Blue screen while downloading headers

[blarbles]

My computer has been blue screening when I am downloading headers in Newsbin Pro. This is problem started in the last week; I have been running Newsbin 6.11 with no problems for a while now. The blue screen has happened 5 times in a row. I managed to get headers once recently without the blue screen.

Newsbin 6.11 64bit
Windows 7 Home Premium 64bit, Service Pack 1
Intel Core i5
8GB ram
SSD Hard Drive
Astraweb usenet provider

I tried clearing out the headers in the spool folder. I am not sure what else to try. I have not had any other programs cause a blue screen so far.

[itimpi]

There is nothing Newsbin does that should ever cause a Blue Screen to happen. It is likely that there is some issue on your PC and Newsbin is simply triggering the error condition.

[Quade]

My assessment too.

SSD Hard Drive

Which SSD do you have? There's a known issue with Sandforce SSD's causing blue screens. Supposedly new firmware fixes it.

[blarbles]

Crucial 256GB M4, I have the latest firmware 0009

[Quade]

Don't know then. I'd go into:

Control Panel/system/Advanced System Settings/Startup and Recovery/

and uncheck "Automatically Restart".

Then the next time it blue screens, it'll stop and give a stack trace that should tell you what's crashing. Somethings wrong with your PC. This might give you some clue as to what it is. If you're overclocking, I'd drop back to stock and see if it makes any difference.

[blarbles]

I ran the diagnostics tool dell has which does the mem test and other things and it passed. I ran chkdisk and found one bad block. I also removed Norton Antivirus 2012 (anyone recommend a low resource AV to replace it with?). I turned off the automatic reboot, but haven't had a blue screen in a few days now. Any other tips?

[DThor]

It's unlikely the one bad block was meaningful, but always possible. If you want to run an anti-virus, I've heard good things about Microsoft Security Essentials, it's not too intrusive. Personally, I use Eset Nod (*not* the security suite, just the AV) since it's always been well maintained and again, not too intrusive.

Norton is, of course, evil.

DT

[blarbles]

Just in case anyone runs into this, the problem was an intel SSD driver that did not support trim. So basically it wasn't deleting files and when apps that create a lot of new files like Newsbin run the computer would send up blue screen to avoid data corruption. I switched to the native Windows 7 SSD driver per Crucial tech support and everything seems to be working now.

[DThor]

Good info.

DT

[Quade]

Wow.

[mrdenny]

I'm having the same problem with my new Crucial SSD. Can you provide a link to download and/or install / switch to the native Windows 7 SSD drivers?

[Quade]

I think it was Ars or Anandtech that said the biggest problem with SSD's is reliability. I had a crapload of problems with mine till I upgraded my motherboard BIOS. I only use Intel SSD's though because they're supposed to be the most reliable.

[blarbles]

I'm having the same problem with my new Crucial SSD. Can you provide a link to download and/or install / switch to the native Windows 7 SSD drivers?

It is fairly easy to switch to the Windows 7 built in driver:

Go to device manager, expand the "IDE/ATA/ATAPI Controllers".

You should have a driver that says something like "Intel SATA driver" or something similar.

Right-click and say "uninstall" making sure to click the "Delete the driver software for this device" check box.

The computer will want to reboot like 3-4 times, make sure you click reboot even if "Found new hardware" wizard comes up. Once it is finally done the rebooting cycle go into device manager and the "IDE/ATA/ATAPI Controllers" and check to make sure the driver has been switched to "Standard AHCI Serial ATA Controller" (it may have a version in there, mine says version 1.0). If it has not changed, try again, and make sure you check the delete driver software check box.

Once you have done this the Crucial tech (who really seemed to know what he was talking about) said to set the computer to not sleep/hibernate and turn off anything that runs at idle like AV and let the computer sit overnight turned on. He said that basically TRIM now has to catch up on garbage collection which will take a while and if you let it sit idle the drive can clean up the deleted files. The drive access will be slow while this happens, but once it is done it should speed up quite a bit. I let mine sit and afterwards it feels much faster.

[mrdenny]

Cool, thanks. Giving that a try now.

[mrdenny]

Thanks very much, this appears to have worked like a champ.