re: Mup.sys? Hangs but not? Wha's happening?
Saturday, February 14, 2004 at 1:47 am
Windows XP Annoyances Discussion Forum
Posted by dan
(1 messages posted)
DING DING DING!!!
absolutely right my man. For fear of coming off as though i have an authoritative
knowledge on the subject, i'll disclaim, i probably do not. However, i am somewhat
of a seasoned vet to these types of winxp errors. (believe me, i only wish i was
not)
I'm actually in the process of reinstalling XP on my trouble machine (mup.sys being
the main problem among hundreds of others) and i finally seem to have cracked the
code on this one. I had abandoned the revival, after weeks of frustration with
it. But due to my internet computer failing, and the one i'm currently on being
a loaner laptop, i'm determined to get this thing going. It's an AMD thunderbird
1.1ghz from like 2000 or 1999. IT was a hell hole since day one, and oddly
enough, the most stable it's been was sporting win ME, back in 2000! HAH.
ok anyway, my point of reitteration is DRAWING POWER TO THE COMPONENTS.
we all know this is a hardware issue right? Well, if you get right down to the logic
of hardware, there's only a few things that can actually make a tested and Q.C'd.
peice of computer electronics fail. and that's either mechanical failure, overheating
to extremes, or intermittent power issues. I suppose there are a few other exceptions
but those are the big 'uns.
So you can probably guess that a computer that's been working fine for 19 months
or whatever, isn't having an overheating issue. And since the only moving parts
are the fans and the harddrives, and the harddrives are pretty much the last thing
to blame in this particular issue, you know it's not them. Plus like others have
said, they knew the harddrives were good.
So what really needs to be looked at, is the amount of power everything in your system
is getting and how the power is getting there. Unfortunately, we'd like to think
this kind of electrical engineering background would be completely unneccessary to
operate and troubleshoot home user computers...but there's no way around the backbone
of the matter. Everything needs a certain amount of power to function properly,
too little or too much and things start to behave eratically! makes sense, no?
This is why overclockers and cpu/ram geeks have messageboards dedicated to plugging
in the correct amount of draw ratios and levels for their overclocking thirsts.
And it's why even reviewers of said rams and processors always say something like
"now, we DID experience strange issues when we tried to run it at 5:4 with blah blah
bus speeds etc"
That's raw electrical malfunction in place. it's not PROGRAMMED to act that way
with certain settings selected in in the bios.
Ok, i'll end that rant, i think you see where i'm going, E.E. people, back me up
or shut me down, can't see the failure in that logic though.
What finally seemed to fix my occurance of mup.sys hanging (for lack of a more technically
correct name for the phenomenon, since it's not mup's fault at all) was remembering
that i had messed with the RAM settings in a desperate attempt to get something to
trigger action. I had shut off paging mode for instance and another key operating
change i'm not sure of (though it shouldn't matter because it's not like having them
on or off is a default good or bad thing. it's all relative to what your mobo and
specific ram NEED) IN ADDITION
i had pumped my cpu clock speed way way down in case it was an overheating
issue or just a "moving too fast for it's own good" issue. Which MOST CERTAINLY
DOES OCCUR.
so i pumped the bus speed back up and enabled all the average options for ram (without
selecting default or optimum, because my bios version of default and optimum does
more bad than good.
However, that's exactly why those of you who said "i selected optimum or default
bios settings and it started right up" had success. You reenabled or disabled the
options of your internal mobo components that draw away or reject all that power
that is being fed to it. And it's also why the guy who updated his psu had luck.
Ofcourse you need to send these amd systems a ton of juice. they're overclocking
systems.
By the way, has anyone noticed yet that almost EVERY SYSTEM listed here with this
problem is an AMD??? i'm not shit-slinging amd's. i'm not sure i personally trust
them for this reason, but at the same time, its a relative issue.
it's just that these boards are crazy about power and power distribution. Both the
XPs as well as my thunderbird series whatever the chipset is. They are known for
tweaking out the most when being messed around with in overclocking arenas. still,
the XPs are designed TO BE overclocked.
and that's what supports my hunch that it's actually BETTER for the stability of
the system to draw a decent to hefty amount of power to your memory and your processor.
It wants to see that power and when it's not getting it, i dunno, maybe the capacitors
chosen are of a finicky higher voltage and so they only operate correctly on high,
i dunno, but something doesn't quite sit right until you're really eating up power
across the board.
this is just what i have found in my experience but also in what seems to be the
biggest causes for other users experience in all kinds of messageboard topics.
don't get me wrong. i'm not saying "go into your bios and crank the amps to 11 !!"
i'm saying, make sure you check what patrick here checked. Make sure you're using
a decent amount of power as a first solution attempt. But also, check out the ram
settings. maybe your ram isn't supporting the bios options. i know mine only supports
8/10 ms latency (my bios is spotty so that's the only actual numeric option i have
besides turbo etc)
you can usually tell if it's not supporting it, if it freezes right in bios or if
your video won't initialize at all causing you to have to reset the bios. Same ofcourse
goes with overclocking the bus speeds.
It wasn't causing "mup.sys" to be unstable though, it was causing the rest of your
hardware to be unstable and so when XP starts initializing (you know that's what's
really happening at that stage of boot, right?) all this extra hardware, it gets
bummed out by SOME kind of intermittent reaction and it's intermittent because of
the power distribution.
Only one other thing to mention, i also changed my agp card to a shitty old PCI
card because i all ready know my agp bus in this system to be REAL troublesome.
AND AGP cards are notorious for causing blue screens (especcially ATI, which lucky
for me is all the agp cards i have around, and you can forget about me getting my
radeon 8500 to work on this crapbox. that card brings enough solid systems to their
knees as it is. )
So why do agp cards kill so many systems? well because of the inherent design of
the M.O. of AGP busses. That's why there are 3 different genres of AGP: 1.5 volt.
3.5 volt and 5 volt. Most require a card that only adheres to its' own voltage or
else it won't even run it. This is probably a good thing for stability, but a horrible
thing for unsuspecting consumers who assume an AGP is an AGP.
You see the difference betwix the three. voltage. current. power consumption.
and it's all tied directly to the system bus rails. That's why it performs so well.
It doesn't have to be bogged down by the rest of the pci slots sagging the power
as each device grabs a'hold an electrical teet to teeth from.
black & white: before doing anything crazy, check your clock speed settings and
the paging settings and everything that goes along with it. read up on them if you're
unsure.
and then if power changes don't work, swap your video card to a PCI slot card.
I know it sucks, but at least you'll know what's going on and can either try a different
agp card (steering clear of ati, just for bad voodoo sake) or aquire a high quality
pci card if it doesn't cramp your style too much.
ALSO, before swapping video cards, try adjusting the AGP settings in the advanced
bios settings. Things like multiplier factor are all just meddling with the power
flow!
ok sorry if that was too long winded, but i felt i had to reitterate that this is
not a driver issue or a simple "microsoft sucks" issue.. though i'm not opponent
to the microsoft sucks school of thought. ;-)
good luck
On Friday, February 13, 2004 at 4:20 pm, Patrick wrote:
>last week my xp1800 went down due to the mup.sys error, I was running win2k at the
>time, my IT friends considered it a partition failure and we rebuilt the machine
>using XP.
>
>Yesterday it fell over again with mup.sys hanging, I tried a new MB,new videocard,
>different ram, updated bios, plugged,unplugged everything... still mup.sys hang
reboot.
>
>I put the orginal MB back in with everything as it was and then increased the Core
>voltage from 1.74 to 1.85 and it is running stable.
>
>There was nothing above that matched what I did, but I can only offer how I fixed
>my problem, I have 4 usb ports sucking power so I figure thats what was dropping
>the core voltage, causing the mup.sys to become unstable.
>
>
>
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