and if anything it’s been getting easier with every version of the OS to make it work on hardware outside The Apple Bubble. I do agree though, for laptop systems at least, that there are very, very few laptops with trackpads as nice as Apple’s.
Apple’s method of licensing is the same as the macOS method of operation: be quiet and get out of the way. I think the whole paradigm difference between macOS and Windows from a user perspective can be summarised like so: on your Mac, you get a system notification telling you about an update. You click it, it’s gone, and the correct software launches to perform the update. On Windows, you get a notification. You dismiss it. You open Notifications, and dismiss it from there. You then have to remember whether the Update app lives in the Old Control Panel or the Metro Control Panel (seriously, why for the love of binary Jesus are there two control panels for one system?). Then you install the update. Then you dismiss the notification that tells you you updated. Then you open Notifications, and dismiss the same message again.
Apple’s licensing method is similar. You have a copy of macOS. You can use it on all your Macs. If you’re feeling clever, you can put it on a PC too. No numbers to type in, no validation to sit through, no calling an Indian call centre and being yelled at for voiding warranty by installing Windows on a Chromebook, no changing the processor in your tower and being forced to beg one of the richest companies in the world for permission to keep using something you already paid for.
This isn’t to say macOS is better than Windows. In many respects it is, whilst in many other it isn’t. What we can all agree upon though is that from the end-user perspective, Apple is most certainly better than Microsoft.
This problem resurfaced last week. My best guess at this point is it’s something graphics-related inside the CPU itself. Watching videos with Firefox is where I noticed the temperature climbing in the past so I’ve used Chrome or Vivaldi if possible.
When the shutdown happened last week, it was instant again, without the temperature monitor program having time to react and I wasn’t watching a video. After letting it cool down, I played Serious Sam: The Second Encounter for about an hour and although the CPU temperature was above the threshold I set during this time, the computer never shut down.
I still don’t know exactly what triggers a spike so fast that it can climb from 65 degrees C (the point the monitor puts up an alert if it gets the chance) to where the motherboard cuts power. At least 20 degrees within 2 seconds. But at this point, my only viable option would be to do a clean reinstall of Win7. After Microsoft started locking out newer processors, replacing the motherboard would mean trying to find a refurbished board. That’s more money than it’s worth to fix the problem.
That is a weird issue. Fwiw Serious Sam is playable on Win10.
I might have a lead on the real cause of this problem. About a week ago, I made a comment about how my motherboard was displaying a low and varying speed for a fan that wasn’t plugged in. It was. It’s the intake fan mounted in between the front grill and the cage for the hard drive.
I had a hard drive unmount a couple of times and come back online and then it stayed offline. When I took out the hard drive cage and saw the fan, I noticed the dust filter was contacting the fan. The filter’s probably been dusty for the entire three years since I first posted this. Not sure how well the fan’s been running during this time before the filter contacted it, but right now, it doesn’t turn well if I move the blades by hand. It’s worn out.
Maybe the power supply was shutting down as a protection feature, such as too much current being drawn by the fan. This wouldn’t explain why previous symptoms seemed to be temperature related and it doesn’t explain why it could go weeks or months between instances. But it does make more sense than CPU temperature spiking so fast it can’t be measured.
Just need to finish up cloning the drives onto new hard drives and then I can put this back together.
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Me, back in December:
I am not looking at a motherboard failure. The spare power supply will suddenly make it come back to life on the tenth time of trying. It is something simple like the power button broke when I took the front cover off so it’s not receiving the signal to turn on, even though I can hear the switch mechanically working.
I set it aside because the Linux computer has been working well, but decided to dig into it this weekend. It’s toast. I stripped it down to just the motherboard and that won’t boot. CPU fan doesn’t turn, with either of the PSUs I have on hand.
I think I didn’t want to accept it could be the motherboard because this is the first one that’s failed in about 25 years. Other failures have been hard drives or the video card where the fan stopped working. I’ve still got a couple of really old computers that are durable and working.
Another part of resisting accepting it is because the time had run out on support for Windows 7. A used motherboard and CPU would get it back up and running, but if it triggers the “you changed too much so you have to call us to get authorization”, I’m stuck. I’d prefer new items for both anyway and Microsoft ruled that out by patching Windows 7 so it won’t run on new motherboard architectures.
So, maybe all of the power-down problems I was having were symptomatic of a motherboard hinting it was going to die. It just took three years to do it.
I can’t justify spending money to build a new computer now. I guess I better see if WINE can run the Windows stuff I want and need.