BTV Hangs at night

[twosouls2gether]

I have searched the forums a bit, and haven't seen anything too close to my problem, so I'm hoping some others have some ideas to try. I recently purchased BTV and had some problems with it freezing every 5 minutes or so, but I found on here a PCI latency patch for VIA chipsets that fixed the problem. It has been running very well for me since, several days. Except, in the morning when I wake up, the computer is hung, no TV output, no response to the network, no HD activity (which is my first clue something is wrong). I reboot, and it works great all day, from morning to late at night. Looking at the logs after the second time it did that, I saw it was hanging up when doing a WMA recommpression, which I disabled, but forgot about the jobs already waiting, hence it hung the next night too on those previous jobs. I found all those and deleted them, but I still have smart chapter enabled. I don't believe that a showsqueeze was ever successful, but I have had a few smartchapters work (nopt all due to it hanging before they all complete.) It always does this around 2-4 am. Is that due to the time constraints I placed, 3am-8. It says when you are setting it up to do it during an idle period, and sometimes I have a late night show scheduled to record. Also, I closed viewscape or whatever they call the menu system of BTV, leaving only the tray BTV icon enabled, in case it was something to do with overwhelming the CPU. In the log last night, it just completed a movie recording, set the system wakeup time to 7:59, and tagged the file just recorded, and that's all she wrote. I woke up at 9, so it should have been up and chugging right? I saw something on here about Soundblaster Live, but I have no problems at all for the 16 hours or so it is on during the day, which leaves some weird things happening when I'm not around. Do I have gremlins? My system is a little on the lower end, but I got a good deal on a new AMD motherboard/chip combo so it will be much more powerful soon. currently is it an AMD 1800+, 256mb ram, PCI nvidia graphics card, soundblaster live, and WinTV 350. Like I said it works wonderfully during the day, come home from work, and it behaved itself for those hours left unattended. Any suggestions?

Rob

[jgourd]

Upgrade to the latest Windows Media. It help me with a few issue I was having. I wasn't having your issue though.

[Bilar Crais]

Did you recently install the Microsoft Spyware detection/removal software?

My computer was regularly freezing around 2am every night for a week, until I discovered that this tool was scheduled to scan nightly at this time. In every instance, I was transcoding shows to Divx at the time. I removed the MS tool, and haven't had a problem since. Apparently, this tool doesn't like to compete with other software using a good deal of CPU when it runs.

[twosouls2gether]

I think I did do updates on windows after the fresh install, I know the install Cd had SP2 on it, since I couldn't use the older versions because of no large hd support, I will definatly give it a try though, on both the spyware and windows media though.

Rob

[StephaneM]

Hello Rob,

Originally Posted by twosouls2gether

I saw it was hanging up when doing a WMA recommpression .../... Any suggestions?

My PC used to have this problem too : it was overheating during Showsqueeze because of the dust in the CPU heatsink. So you should open your PC case to see if there is any dust that you can remove...

Regards,
Stéphane.

[twosouls2gether]

Originally Posted by StephaneM

My PC used to have this problem too : it was overheating during Showsqueeze because of the dust in the CPU heatsink. So you should open your PC case to see if there is any dust that you can remove...

Well, I used to run the computer for a long time with things like seti@home and the distributed.net client, which had the cpu always at 100%, but there does seem to be some dust on the heatsink, I suppose nothing is out of the question. Last night according to the log it did about 3 smartchapters, and then started some left over showsqueeze that I think escaped my grasp, though it was a show I just recorded at 5 or 6 pm. Hmmm... I just manually started a show squeeze, and am watching live tv as well... hasn't froze yet. I think I have gremlins. Tomorrow my new computer case and motherboard should arrive, so then BTV will inherit this computer I am on now, AMD 2400+, 768 mb, 3 fans plus 2 in the power supply. It's not an old HP prebuilt computer either... anyone have bets if that will solve my problem? Or any suggestions on getting this older computer working? It seems to be a personal challenge now. Could it be the soundblaster live that I remember hearing about on here? I would think that it wouldn't just do it last at night though. And also, in reply to the one post about the spyware program, I did not install any updates after installing windows, so unless it is included in SP2, I don't have it. Unless Bilar can explain where he found the spyware program, I cannot find it in startup services or add/remove programs. I also downloaded Windows Media 10 as suggested. :

Rob

PS. I found out why it wanted to showsqueeze, I guess when I first installed BTV I made Stargate have showsqueeze enabled, not showsqueeze as default (ie, if i disable showsqueeze then all show squeeze's are disabled.) So hopefully that will kill that bird.