A Bit Disappointed with the New Supercomputer
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Alexhcowley, you may as well update to Windows 10 now and go thru the pain sooner than later.
Otherwise in the future you will start to see notices from software telling you it can only run in Windows 10 or above. As is alway the case.
When troubleshooting, we need to identify the problem.
You identify the issue with lag, and it is causing you a problem; it is, however, a symptom of the problem, not the problem itself.
Lag can be many things, and any semi-modern computer can handle typing just fine - basically, just about anything built this millenium. :)
If what you're doing relates to the internet; then you computer could be the problem (including drivers, and other software as well as hardware); it could also be your router, your ISP throttling your use, other uses on your network, and other users close by using he same nodes.
Then there is the issue of the internet itself, and all those issues, including is the page you requested cached locally on your ISP or is it going to have to retrieve it from wherever?
... Internet use = a troubleshooting nightware.
I tend to agree. Nobody hates Windows more than I do, but sometimes you gotta do what you gotta do.
And yeah you have to jump thru hoops to turn off all the privacy stuff that Windows uses to extract every bit of data about everything you do...
And yeah you probably want to download something like Classic Shell to get rid of that nonsensical mobile-centered junk that makes desktop life miserable, and make it look like the old Windows 7 or whatever...
And yeah you gotta put up with insane stuff like simple failures to copy files it said it copied (something I never experienced before in decades of Windows use)...
But on the bright side, Windows 10 is a lot faster than previous OS's. And especially if you have an SSD, time to boot up is almost instantaneous after you enter your login stuff. Very nice, compared to old versions that take a week to boot up.
And especially with the new techology that relies so much on working drivers and updates and so on...I fear that older Windows versions might suffer from some painful incompatibilities in years to come.
Thanks, but the problem was found...AMD chipset drivers that were 1 month out of date.
And troubleshooting something like that is virtually impossible. I'm rendering with the GPU, and typing in the background in Word or Chrome or whatever, and it's slow as molasses. Most of my 16 CPU cores are sitting there doing nothing. And when I stop rendering all is back to normal.
Troubleshooting something like that is impossible. It turns out it was something deep inside the AMD chipset drivers that kept Windows from using the CPU cores.Just one more issue that users cannot possibly troubleshoot or even understand, but spend hours and hours chasing.
Glad you got it sorted.
Drivers is one of those that are always worth checking, but sometimes it is a case of if they are working, leave until an update provides something you need.
I keep a disk image (well a few) and before updrading (or installing Windows updates, which I've stopped doing auto - yes you can on windows 10) I test; i then install and create a new disk image. I also use virtualisation software to test stuff out, especially when I'm playing with the registry.
Speaking of creating disk images in case of problems...
I'm surprised that few people on the net ever mention the process I use for backups, and it seems to me it's much easier. I have a backup computer on my home network. When I build a new computer I keep the old as backup. It generally already has all my software installed. So all I have to do is synchronize my user folders on a regular basis. I use a free app called "Syncfolders", and I just tell it to copy all my documents from the new computer to the old computer. So, once a day or whenever I tell it, it copies whatever folders I want to the other computer. I don't have to do anything, and it's all invisible in the background.
But the popular methods seem to be to make these unusable differential backups and stuff that require this special software to even view.
I don't get it.
And if you want to try new drivers on your new machine, no worries about polluting the old one. Even if the new drivers cause you to crash and burn, just turn your chair around to the old computer and you're ready to go. No fuss, no muss. And work on the dead computer when you have a chance.
I use disk images; I create them as a new install; I use to recover (not quite like a back up as it is an exact copy of the state of the disk.
I can be up and running with a newly installed OS in about 30 minutes (or less). Much more useful now Windows 10 feels I'm not up to manageing my own PC; I do, as I disabled auto updates, but if I forget after enabling to run a check - it happens.
I use differential backups for Daz stuff and some other items. It's on a timer, and runs everyday on a disk that I plug in (hard drive cady) for the purpose. Other than plugging in and removing the disk, no effort required.
But my point is usually you don't WANT an exact copy of your disk right? Because the times you need your backup is when something is goofy on your disk, and then you have to worry about reverting to the correct version (and you don't know what the correct version is...) and so on.
Why not just have a backup computer that likely won't suffer the same crash as your main computer, and gives you a way to keep working and access the internet and stuff to get the necessary tools and info to repair your crashed computer?
It just seems that when your main computer dies, you have to worry about these wierd encoded backup files that may or may not be readable by your crashed computer.
These higher count multicore CPUs will only help speed things if you do things like run PS, DAZ, Blender and a bunch of stuff simultaneously being too lazy to close them down or if you CPU render a lot of stills/animations. Most people don't actually multitask well at all so the new CPUs really should help with basically only rendering and if you have one or more 1080TIs or whatnot even less reason to get these higher count multicore CPUs.
And you really, really need Windows 10 to take advantage of the improved parallelization for multicores.
Although rendering is the most common multi-threaded operation it isn't the only one, across all of the software I have. Nor are all renderers using the GPU, not will all scenes fit into the GPU's RAM (though something like Scene Optimiser can help with that).
The problem I find is on manufacturers are pretty lazy. Once your computer is built they pretty much no longer want to bother making and updating drivers which means they rely a lot on generic windows ones or the user to track the driver down from the device manufacturers page. Windows 10 is one of the worst operating systems I've ever used it is very bloated and so much spyware and janky stuff going on under the hood
Disc images return the computer to a known state after a bungled updatee or virus infection or whatever. They usually have everything you normally use included so you can get back to work. The backup will have what's changed since the disc image was made, and can be limited to only things in certain folders.
The "best" Windows is the one that get's the jobs done with the least headaches. This is not a simple equation. For me that set is a NULL set since I despise Windows. With that being said, I have a machine and/or VM dedicated to each desktop version of WIndows from XP forward and Windows server 2003, 2008, and 2011 because I have to test my software on each (I have many more commercial software packages that I've written and have to support beyond LAMH). I find that I spend the majority of my "Windows time" in Windows 7 running Visual Studio, RAD Studio, or some OSS language. Windows 8.x and 10 are just too "touch" and GUI oriented and cause me to waste far too much time working around things that shouldn't require mousing.
My preferred OS environment is either Fedora or CentOS Linux (depending on if it is my Desktop Workstation, Laptop, or one of the rack servers) and under that I will use DS (for pleasure -- which doesn't happen much these last few years) on Windows either via WINE or VMware. For working/development, I use a Linux environment with the programming UI in a Windows VM (VirtualBox) that has the Windows desktop integrated with the Linux desktop (so that I can use the power of the Linux UI to control Windows) then I use a series of scripts to automatically move the newly compiled .dll's/exe's to the necessary Windows native test machine across the network. From there I use a network/IP KVM to control the Windows box for testing, or I'll get up and walk over to the necessary machine if it is required due to having to manipulate hardware.
All versions of windows have their distinct set of drawbacks. The trick is to select the version that sucks the least for what you have to do. None of my Windows environments have internet access so I do not have to worry about the inherent insecurities of the various Windows versions, and as an effect, I don't experience a lot of the issues that many here in the forums run across. I don't need to run anti-virus, malware checkers, blah-dee-blah on the Windows systems and (for the most part) they run fine. If one acts up, I use the "known clean image" to blow away the install and put a good working environment in place.
The "fastest" desktop version of Windows is XP. It has such little cruft that the majority of CPU time is spent on the applications. Following that is Windows 7 with Aero and IE removed. If you can avoid over installing network pieces, Windows 7 can operate fairly unencumbered. After that is Windows 10, but this is only the case because Windows 8.x is a terrible boat anchor. For absolute speed, WINE blows all of them away using the same hardware -- presuming that your needed software runs correctly in it.
Kendall
I hear ya, and that's what all the backup/restore stuff says on the internet.
But as someone who had to debug and deal with a harddrive crash last year, I can tell you it's not always that simple. And MUCH nicer if you just have a backup machine sitting there with all your stuff, ready to go.
I had backups and disk images, but it had been a while since I backed up, and didn't know what the files were on my thumb drives and my drive wouldn't read the backup image and on and on and on. So I had to replace the drive, re-load everything, and start from scratch. All that backup stuff was useless. And I sure wished I had a backup computer ready to go so I could re-download all the software and so on.
Just sayin'....
I'm not sure if you might be seeing a different issue, however in the past when I had a few files get corrupted during a file copy to or from a backup (a 1-byte difference in a handfull of random files), it turned out to be that my memory had gone bad. It might be worth your time to run memtest or some other memory checker just to make sure. It was very subtle, there were no other symptoms, no blue screens, everything seemed to be working fine and if I hadn't run a byte-by-byte comparison of the backup I just made, I wouldn't have even caught it (until perhaps years later depending on what those errors did to the files). The memory had actually tested out fine a few years earlier when I bought it as well, but somewhere along the line one stick had developed issues.
Interesting about the memory issue...never thought of that.
What's stranger is that it seemed to only affect folders that with alphabetical names starting from U to Z. Go figure. Maybe it copies in alphabetical order, and by the end it was getting tired and just kinda gave up.
That's because you didn't check your restore process. I have a Win7 Wim image ready to boot for recovery sitting on many hard drive and usb key. It's only 200 MB so the copy doesn't take long
And checking a backup takes a few seconds
Being prepared makes thing simple and quick.
Just as long as the dust doesn't bury it.
No, I make an image because I do want an exact copy; it makes it easy to revert to a clean install. I have a backup computer (and an i7 laptop), but restoring from a disk image takes at most 30 minutes. Because sooner or later, MS manage to f... mess up updates.
Wow, thanks, good point. Never thought of that..
"Always do everything perfectly and you won't have a problem."
Let me write that down...
I have made and restored hundreds of images on multiple computers over the years, never had a problem. I always use verify byte-for-byte both during creation and restore of the images, then you're sure they're OK and that you get a system that's 100% identical to the one you created the image from. Plus at least one backup of the images just in case. The software I use (Image for DOS by terabyteunlimited.com) also comes with a Windows image browser so you can restore any particular file or folder set from an image on the fly, if you need it.
Having a backup computer is indeed a good idea, especially if you have tons of stuff installed so you don't have to spend a couple of weeks reinstalling everything from scratch and maybe missing a deadline or whatever because you can't do any work. When I build a new machine for my main PC or any other important work related PC I also build an extra 100% hardware identical one so if I have a hardware breakdown that makes it unusable I can just restore an image to the other one and it will work perfectly (no hassle with updating drivers and stuff because hardware is identical). It's just "restore and go".
Most people put SOLVED in the title.
I'll recommend testing with more than one tool, if there is a suspicion about bad RAM. A couple of years ago I had built a new PC but discovered random file corruption while copying data between disks. The first thing I did was of course to test the RAM with MemTest86+ but it reported all was OK even after several long tests. Windows built-in RAM tester also reported no problems. I then tried to replace the mainboard with an identical one, as well as disks, cables etc.. to track down the problem, but none of it helped. I even wrote an app that did long file copy tests with verify to track down which files that were corrupted and when the corruption happened to see if it would give me a clue, but that didn't reveal anything other than the problem seem to occur periodically (like several hours of copying with no problems at all, then suddenly the errors started to occur).
In desperation, after messing with this for three weeks, I went looking for something that could diagnose the whole system. I finally found a program called PC-Doctor Toolbox and gave it a try. When I ran the RAM Stress Test it immediately reported errors. I then tested the sticks one by one and found the bad one. I then tried MemTest again, now it suddenly also reported errors. After some experiments I discovered that Memtest would only detect the problem if the bad stick was in slot 1. As it originally was in slot 3 it therefore didn't detect it.
So it can indeed be tricky to find out what's wrong, sometimes. I highly recommend PC-Doctor Toolbox (costs only $20) for system diagnosis, it's made by a company that produces professional hardware diagnostics tools and they seem to know what they're doing.
Takes a while before that happens it seems, all my PCs have 7-12 year old hardware, and are running any Windows OS from XP to Win 10 without any problems. Only problem is that my render machine only has 8 GB RAM and can't take more, so I'll have to build a new one if I want to render larger scenes. Otherwise it renders perfect and very fast with a GTX 1070.
Also, I've found that restoring a computer from scratch really isn't that big a deal, in my case at least. As long as you have a copy of your important stuff in your Documents folder (Videos, text files, DAZ scenes, Blender scenes, Visual Studio projects, Word docs, Excel stuff, etc.), as well as a copy of all your downloads.
Nowadays most of the software is freely downloadable, and installation is fairly quick if you go thru the list of files in your downloads folder. And re-installing Windows is pretty quick too. Especially if you have a backup computer ready that you can use to download the ISO file. And the nice thing about DAZ content is you can automatically download it using DIM.
The challenge can be your Preferences for all your software (Google Earth kmz's, Blender startup/preferences, DAZ startup/preferences, Visual Studio preferences, browser bookmarks, and on and on). And some of those are tough to locate so you can back them up. And then re-installing the non-DAZ content, which can be a big pain. But if you can access a backup of your downloads, it's quite a bit easier.
The challenge, if you don't have a backup computer, is getting internet access to download all that stuff, and accessing your saved Documents, and so on. Especially if you have a hard drive crash, you're SOL (Surely Out of Luck) unless you've been a very good boy or girl and been very attentive to manually backing up on a regular basis, and can replace the hard drive and somehow reinstall everything, and hope you backed it up recently enough that you're not missing anything. And especially hope you have the software installed that can read your backup files, cuz they're probably in a proprietary format for the particular backup software.
And for me personally, IF there is a problem with my computer that requires I restore it, maybe due to a crash or whatever, I'd much prefer to start from scratch, and reinstall everything from scratch. That way you're certain you don't have some leftover junk that will just cause the same or different problems. And having a second computer on the network as a backup makes all of that much much easier, IMO. No rush, you can use the backup to do your stuff, and when you can gradually repair the main computer at your leisure.
Personally, I much prefer the automated folder synchronization in the background to a backup computer on the network so I don't have to worry about all of that. But hey, to each his own.
Well if you create an image of your system right after you have built it, where it's supposed to be more or less free of problems, and then just revert to that image if things go bad, you don't need to reinstall.
And if you want to make regular backups, you can make separate differential backups, then you can always revert to the last known working copy.
My main system is quite big, about 100 GB, and that is programs only, all data is kept on separate disks with their own backup system so the system images aren't cluttered with unnecessary stuff. Reinstalling from scratch is therefore a huge task that may take weeks. Therefore, when I build up a system I do it in sections, with a differential backup for each section. I then test everything in each section after having built it, and if it's OK, I start on the next, etc.. If there are problems, I restore to the previous image and start over again from there. This way I know everything is OK in the final version.
Over time I may add, update or test some more programs and stuff. Some of it I want to keep, the rest I wan't to get rid of. When there's enough I want to keep to justify creating a new differential image, I restore to the latest image, reinstall all the new stuff and updates, and then create a new image. That way I get a fresh install of the latest additions and updates, plus get rid of that which I don't want to keep, or which may have caused problems.
This way I always have an image of my complete system, with the latest updates and additions. After I started doing this I've always have had a more or less flawless system, because it's being refreshed every 3 months or so, and even though each differential image is just a successive addition to a maybe 5 year old first image, the latest image is technically just as fresh and clean as if I'd installed everything yesterday.
The reason I rely on images alone is that a simple backup or sync may not include everything that's needed for your stuff to work. Programs often store files in different odd locations, and many rely on data in the registry. Some files may be locked, and not all backup software can copy these. If you miss something, some things may not work correctly.
I don't understand why anyone would use differential or incremental backups. It's basically keeping copies of the latest version of your files, PLUS all other previous versions. And it puts them in an encrypted .VHD or whatever format that you can't actually view.
Why? Why does anyone need 15 previous versions of a file? It just takes hard drive space with a ton of these folders with encrypted files inside. And you need special software in order to de-crypt and use them. Why not just keep a real copy on a backup computer that you can actually use, without any specialized software?
I dunno, I guess people need that, but for my it just makes me scratch my head. And for most of us who only have serious computer crashes once every 5 or 10 years or whatever, who remembers the procedure for reverting to the last good image, and what software to use, and so on...
...that's what brushes and compressed air are for.
Because people don't want a second computer just for backups? Seems pretty obvious. That and the peace of mind of being able to step back a few days just in case. I use Macrium Reflect and highly recommend it. It's free and has never failed me. Can also just quickly mount an image and grab a file that I overwrote accidently. Although it's not usually by accident because I know a previous version is only a mount away so I don't even bother saving a copy first. If I really do notice days later I just mount an earlier image. Backup is done daily and I can setup however many days I wanna be able to go back. In my case I just tell it to fill the disk which is like 3TB so who cares.
Also recently had my system partition SSD fail. simply replaced it, booted from the Macrium Reflect recovery disk and restored the image. It couldn't be more straightforward. Why on earth would I bother with a second computer that sucks power, takes space, needs maintenance etc.
What you are experiencing is DIY blues. Because putting together computers is so easy, Everyone thinks they can put together a $10,000 graphics workstation for a fraction of the price of the professional companies. They don't realize that thousands and sometimes millions of dollars goes into R&D so that everything will work as expected. They don't realize that engineers with lots of experience design their systems for peak performance. They just know ASUS came out with a cool new motherboard and they can slap it in a case along with a shiny new cpu and it's off to the races
. I can't count how many times a DIY computer builder advised me that buying a workstation instead of building your own was a ripoff. In fact, the DIY is the only choice for many, but they need to understand the tradeoffs. Unless you have a lot of experience or low expectations, do not expect to get the same performance as those whose business is to build computers. They cost more, but there is a good reason for it. It is easy to assemble the parts of a computer. It is a lot more difficult to assemble the right parts. And the right parts are different depending on what application you will be working in (or whether or not you will be playing games).
As a former DIY'er back in my young days, I learned that you earn experience with blood. Or as Han Solo would say, "building a workstation ain't like dustin' crops back home, boy!"