OT- Windows 10 works great.. except when it doesn't

[digdugnate]

I'm mostly just whining about my wife's gaming computer.

 

It died unceremoniously yesterday afternoon- my daughter reported extreme tearing/corruption of the display (she does this nerd dad proud), and then it just refused to go further than the boot screen for Windows.

 

I really think the issue is with the video driver set or the card itself- i brought it into my office today where i have space and tools, so I'm trying to get the thing into safe mode and install a driver suite at least.

 

if it is the card physically.... blech!

 

But.. nonetheless, when something wacky happens with Windows 10, I always have a heck of a time fixing it. I do like the OS, but it leaves some things to be desired.

 

I think I'd rather use my TI.

 

[Flojomojo]

Just to play devil's advocate -- it is processing thousands of times more information than your TI, even when idling.

 

I would try to rule out insufficient cooling or power first, even before software. Blow some canned air over the fans and make sure they're not caked up with cat dandruff and house filth.

 

Just curious, how old is the card? A 2017 GTX1050Ti like I have (plenty sufficient for my needs) is only about $150 if it comes to that.

[+OLD CS1]

I have seen these reports in Windows 10 for driver problems. Go directly to the manufacturer website and download the latest driver.

[digdugnate]

Just to play devil's advocate -- it is processing thousands of times more information than your TI, even when idling.

 

I would try to rule out insufficient cooling or power first, even before software. Blow some canned air over the fans and make sure they're not caked up with cat dandruff and house filth.

 

Just curious, how old is the card? A 2017 GTX1050Ti like I have (plenty sufficient for my needs) is only about $150 if it comes to that.

I used my toner vacuum here and blew out more stuff than i did at home. it's running at about 100F, which is well within what i would expect. It will display ok for BIOS and the Windows startup, but when it goes to load the OS it freaks out and goes black-screen.

 

It's an AMD Radeon 6870 HD from.. 2011

 

I got it into safe mode so at the very least i'm going to try to back up my wife's data without having to slave the drive to my dock.

[digdugnate]

I have seen these reports in Windows 10 for driver problems. Go directly to the manufacturer website and download the latest driver.

yup! that's what i'm doin.

[MrMaddog]

Ok, here's my rant about the latest upgrade...it completely breaks junction links meaning I can't use Steam Mover anymore (transfers Steam games to a different drive while Steam still thinks they're on the SSD drive). I had to move all my games to a different directory that Steam could use, so I won't be using any more 3rd party programs to manage my games library...

 

For those who care about tech details, Fall Creators broke junction links because M$ can't get them to work on One Drive. I can still make symbolic & hard links (like good ol' Linux) using the mklink command but A.) they have to be on the same drive and B.) must run CMD using administrator privages.

[Flojomojo]

It's an AMD Radeon 6870 HD from.. 2011

 

Good luck with the troubleshooting. I humbly submit that replacing that old card wouldn't be the worst thing a person could do for a gamer spouse. Such people should be respected and cherished.

[digdugnate]

her machine has a build date of 2011, so i'm planning on building a new one for her in 2018- i was just hoping that i could limp this one along until i did.

 

I suspect that i will end up replacing the vid card in it until i can totally replace it.

[Osgeld]

I had a 6870 after a while the ram gave up

 

there's something about that era of cards, I had a geforce GTX250 and after a while it pooed a ram chip so I got the 6870 and it lasted a couple years and pooed a ram chip (to be fair it was used)

[+OLD CS1]

Yeah, Radeons are actually pretty good for blowing RAM. Being that old, if an updated driver does not fix it then I would just replace it out-right. You can get cards on a similar level really inexpensively.

 

Windows 10 updates (specifically feature updates) tend to do nasty things to my customer computers. Things like reset the default PDF viewer, removing the Outlook icon in favor of Windows Mail which notes happily it now supports Exchange email, and a few other things. Junctions are another problem I have as well, but that also exists in Windows 7 for some stupid reason. I have to keep re-creating junctions to fix a couple of programs I run, but thankfully only every so often.

 

One BIG problem I have after major updates (releases) network issues. You can ping but cannot make connections. It literally takes three or four reboots to resolve. Annoying as hell.