On 17 May 00, at 16:57, Bruce A Metcalf wrote:
> I had a similar incident this past week running Prime95 version 20.4.1
> under Windoze95 testing in the 4.7M range. Since it *is* a Windoze
> machine, I first tried just rebooting, only to get the same failure
> immediately upon Prime95 starting.
>
> I then reinstalled Prime95 from the download zip file and have been running
> fine since. No corruption of the data files were observed, and no
> reptition of the crash has yet occurred.
If there's a sudden burst of these incidents, maybe something
external is to blame. Maybe a virus infecting Prime95 or one of the
DLLs it uses; could also be something hitting the comms routines in
Windows. It's perhaps not coincidental that the PrimeNet server seems
to have been having problems recently.
Benny says (private communication) that the refreshed program found
both his savefiles corrupt, so he's had to restart :(
Perhaps this is a good time to suggest:
(a) running a periodic backup job including the files in your Prime95
directory, so that you have something fairly recent to fall back on
in the event of disaster;
(b) adding a line "InterimFiles=1000000" to prime.ini, then exit &
restart Prime95/NTPrime. With v19.2 and v20.x, this will cause an
extra save file to be written every 1000000 iterations, this extra
save file will be kept indefinitely & is therefore useful as a
fallback. Also valuable if you run into hardware reliability problems
e.g. a failed cooling fan.
Note 1, you can change the value 1000000 if you wish.
Note 2, to get rid of surplus save files you have to delete them
manually.
>
> If there is any data I could collect on the occasion of another crash that
> could help analysis of the bug, please let me know and I'll try to secure
> and report same.
>
At least write down everything in the error box. Don't rely
exclusively on e.g. screen capture software, which may not function
correctly on a system which is in some sort of distress.
Regards
Brian Beesley
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