Skybuck's Dream PC dead again for the (4th?) zillion-th time ?!? (Electrical fault with X-Fi Elite Pro Soundblaster)

Hello,

My Dream PC from 2006 just died again, this time I will remain calm since I
am used to it by now.

I will describe what happened and probably caused it to die below:

Months before it died:

1. Creative Labs X-Fi drivers hanging the system on shutdown, many forced
resets and power downs but this is probably not the main reason.

What led to the situation:

1. Running out of harddisk space.

2. Buying new harddisks.

3. Having to de-tach cables to be able to work on PC.

4. Not being able to tell how to re-attach 7.1 surround sound cables from
receiver.

Ok here I was playing with a Windows 7 for the first time on real hardware.

1. Wanting to get the sound working again, installing drivers.

2. Had to attach 7.1 cables.

3. When attaching the cables I noticed strange sounds like buzzes when
plugging them into PC, PC was on, Receiver was on.

4. I had to figure out which way to attach the cables there were 3 cables.

Speakers:

Front/Left/Right/Center Left/Center Right/Rear Right/Rear Left (subwoofer
not present).

So the creative labs X-Fi Elite Pro soundblaster probably has electrical
faults.

I just checked the outputs from the onboard audio chip and holes from the
motherboard itself, they seem to be protected with sound kind of plastic or
keramic, while the plugs/holes from the creative labs x-fi soundblaster are
of gold and probably conducting.

1. The cables were not correctly plugged in... I swapped them a couple of
times leading to more buzzes when I pulled them out and plugged them in.

2. Finally I decided to consult the build-plan that came with the
soundblaster to see how to correctly attach the cables.

3. A final buzz heard, now all speakers were correctly connected again.

So far so good the system work for two days... I was enjoying my music.

Windows Seven was kinda driving me nuts with all my old software missing, so
I was reading how to boot into a VHD, I copied my old disk to VHD.

To add salt to injury.. creative labs probably also responsible for causing
8 KB of bad sector on my harddisk... it probably crashed the head during all
the resets, or perhaps I bumped my table so this is not sure. The bump seems
more likely.

Adobe Flash also probably caused a virus to penetrate IE8 which also caused
damage.

Creative Labs also caused file system damage. Fortunately Microsoft's
Windows Seven chkdsk was able to fix the file system. (Microsoft Windows
XP's chkdsk was not able to fix it).

Anyway then it happened: As I was adding something to the boot manager, I
resetted my system and boom dead.... nothing happened ?!? I was like:

"huh ?!?" Maybe the cpu is hanging ?!?

So I resetted it a couple of times but nothing... no signal on monitor, no
harddisks spinning up.

Perhaps the cpu cracked because the cpu fan sometimes wouldn't spin up but I
learned later that ultimately it will spin up.


So my conclusion for now is:

It's not save the pull out and plug in cables into the creative labs
soundblaster x-fi elite pro while power is on.

However powering down and starting up seems a bit much for being able to
figure out how to attach cables and test surround sound.

This soundblaster also caused too much heat in the past because it was in
front of nvidia cards.

All in all this soundblaster and surround sound has giving me (and my
neighbours/neighbourhood lol) lot's of pleasure but also lot's of damage.


I just got the drivers working nicely in windows 7... to bad it had to die
like that just now.... I spent about two to three days just getting a basic
windows 7 installation working. Crazy how much time it costs to re-install a
system.

Unfortunately an update from XP to Windows 7 is probably not a good idea
because of software rott because of memory chip bit errors and virusses and
such.

However I still think a solution could be found if the way software is
installed is changed somehow... for example scripts which install registry
keys into the registery even on new systems. Though this remains a "future
dream".

For now I was placing my hopes on VHD's however these have a limited
sustainability of only 2 TB. So it's a short term solution at best...
perhaps VHDM or something like that might replace it in future.

I also considered vmware or virtualpc, the first requires special vm
hardware for 64 bit emulation, and the second does not support 64 bit
operating systems.

Thus booting into a 64 bit VHD seemed the only way for now.

Unfortunately I will not get it to see in action for a while... how long I
don't know...

Perhaps I will buy a new motherboard... but what's the use if Creative Labs
X-Fi soundblaster will kill it again ?!?

I could be very carefully with the cables but when I get tired or when I
forgot the same will happen. I am a bit sloppy and lazy with these kinds of
things.

I want a audio-system which is hot-swappable, and not requiring a power
down.

Am I crazy/retarded for wanting something like that ? I think not.

Some harddisks and usb devices seem hot-swappable... why not a soundblaster
?!?!

Apperently this discrepentancy has cost me darely, as well has creative
labs... that creative labs has bad drives and bad electronics is known by
now... but the costs far extend beyond their own hardware.

So far the costs have been:

1. Extra receiver 700 euro.
2. Dead gigaworks subwoofer 200 ?
3. Additional cables required for receiver 30 ?
4. First dead motherboard because of overheat 100 ?
5. New case because of over heat 200 ?
6. Second dead motherboard because of overheat 100 ?
7. Third motherboard because of electrical damage 100 ?
8. New memory chips, free from corsair, only postage stamp 2 bucks or so.
9. Perhaps damage harddisk as well: 200

Total damage:
1600 euro's.

This high figure has convinced me why Microsoft has not added Creative Labs
X-Fi drivers to their windows 7 operating system. Microsoft knows that
Creative Labs X-Fi soundblasters are crap and doesn't want them to be part
of the OS.

And ofcourse lot's time wasted with driver installations especially on XP.

But money is main concern for now.

However fully blaiming it on creative labs is not fair, yes they have made
some mistakes and probably have a bad back side of the soundblaster which
should have been protected from electrical currents but others are to blame
as well, to much heat, to much dust.


The sad thing is that their soundblasters do give great sound and do lighten
up the load on the cpu somewhat... I do wish to have beautifull sound... I
very much doubt that onboard audio can replace it. Though perhaps I will
have to be content with slightly less sound.

At least today I played all my favorite songs (check out: www.amigaremix.com
for some cool remixes) so I am good for a while.


Fortunately for me I backed-up all my critical files to my old computer
which never had any of these problems... so I am very glad and very
cratefull to myself that I kept all these old computers... I kinda new it
would go down like these... new hardware getting bad and worse by the year.

Sales figures lot's time I heard are down for PC's... then conflicting
reports that it's picking up again... but I doubt it.

I am starting to wonder if I should buy integrated devices instead like:

iPad's, iPhones, andraoids, tablets.

At least these have everything integrated and might be well tested, and
hopefully no heat surprises or eletrical surprises, however their is some
surprises like heat-shutdowns in the sun, and antenna gate, and cracked
screens, and privacy issue's, and evil apple dictators, plus unhealthy
plastics and what not.

All I can do is hope that somebody takes this posting about "electrical
flaws" on the back side of the creative labs soundblaster seriously and
comes up with a fix for future soundcards...

Perhaps the sound cards from asus or others already have a fix for it ?

I'm really bummed that my system is now dead again... it's probably not much
of a big deal to fix it, but only if I can find a socket 939 motherboard.

The point is not money costs, but more or less time costs:

More down time.


I'll be spending months before I have windows 7 the way I had windows xp.

Then one little virus comes along and screws everything up again.

Backups not really an option, they don't work 50% of the time and contain to
old data or whatever... cloud computing is stupid because of hackers dos
attacks and loss of control.

I wanted to run Internet Explorer in a virtual machine... so far that's not
really happening unless using a 32 bit operating system in a virtual
machine.


The main point of this posting is that computer industry has to start taking
threats and solutions more seriously:

PC industry is:

1. Under attack from virusses/trojan's/hackers causing major damage and time
loss all over the place. Virus scanners are not a solution, they cause more
damage then they solve.

2. Flash/IE has too many holes and is causing too many attacks to be
successfull.

3. Changing to a new version of windows is too much of a productivity loss.
Mostly because of incompatible applications, incompatible drivers, time lost
transferring files, transferring 1 TB of data can take one to two to three
days depending on if something goes wrongs or needs to change... harddisks
pretty slow for terrabyte computing.

4. Backing up 1 TB can take days as well, bandwidth of harddisks too low.
(Ofcourse backups need to be tested otherwise you won't be sure if they
work)
(disk2vhd doesn't finish but apperently good enough ?)

5. Then there is the bad hardware situation with overheat, and electrical
problems... I am not an electrical engineer... please make hardware in such
a way that I cannot damage it with currents ?!?

Also software problems:

1. So many new technologies, new languages, needs new compilers, new ide's,
needs lot's of time to learn all this new stuff... it's like functionality
overload. And non of this seems backwards or future compatible.

2. However backwards compatibility might constraint innovation.

Now there are iphones and ipad's, mostly integrated systems with only a few
of not one serious development platform, most apps not very serious and not
ment for heavy duty of heavy work... this remains mostly area of workstation
so it seems... so not really comparable to workstation... but give it a few
years and perhaps these devices being attach to monitors and keyboards and
then suddenly can do more work.


I have seen so many problems lately that I am starting to wonder if I should
give apple technology a try. I doubt I would like it... but at least then I
have some modern systems working... my system is now dead again for the so
many'thest time... I am not liking it ofcourse. Though my system can do
things which those little integrated things can only dream of ofcourse so
not really good comparision


My main concern is towards the futu

1. I want my computers to survive as backup computers to the future and
currently that is not happening. I was hoping all problems solved with my
DreamPC for 2006 but the opposite has happened. I even had nightmares about
melting chips and what not.
So I felt this was coming I was afraid of it for many months now... the
inevidetable has happened it's dead again.

2. Now my worry is starting to shift towards finding a motherboard
replacement.

If I cannot find a motherboard replacement then I am going to declare my
DreamPC dead and for me this is giving to have far reaching consequences and
decisions:

1. First of all no more expensive gaming rigs and no more high end hardware,
instead cheap hardware build by others, hopefully big companies which test
their designs for heat and eletrical problems so I don't have too.

2. Perhaps no more pc's all together if even they cannot deliver on stable
PC's.

3. No more flash, no more IE... I guess steve jobs was correct to ban flash
from their hardware... I have no proof that flash was cause of infection but
I have my suspicions

4. Could also be a general IE hole, therefore no more IE on main hardware,
intead IE has to be virtualize and isolated... I am pretty fed up with web
anyway... it's becoming more of a ad-infected-thing. Though there is still
usefull information on it.


For now I have two courses of action:

1. First make sure motherboard is really dead, then find a replacement
motherboard.

And then I will continue this endurance because I don't want to give up on
my other expensive hardware components.

or

2. Re-think hard and find a nice pre-build PC to replace my high-end problem
infected PC (This will take huge time because there is probably lot's of
bull**** systems out there and a few which might be nice... though big
company computers have issues to so that's probably a pipe-dream... compared
to them my dreampc might not even have done that bad... who knows what
their track record is... check your neighbours how often they dump pc's !
- I think this is probably main reason to switch to something else just to
see if it's better... could explain why apple is gaining some market
share... people switching out of pure desperation.)

Bye,
Skybuck.

This time I am also going to call an eletrical technician to replace the
power wall sockets in my house, they only have two holes, and not a third
hole for grounding.

They should have a third hole for grounding I think ?!?

Or maybe that would be dangerous but I don't think so...

Perhaps if all stuff was grounded it might not have happened...

There seemed to be some kind of load/current flowing through the audio
plugs...

When the audio plugs touched the backside of the plate of the soundblaster
there was some kind of sound... probably leaking currents from PC case and
processor and such... these should probably have been guided away via the
ground wire... which didn't happen...

Other explanation could be received is actually transmitting power over the
cables which
are supposed to be input cables only ?

This time I want to be sure so just gonna call an eletrical technician soon
and ask him to come have a looksy and replace wall sockets to see if that
can help with grounding my computer, especially as someone else just posted
a message to about popping clicks and what not.

So could just have been a grounding issue...

Bye,
Skybuck.

Hmm,

Pretty complex this ground-wire stuff:

For dutch people:

http://oswaldshomepage.tripod.com/Te...id/aardepc.htm

I'm a bit scared to let an electrician mess with my power sockets... what if
he screws it up or introduces new problems ?!?

At least according to this dutch text "grounding the pc" is safer ?!? But
what if an earth-loop exists ?!? Is that still safe or the opposite ? Danger
? Doesn't seem to explain... me a bit scared of all of this ! =D

Perhaps I should just let it be like I did last time and just take the
damage as an unfortunate cost factor

But then again... replacing motherboards forever is not an option... and I
am in appartment... maybe eletricity from above neighbours would hit my
ground wire and might kill me... so me not sure...

Better option is probably x-fi creators to make sure their soundblasters are
isolated... seems much safer to me

Bye,
Skybuck.

This dutch site problably explains what happened:

http://www.radionics.demon.nl/pc_aarden/aarding.html

There are two options to make computing safe:

1. Ground all devices.

2. Connect all devices to one big power block, this still can lead to half
of the power being applied.

However my situation is as follows:

1. No grounding power sockets.

2. Multiple power blocks being used.

And thus I can come to the conclusion that what is described at the link is
exactly what happened:

110 volts where transferred from the Denon Receiver to the PC/X-Fi
soundblaster which entered the rest of the PC/motherboard.

Miracously it survived that first impact, but the second day it still died
somehow... maybe capacitators that took the hit or other components died.

So it seems wise for me to spent time on two solutions:

1. Call technician and ask him to have a looksy about power sockets and ask
him these questions to see if he knows the dangers to be able to evaluate if
he's good or bad and then ask him over and see if he can replace the power
sockets with something safe... but I would expect guys like this to know
this kind of stuff but still... a bit of questioning is in place before
inviting over

2. If not ground wire available then instead buy a huge powerblock which
might be a bit better but probably not... I guess I have no choice and power
down everything before reconnecting stuff... otherwise pc will get hit with
110 volts.. !

(Never knew something like that could happen... gjez...)

Ofcourse I am not 100% sure but this seems the most likely cause... it sucks
but that's life ! =D At least now I have a chance to do something about
it.

Bye,
Skybuck.

Maybe I can even ask him to do some measurements or so to see if there is
leaking current on my PC and such... and receiver... and perhaps even replay
what happened and see if he can make sense of it (as well)

Bye,
Skybuck.


"Skybuck Flying" wrote in message
.home.nl...
This dutch site problably explains what happened:

http://www.radionics.demon.nl/pc_aarden/aarding.html

There are two options to make computing safe:

1. Ground all devices.

2. Connect all devices to one big power block, this still can lead to half
of the power being applied.

However my situation is as follows:

1. No grounding power sockets.

2. Multiple power blocks being used.

And thus I can come to the conclusion that what is described at the link
is exactly what happened:

110 volts where transferred from the Denon Receiver to the PC/X-Fi
soundblaster which entered the rest of the PC/motherboard.

Miracously it survived that first impact, but the second day it still died
somehow... maybe capacitators that took the hit or other components died.

So it seems wise for me to spent time on two solutions:

1. Call technician and ask him to have a looksy about power sockets and
ask him these questions to see if he knows the dangers to be able to
evaluate if he's good or bad and then ask him over and see if he can
replace the power sockets with something safe... but I would expect guys
like this to know this kind of stuff but still... a bit of questioning is
in place before inviting over

2. If not ground wire available then instead buy a huge powerblock which
might be a bit better but probably not... I guess I have no choice and
power down everything before reconnecting stuff... otherwise pc will get
hit with 110 volts.. !

(Never knew something like that could happen... gjez...)

Ofcourse I am not 100% sure but this seems the most likely cause... it
sucks but that's life ! =D At least now I have a chance to do something
about it.

Bye,
Skybuck.

Hmm maybe not having ground is interesting to... like a bird on the eletric
lines... but then again there are also eletricity wires from earth coming
up... so maybe grounding still saver...

Not sure... but some say there are risks involved with grounding.

Bye,
Skybuck.

Hmmm... I'm probably coming to same conclusion as last time that I checked
into this:

This time a little more or same detail... the earth wire is shared by other
appartments and therefore there is a risk that if one appartment has a
problem and I touch that earthwire I could get shocked... therefore seems
not too save to me... so I will let things be as they are and take this
damage as unfortunate.

Bye,
Skybuck.

There is probably one thing I can do to make it a bit safer/better:

Swap plugs to power boxes/extensions.

I thought it would be better to distribute plugs to multiple boxes somewhat
especially the high load ones and also some plugs are oddly shape and can
only be plugged in on the sides, but the receiver has a straight plug and
can be swapped with lamp I think.

So current situation is as follows:

wall power sockets
1 2
| |
| |
___ |
Monitor------|+| |
Lamp---------|+| |
PC-----------|+| |
--- |
|
---
Television-----------|+|
Cable modem----------|+|
7.1 Audio Receiver---|+|
---


This situation should be changed too:

Probably better situation:

wall power sockets
1 2
| |
| |
___ |
Monitor------|+| |
Receiver-----|+| |
PC-----------|+| |
--- |
|
---
Television-----------|+|
Cable modem----------|+|
Lamp-----------------|+|
---

This way the potential between the PC and the receiver should be more or
less the same or at worst half... so with a little bit of luck perhaps this
new situation will not lead to a power potential difference and avoid damage
?!?

Or maybe it will be half... not sure... but it's worth a shot/try...

I just hope that all that power on one box won't be nasty ! =D

Bye,
Skybuck.

Hmm there is another interesting limitation to power boxes/extensions.

The receiver can take/deliver about 800 watts or so.
The PC itself 600 watts.
The monitor about 100 watt.

Total: 1500 watt.

I am not sure but this might be too much... so much power draw could put
cables on fire...

Some say 3600 watt is max on one power socket.

There is sometimes some dust on ground, if cables catch fire, dust could
catch fire and then who knows... more fire could break out... though nothing
else on ground except wall paper which could also catch fire and that would
be a very big problem !

So not sure how much power draw these extension things can handle... I will
have to look into that some more.

Another interesting discovery: 1200 watt super high end gaming rigs are a
no-no just for this reason alone !

Yes... the limit of what is safe is quickly approaching.

Bye,
Skybuck.


"Skybuck Flying" wrote in message
.home.nl...
There is probably one thing I can do to make it a bit safer/better:

Swap plugs to power boxes/extensions.

I thought it would be better to distribute plugs to multiple boxes
somewhat especially the high load ones and also some plugs are oddly shape
and can only be plugged in on the sides, but the receiver has a straight
plug and can be swapped with lamp I think.

So current situation is as follows:

wall power sockets
1 2
| |
| |
___ |
Monitor------|+| |
Lamp---------|+| |
PC-----------|+| |
--- |
|
---
Television-----------|+|
Cable modem----------|+|
7.1 Audio Receiver---|+|
---


This situation should be changed too:

Probably better situation:

wall power sockets
1 2
| |
| |
___ |
Monitor------|+| |
Receiver-----|+| |
PC-----------|+| |
--- |
|
---
Television-----------|+|
Cable modem----------|+|
Lamp-----------------|+|
---

This way the potential between the PC and the receiver should be more or
less the same or at worst half... so with a little bit of luck perhaps
this new situation will not lead to a power potential difference and avoid
damage ?!?

Or maybe it will be half... not sure... but it's worth a shot/try...

I just hope that all that power on one box won't be nasty ! =D

Bye,
Skybuck.

On Fri, 6 May 2011 20:31:50 +0200, "Skybuck Flying"
wrote:

Hello,

My Dream PC from 2006 just died again, this time I will remain calm since I
am used to it by now.

You are the ravager of PCs. Get an iPad.

John