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Win7x86 Crash Dubbed "Disco Screen"
Here is a video of the dreaded "Disco Screen" : Win7x86 Crash. Dubbed "Disco Screen" - YouTube
I've been dealing with this issue for 3 weeks. Now it's time to solicit the help of you fine folk
History: We order about 25 ACER VM6630G computers a month. As of December 2013, the manufacturer made a change- they "upgraded" the CPU from an i3-3220 to an i3-3240. Since this change we've seen a failure we've dubbed as the "Disco Screen" on about 5 of 28 computers (~18%). I'm not positive this change is the smoking gun as we may have a (unconfirmed) case of an older, i3-3220 machine, exhibiting the issue.
Symptom: The machine will become unresponsive, displaying a rainbow of rapidly changing solid colors, followed by shutting off. In this time, there is no BSOD. There is no kernel dump. Just dance party.
I've had the following failed machine, sent from a customer, on a bench since 1/28/2014
Machine running:
- Acer VM6620G
- - i3-3240, 4GB RAM, 500GB hard drive
- Win7x86 w/ Windows updates until 11/12/13
- National Instruments LABVIEW
- Communicating with a Galil Motion Controller over Ethernet Via Intel Gigabit CT desktop adapter
- Aquiring Point Grey Firefly Firewire camera feed via NI Vision Acquisition module through Point Gray Research Firewire PCI card (ACC-01-1000)
The following are my steps taken so far:
Tuesday, 01-28-2014: 11:50am
- Started PC on bench running as close to failure conditions as possible.
Friday, 01-31-2014 8:00am
- Came in to find machine off.
- Unexpected shutdown on 01/30/2014 @ 4:51pm (via event viewer)
- - Ran for 2 days, 5 hours
- Set up to run again over weekend
Monday, 02-03-2014 7:30am
- Came in to find machine off
- Unexpected shutdown on 02-02-2014 @ 12:20am
- - Ran for 1 day, 16 hours
8:00am- Started burn in software (Furmark/prime95) to test CPU/GPU
Tursday, 02-06-2014 10:00am
- Stopped burn in -Total burn-in run time: 3 days, 2 hours
- returned machine to previous test conditions (did not restart)
Monday, 02-10-2014 7:30am
- Came in to find machine off
- Unexpected shutdown on 02/09/2014 @ 10:34pm
- - ran for 6 days, 3 hours
Tuesday, 2-11-2014 8:30am
- Installed Intel Video Drivers (Win32_15338)
- - Old driver rev- 9.18.10.3071 Date: 03/19/2013
- - New driver rev-10.18.10.3345 Date: 10/31/2013
3:00pm- Started Intel Extreme Tuning Utility CPU Burn
- Furmark 1.12 burn-in test w/ settings:
- Dynamic Background
- Burn-in
- Xtreme Burn-in
- Post-FX
- Logging Temperature to file
Wednesday, 2-12-2014 7:30am
- Started Prime 95 w/torture test (Previous burn-in still running. Burn, baby, burn.)
3:15pm- clicked on System clock in taskbar. Video driver seemed to crash, leaving the display @600x400, focused on calender.
- system ran for 24 hours
3:45pm- Started verifier w/
- Create Custom Settings (For code developers)
- select individual settings from a full list
- enabled everything but low resouce simulation
- selected all drivers but Microsoft
- Starting NI Software immediately crashes system with nipalk.sys Stop: 0x000000c4
- Tested this 3x
- unchecked NI drivers from list
- software now runs. left for the night
Thursday, 02-13-2014 (today)
- Machine still running when I came in (7:30am)
- Went to use SF_Diagnostic_tool, came back, machine is off.
- unexpected shutdown @ 8:16am
At this point, it's taking too much time to diagnose and/or fix. Steps I'm going to take I'm going take from now: going to take an image of the machine then put on a factory default ACER image and see of that will run without failure. If not, I'll take out all cards, then try to work backwards. I'm starting to think it might be a windows update that I installed in November of last year? Honestly, I don't know....