Causes XP to Reboot

[brucern]

I'm running audio cassette tapes from a player thru the line in jack on the sound input. When I hit record, it runs fine for a minute or two then suddenly reboots the machine. What would cause this? It says I have over 23 hrs recording time available on the hard drive. It has done it everytime so far. I'm running XP SP3. Can you advise?

[steve]

It says I have over 23 hrs recording time available on the hard drive.

How much actual disk space do you have on your C: drive?
Have you defragmented the drive lately? If not, do that when you have time (overnight is a good idea for large drives if they have a lot of fragmentation) then try again.

[brucern]

Yes the drive has been defraged. It has an automatic defrag running in fact. The last time I tried Audacity it said the drive had room for over 47 hours of record time in mono.

[kozikowski]

<<<It has an automatic defrag running in fact.>>>

I don't know if I would be doing that. Defrag needs to keep multiple files and segments up in the air at the same time and you reeeeeely shouldn't be doing any production on the machine while it's doing that. If Audacity, or any production tool steps on a file while defrag is moving it, that's the ball game, get in the car and go home.

Most of the Windows Auto tools should be turned off while you're doing production. You do not want massive Service Pack 93 to start downloading in the background while you're trying to cut your latest song. That's begging loudly for trouble.

Virus Protection is another problem. If your Auto Virus Protection starts investigating every file that Audacity makes, Audacity will stop making them and there's the show in the dustbin.

Koz

[steve]

It has an automatic defrag running in fact.

I see that Koz has just in before me - I was about to say, make sure that you suspend auto defrag while you are recording - If the defrag program is moving data around while Audacity is writing to disk that is very likely to cause problems.

he last time I tried Audacity it said the drive had room for over 47 hours of record time in mono.

In a few cases the remaining time according to Audacity has been wildly incorrect. If you check in My Computer you should be able to find how much actual disk space you have (x GB in use, y GB free space).

[brucern]

No ok I meant it is on automatic schedule to defrag once a week or month during night hours. It says there is about 27 GB free on the hard drive. Still reboots did today.

[steve]

I'm guessing that there are no other signs of instability on your machine other than Audacity?

I don't know what the cause is, but we've seen similar issues with Audacity 1.2 on XP with SP3, so my guess is that there is something in SP3 that fights with something in Audacity 1.2. This will almost certainly not get fixed as the countdown to the release of the new stable version of Audacity (v.2.0) is well under way. Your best course of action is probably to update Audacity to 1.3, but before you do, let's reset the Audacity preferences so that the new version of Audacity gets a clean install.

1. Go here , scroll to the bottom of the page and right-click over "Audacity 1.2.6 reset Preferences .reg file for Windows"
2. Save this .reg file to your drive
3. Double-click the saved .reg file and click "yes" when asked if you want to add the information to the Registry

When you have done that, install Audacity 1.3.8 and cross your fingers.

[torque]

NOT SP3.
I have the exact same problem in XP SP2. Gigs of free space (12gb), defragged. Audacity 1.3.5.
Only program I've ever encountered that produced a full reboot on error (well, since home computers' early days, anyway). Questionable instructions to the hardware?

[kozikowski]

Audacity doesn't cause system instability, but it does take very good advantage of it if it's already there.

-- Auto Defrag fails. We had one poster that naturally assumed Auto Defrag was taking care of this system for a long time and ended up spending hours cleaning up after it. Do a manual defragmentation. On a healthy machine, it should take ten minutes.

-- Do an error check while you're in there. It's in the same panel.

-- A hardware error in high memory may not show up until you use a program that needs lots of memory. That will cause Windows to go face-first into the mud. Microsoft makes a very nice memory checker. Leave several hours free and run the test multiple times. I run it overnight if I think there's something wrong. It's a memory tester, but the rest of the machine has to be in pretty good shape to pass. I have found bad power supplies, ratty memory sticks, and physical install problems.

http://oca.microsoft.com/en/windiag.asp

Koz