BOINC Manager does not initialize

[rabrittain]

I posted this in Technical Support, but I'm not sure that it will be seen there.

I installed BOINC Manager on my other computer. Something happened after I posted the Rosetta URL. I was assigned a task, but the Manager froze during the download. Now when I lauch BOINC Manager on that machine, it doesn't connect to local host, and it says "disconnected" at the bottem of the window (instead of "Connected to localhost"). I have uninstalled the program, gone through the registry and deleted all things BOINC and Rosetta. I have then re-installed the manager, and the same thing happens. It doesn't initialize; my mouse won't do anything but move around; cntr-alt-delete does nothing, and I have to shut off my computer with the power switch in order to reboot.

Help!!!!

 

[BlackMountainCow]

What BOINC version?
What OS? ( I assume WinXP )

The BOINC manager communicates with the BOINC client via ports. Sometimes a firewall can block these ports within Windows and thus the Manager can't connect to the client and vice versa. Try to start BOINC with your firewall turned off for a moment and see what happens.

Between your two installs, did you completely delete the BOINC folder? If not, some corrupted stuff might have been left in there and also crashed your new install.

 

[Assimilator1]

CPU cooling is ok isn't it?

 

[rabrittain]

Thanks for the help BMC and Assimilator1! I have re-installed the OS on my Athlon XP 2100+ box several times, but I am unable to install BOINC. It keeps hanging up near the end of the install. The Logitech bluetooth desktop that was running on that machine before will not install properly either. I've been through the bios, and that looks good. My problems started after I tried to overclock the machine. I might have damaged something. I heard that there is another distributed computing client besides BOINC. Does anyone know anything about that?

 

[BlackMountainCow]

There's nothing similar to BOINC as a DC platform. But there are other projects, which don't use BOINC but their own infrastructure: DPAD, Folding@Home, 17 or Bust, and some others. Take a look into the welcome thread here in the DC forums (the sticky one on top). That should give you all the info you need. But if you can't install BOINC or your desktop, then something might really be broken, and in that case, I doubt that you'll produce good scientific data for these projects.

Is you system capable of running Prime95 for 24 hours without an error? If you don't know what I mean, download this (WinXP) and run the stress test. If you machine can do that for 24 hours without an error, then you CPU should still be fine. If not, you know that something is indeed wrong with you system.

 

[rabrittain]

Thanks for the suggestion, BMC! I just downloaded Prime 95. I'll try it and see what happens.

 

[rabrittain]

OK, my computer ran Prime 95 tests from around 11:00 PST til now, ~17:30. That's about 6.5 hours. It never missed a beat, and it stayed between 55 and 60 degress Celsius the whole time. The problem may be an IRQ Conflict/Memory Address problem. Hmmm. Any help that anyone can give me in this area would be much appreciated.

 

[BlackMountainCow]

I'm sorry to say, but 6.5 hours might now be enough. I had PCs fail on me after 20 hours, which I though perfectly stable. Further checks then revealed that the mem was faulty. I really recommend 24h of the Prime95 stress test with minimal mem usage (in cache something) and 24h of memtest86+ (all tests) to really check on these two vital components. Once they're ruled out, your OS and its drivers is the likely culprit.

 

[rabrittain]

I think runing Prime 95 and memtest86 for 24 hours each is a very good way to determine if cpu and memory is rock solid. I will do that very soon. For now , though, I have found the problem. 3dMark2000 would not even start, so I looked for problems with my graphics card. The card is an 8x AGP, and I had set the bios to 2x. I changed the setting. The highest that I could go with my motherboard (Gigabyte GA-7VRXP) was 4x. After I did that, all my problems went away. The computer is it's old self again, same as it was when I built it 5 years ago. I know that it isn't much, but when I couple it with my Athlon 64 FX-60 Rig, it should put me into the top 25 producers on a good day. Now, if I could only be successful in adding my rigs to My Anandtech page....

 

[BlackMountainCow]

Good to see you solve the prob the easy way!

(Why can't you add them to you Anandtech rigs page?)

 

[Assimilator1]

Originally posted by: rabrittain
OK, my computer ran Prime 95 tests from around 11:00 PST til now, ~17:30. That's about 6.5 hours. It never missed a beat, and it stayed between 55 and 60 degress Celsius the whole time. The problem may be an IRQ Conflict/Memory Address problem. Hmmm. Any help that anyone can give me in this area would be much appreciated.

That isn't long enough ,you need to run it for 24hrs to be as near 100% certain as you can be.

55-60C is rather hot though ,or is that the internal CPU temp using the CPUs temp diode? if so then thats ok.If that's the reading from the external CPU sensor then that is way too hot!:Q

 

[rabrittain]

Everytime that I fill in all the blanks that describe my rig, and then click on the "Submit" button, a page comes up that notifies me that there has been an error, and that the webmaster has been notified. I have tried to do it on at least 5 different occasions, and the same thing always happens.

I'm not sure if it is an external or internal sensor. Thanks for the warning. I'll investagate it further.