[Gothic Gerbil]

I am having some severe problems with my computer and my wacom tablet. I'm hoping someone here can help at all? I'm trying to identify exactly where the problem is coming from so that I can at least know who to call for technical support. What I have is a Wacom Intuous and a Dell OptiPlex GX1 (p3-450 196 megs ram with an onboard rage pro turbo). I have updated all the drivers for everything. What happens is that when I'm running photoshop 5.02 (no money for 5.5) or painter classic, I'll usually end up locking hard soon when using the airbrush or paintbrush. But it isn't exclusive to that because I locked once when going to save. (Isn't that the best luck) I hear a pretty loud click from my computer when this happens, and everything stops moving on the screen. Have to hit the reset button. I would guess that something is maybe overheating in there from the intensiveness? I am going to dust it tomorrow thoroughly and put it all back together, but it still shouldn't be having airflow problems I would think. Any help or insights would help and be much appreciated. I might actually finish something then! I do think it might be memory related because it seems to happen when I use large sizes. Nearly 3000x3000 with a couple of small pics open, but nothing else loaded.

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-- Jeff Land
http://www2.andrews.edu/~landj/
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[balistic]

Yeah, make sure all your CPU/case/power supply fans are blowing and unobstructed, and also, try running scandisk on your hard drive. That clicking sound might be a disk malfunction.

If scandisk finds bad sectors, back up your important data immediately (onto CDR, zip, another hard disk, whatever) . . . once bad sectors start cropping up, your chance of catastrophic disk failure increases. If it /is/ the hard drive, I would imagine Dell would send you a new one.

I doubt it would be a virus, but if all else fails, you might check for that,

Mind you, this is just my guess without actually being there.



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Brian "balistic" Prince
3D Artist
Eggington Productions

[Gothic Gerbil]

Well I figured out the clicking noise. It was the modem immediately going offline right when that happens, every time. All the fans are working, and I'll run scandisk when I'm off to bed. Updating my viruses list and a new scan wouldn't hurt though either at that. Thanks for the help! Sigh, I guess this means that I'll have to draw on real paper tonight. *cringes*

And by the way a virus scan turned up nothing, and just out of curiosity I tried playing around with just the mouse and came up with the same problem, though only if I dropped the translucency of the brush to 32% from 100% (random number) So a new video card might be in order I think? Never liked ATI.

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-- Jeff Land
http://www2.andrews.edu/~landj/
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[This message has been edited by Gothic Gerbil (edited August 10, 2000).]

[chrisk82]

I remember reading recently in an overclocking tutorial that some settings in the BIOS may cause freezing - or locking up. I think it was an article on the GeForce 2 MX board, but I'll bet something similiar may work for you if you have time to find it and tweak your BIOS settings.

I use to lock up all the time on an old rendition board, so I bought a Riva TNT - which didn't help much. And then I ran ScanDisk a few times and my hard drive was on its way to complete failure with bad sectors. DON'T EVER BUY A WESTERN DIGITAL HARD DRIVE!!! They are the worst. So, when I bought my Maxtor drive most of my problems went straight down the tiolet.

But call dell, they have good customer support.

[Gothic Gerbil]

Well I fixed my problem, thanks for all the suggestions people. What was causing the lock-up problems were the 5.0.4 pentium 3 tweaked files they have on the adobe site for 5.02. I won't miss them, never really noticed any performance increase there. Hope you liked your TNT chrisk82, I know mine has held steady in my other machine for quake 3. As for that Maxtor drive, ehhhh, I wouldn't highly recommend them at all. Everyone I know including myself who's gotten a Maxtor has had them die after about 2 years, no more. But this isn't the place for this, sorry for disrupting all the artwork! And thanks for the help again!

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-- Jeff Land
http://www2.andrews.edu/~landj/
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