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RAM Preview causing System crash
Alright, I’ve done a couple searches through the forums, and haven’t really found an answer. Tried a couple things and I’ll detail it all here.
To start:
Specs: 17″ MBP, core 2 duo 2.5GHz, 4 GB RAM, Nvidia 8600 GT Vid card, AE CS3 (latest update).I’m completely new to AE, and I’m using Adobe’s Classroom in a book to learn the basics. I’m on Lesson 4, things are running along smoothly, I’m making my nice little shapes, etc. I get to the end of the lesson, I do a RAM preview, it gets about 3/4 of the way through, and my screen drops to grey, telling me that I need to restart my computer. I restart my computer, check the log, and it gives me a bunch of tech speak, but the one thing I notice is that it says panic at xxxxxxxx.
OpenGL isn’t enabled, I’ve done a little looking and found that panics are caused by bad memory.
My question is: Do I have bad memory, or is there a setting in AE that I’m not aware of? I bought the computer from Apple’s Refurbished page, if that helps matters any.
Thanks in advance.
Kevin M
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4 Replies
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that type of crash is most likely a hardware problem… you can run the hardware test to test your system out.
find the original system disc that shipped with the mbp. on the label it should tell you how to run the hardware test… usually it’s something like insert the disc, reboot while holding the option key down, then select the hardware test from the rather unmac-like menu.
once you get that going, choose the option for the more extensive test. this will thoroughly test you ram and report any problems.
Kevin Camp
Senior Designer
KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW -
Yeah, that’s what I’d feared. Thanks for the input, I’m going to give it a shot here after I get some other ducks in a row. I’ll be back to inform on what I found.
Thanks again
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Alright, I ran the extended hardware test, it ran for an hour and a half, and turned up nothing. I’ll work with the program some more, maybe run the hardware test after another crash, and report back.
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i should have warned you about how long that test would take…
it’s possible that the ram isn’t well seated and there is a contact issue… you might try pulling the ram and putting it back in to make sure it is well seated.
there is a remote possibility that it is a heat issue… usually when a mac gets too hot, it goes into deep sleep mode to avoid damage, but you might get a crash. you can monitor the temperature fairly easily to see if there is a link between heat and crashes. there is free software like temperature monitor that can display the cpu temp in the menu bar to make it easy to track.
also, i had an older ibook that had a bad gpu socket… essentially the gpu chip was not securely seated and some movements would cause it to lose connection and crash the system. so you might try to keep track of anything that may be linked to this type of crash.
if your system is still under warrantee, i’d really try to push it to see if you can get it to crash with some consistency. then you’ll have a good argument for a replacement or free repair. even if it is not under warrantee, i’ve had some success getting apple to fix things that seemed to be system design issues. the ibook was repaired 2 times and a g5 had both processors replaced due to a coolant leak, and they were years past the the warrantee.
Kevin Camp
Senior Designer
KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW
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