Audacity Forum

<<<Can't remember how to set up the PC to check the memory. I thought I could set it up in the Bios but couldn't find the option there.>>>

They usually hide that under a listing like [x] Fast Start? under Boot. Deselect that.

<<<Been struggling with setting up the hardware memory test >>>

It's much easier making the floppy. Do you still have a floppy drive?

Anyway, just so you understand what we're doing, Windows and memory tests don't get along in one machine because Windows takes up too much memory for itself leaving nothing to test. So you need to start the machine on the floppy (or ISO CD) and run the tests from there. The CD loads the barest possible simple operating system and runs the tests with almost all the machine memory available for testing.

There are several tests in the suite; Checkerboard, Walking Zeros, Twos Compliment, etc. The web pages tell you to run the whole thing once, turn it off and go home. No. If you have marginal memory, it may not show up until the third or fourth pass through the whole collection. Just let it run.

This test stresses the whole machine, not just the memory. I have found bad power supplies and broken plug-in boards. The only acceptable result after several hours of testing is no (0) errors.

Koz

Ran the hardware memory test for 8 hours. In that time it made 53 passes over 6 tests and the result was "No errors found". After booting the system up again I setup and started another capture. Recording lasted about 10 seconds before Audacity stopped and the sound from the source (Youtube, this time, or to be more accurate I suppose, my soundcard) gave up.

Maybe I should give up and get a life.

<<<"No errors found".>>>

Nuts.

I still wish you would do the testing with a straight line-in or cheap microphone instead of involving the internet services. The idea is to narrow the possibilities, not widen them.

I need to go back over the thread...

Koz

Sorry! I should have tested Audacity without using up other chunks of the system's resources.

I have just played an album on my other PC and recorded from its speakers using a microphone attached to the PC on which I have Audacity installed. It continued recording until I stopped it, over 11 minutes, and looked as if it would have gone on recording for ever. I suppose that helps narrow the problem down a bit but I'm still puzzled by the fact it could record from streamed radio or Youtube before.

charlie7 wrote:I'm still puzzled by the fact it could record from streamed radio or Youtube before.

Perhaps an update to your web browser has messed things up. What browser do you use?

Mostly Firefox and they do seem to have been sending a lot of updates recently.

Yes they do, but I've not noticed problems using Firefox myself, though you may of course have add-ons that I don't have.

I've read through this topic and nothing jumps out at me but it seems that something is wobbling your system.

Have you done a full system scan for viruses / adware / spyware? Not just the regular "resident protection" but the sort that scans at boot time and runs over several hours (overnight) and scans everything? A good anti-virus for that is "Avast" (free for personal use).
For spyware / adware scanning "Adaware" is good, and so is "Spybot S&D" http://www.safer-networking.org/en/download/index.html

No harm in trying with a different browser either - "Chrome" and "Opera" are both good browsers for Windows.

Can Avast be used to do a one-off scan as you describe without my uninstalling my present antivirus, Kaspersky? I've used Adaware and Spybot on my other PC so will download and use them on this one.

In the meantime, perhaps you could eliminate one thing that's puzzling me. In Edit>Preferences>Directories, the path is: C:Documents and SettingsCharlie HillLocal SettingsTempAudacity_1_2_tempaudacity_temp When I clicked OK, a message came up saying file doesn't exist and asks if I want to create it. I thought that seemed a bit odd. Also, despite saying yes and then restarting Audacity, when I do a search for "audacity_temp" windows can't find it.

Start Audacity and make a recording of almost anything. Pause the recording and go looking for that folder.

Koz

Maybe this has been a bit of a red herring. I recorded 22½ seconds of music through the microphone and then paused it. I then traced the file through Dos and found the information below. I think I was unable to find the file by "search" because it was in a hidden folder.

15/06/2009 14.35 <DIR> .
15/06/2009 14.35 <DIR> . .
15/06/2009 14.34 1,060,956 b00000.au
15/06/2009 14.34 1,060,956 b00001.au
15/06/2009 14.34 1,060,956 b00002.au
15/06/2009 14.34 1,060,956 b00003.au
15/06/2009 14.35 1,060,956 b00004.au
15/06/2009 14.35 1,060,956 b00005.au

6 File<s> 6,365,736 bytes
2 Dir<s> 54,931,894,272 bytes free
So 22½ seconds of recording uses about 6MB of space but there is still over 50GB free disk space left.