VIZ4 Disappearing act

[Psychoscorpic]

Anybody else out there have problems with VIZ simply disappearing while you're working? Beginning to happen with annoying frequency lately (2 or 3x a day!)

No opportunity to Save - you're suddenly just looking at the desktop.

 

Also getting Visual C++ crashes from VIZ.

 

First going to re-install Anti-virus, then, failing that, going to do a re-install of VIZ.

 

I'd like to avoid this if there is a known issue/solution.

[Eric]

Have you noticed it happening when you roll the wheel on your mouse (assuming you have one)? Mine crashes frequently while rolling that thing. I customized my controls to disable the wheel function. That seemed to help.

[Iain Denby]

Have you got the latest service pack?

[Psychoscorpic]

Thanks for the replies, Eric, Dibbers.

 

Never occurred to me that the mouse might be involved - I'll be alert to that.

Running Ver.4.2 SP2 Commercial

[Jim Albea]

I recently worked on a machine that was doing the sudden crash. I fixed it by switching the Viz dispaly driver from OpenGL to HEIDI.

--

Jim

[Psychoscorpic]

Thanks Jim. I am running Heidi.

 

I borrowed another 128Mb from someone else's machine, bringing my total to 640Mb.

This made running Radiosity Solutions stable, and Rendering up to 1024x768.

However, trying to Render 2048x1536 or Walkthrough animations still crashes.

Also, the RPC trees get that stupid dark panel effect again (equalising contrast in Exposure control fixed it for lower resolutions).

 

Getting seriously frustrated here!

[Richard McCarthy]

I am not sure what causes your problem but I also had some problem with my computer last week which result in me formatting my hard disk to get rid of the trojan/virus. It only took me less than 20 minutes to get everything back to normal, by putting an image of my perfectly optimised hard disk back in. I highly recommend you make an "image" of your hard disk with software like Norton Ghost or Acronis trueImage. I highly recommend Acronis trueImage, it's FAST, compress your HDD/partition VERY VERY well, and it's SOoooo easy to use compare to Norton Ghost.

 

 

http://www.acronis.com

 

So, next time, if you have one of those day where computer ain't working, no worries, just pop in your backup HDD CDs, move your precious data files (remember this!! important to somewhere else, and go make a cup of coffee, your computer will be good as new in no time

[Psychoscorpic]

Thanks Richard.

 

Unlikely to be a virus - I'm running inside a well protected network (famous last words!!)

 

However - I think I found the problem: Seems last time one of the Techies fiddled in my machine, he set the Page File WAY too low. Discovered yesterday that it was set to:

Initial: 128Mb, Max: 384Mb.

Should be, for 640Mb RAM:

Initial: 960Mb, Max: 1024Mb+

 

Since I reset this, it has been stable again!

(I'll now go back to my machine and find it blue-screened?! The Eternal Pessimist)

[Fermi Bertran]

When setting the swap file, it's better to make intial = total amount, to allow the swap file be built whole at boot time, it continuous disk space preferably, and not make the system try to rebuild it in the middle of some stressful operation (VIZ does stress the system)