Wednesday, June 17, 2009

Crashes lead to use of Chrome

I have uninstalled FireFox from my computer for a while. My laptop has been crashing with erratic and random errors. According to the response from Microsoft when I submit the error report, it is a device driver problem. So, I contacted DELL who had me run all thier diagnostics from the utility portion of the hard drive. That diagnostic came back clean, so they say it is a software problem and recommend reinstalling the OS and all apps.

I do not want to reinstall the OS and all my apps becuase of a) the time it takes and b) the cusomizations I have done and c) its a brand new computer with a fresh install of everything.

Things I've done:

1) Ran memtest86 the complete test several times. All RAM comes back clean.
2) Ran Microsoft's Memory testing application, the complete test. Comes back succesful.
3) I've scanned for viruses, malware, and spyware using 3 different applications. None found. (no suprise since I am very keen on ensuring that I don't get that stuff).
4) Run two registry cleaners to ensure that there are no registry problems.
5) I have scan disked and defragged several times

I've noticed that it crashes the most when FireFox, Photoshop and Media Shout are all open. But there is no correlation there because it has crashed when none of those are open too. Anyway, it didn't start crashing until after I loaded FireFox. Earlier, I uninstalled and reinstalled FireFox. Now, I have completely uninstalled FireFox, deleted all its directories, and cleared the registry of all things FireFox and have switched to Chrome. We'll see if that helps.

If you're interested. Here is a log of all the crashes. Maybe you can see something that I am missing.

Also, fwiw...I use a program called Super(c) from eRightSoft to convert media. It works like a charm on my old computer. Everytime I use it on the one that is crashing, I get an error message that reads:
Runtime Error!

Program c:\progra~1\eright~1\SUPER\spk\1strRun.exe
This application has requested the Runtime to terminate it in an unusual way. Please contact the application's support team for more information.
If i try to convert a file, this dialog box begins popping up every two or three seconds. It will pop-up a new dialog box faster than I can shut them down.

I have already uninstalled Super and re-downloaded it and reinstalled it to no avail. I unistalled it again. I did contact thier support, but never recieved a reply (which doesn't surprise me since its a free program).

My gut says the two issues are related.


1 comment:

Jim Burch said...

Hi Randall,
Did you ever figure out what was causing the Super-c errors? I've just had that same problem crop up. Interestingly, the video outputs just fine, but a message like that makes me nervous.
All best,
Jim