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Crashed Ward Computer

Posted: Sun Feb 07, 2010 4:27 pm
by krhellyer
So our ward computer crashed 2 weeks ago, and we finally got the new one on Thursday. Our finance clerk had to resubmit all of the tithing for December and January, so it appears all of the financial stuff is current and up to date.

However, we were noticing throughout the day today that we have certain members records who are not showing up in MLS. Information has been transmitted to and from Salt Lake a number of times since Thursday, but these members who were and are in our wards have gone missing from MLS.

How do we fix this?? Thanks!

Posted: Sun Feb 07, 2010 5:18 pm
by aebrown
krhellyer wrote:So our ward computer crashed 2 weeks ago, and we finally got the new one on Thursday. Our finance clerk had to resubmit all of the tithing for December and January, so it appears all of the financial stuff is current and up to date.

However, we were noticing throughout the day today that we have certain members records who are not showing up in MLS. Information has been transmitted to and from Salt Lake a number of times since Thursday, but these members who were and are in our wards have gone missing from MLS.

How do we fix this?? Thanks!
Request a Unit data refresh.

Posted: Sun Feb 07, 2010 5:38 pm
by krhellyer
I'll give it a shot. Thanks!

Crashed?

Posted: Sun Feb 07, 2010 6:15 pm
by drepouille
I am always interested when someone says a computer crashed, because I can't tell exactly what happened. Is the hard drive unreadable, or can it be inserted into another computer to rescue the data files?

If the hard drive is physically OK, is the file system corrupted?
If the file system is OK, is Windows corrupted?

I have been collecting hard drives that I have verified are physically defective and unrecoverable. The percentage of physically bad hard drives is really quite small.

Anyway, I am curious what is meant by "crashed" in this case.

Dana

Posted: Mon Feb 08, 2010 7:03 am
by MorettiDP
I have another hard problem related. I'm the STS in our stake and a strong rain killed the computer of one of our wards. Brazilian Dell Support can't help me because the machines are purchased in Brazil with a worldwide contract with Dell in USA and I can't know what is the corporate name the Church used to sign the contract with Dell. Without this name we can't request support to call a technician. Anyone in the Brazil Area ICS office are available to help me... and the ward returned to the old weekly donations form for this week.

Posted: Mon Feb 08, 2010 7:36 am
by iamdavid
As often as not, when a Windows based PC "crashes", the problem lies in the RAM. I find RAM can be damaged by a whole range of things, including not properly shutting down the PC before 'killing' it with the wall switch!!

For the sake of this discussion, our DELL is getting close to being crashed now so far as performance is concerned. It's just so slow and MLS takes ages to open. Additionally last week I had to reboot the machine to get a clean start (probably after someone kill-switching the machine) and it actually took half an hour to get Windows up and MLS running. I closed it down properly Friday and it booted up OK Sunday but remains extremely slow operating.

Did the Church specify a particularly retarded CPU/OS mix or is there something uniquely demanding about the MLS-Afaria system? It's tempting to complain to the STS but when I briefly mentioned bad RAM he was oddly non-commital. All this to say, my DELL acted like it was 'crashing' but responded eventually to being: booted up; properly shut down via Windows; re-booted; and MLS being allowed sufficient time to start and get its breath back.

But if the problem is just 'Windows will not load', the cause is very often bad RAM. Windows will NOT load if it doesn't have good RAM.

Thrashing

Posted: Mon Feb 08, 2010 4:13 pm
by drepouille
WenU wrote:Did the Church specify a particularly retarded CPU/OS mix or is there something uniquely demanding about the MLS-Afaria system? It's tempting to complain to the STS but when I briefly mentioned bad RAM he was oddly non-commital.

You don't have bad RAM. You just don't have enough RAM.
Look at the Commit Charge on the Performance tab of Task Manager. If you are using much more memory than the amount of installed physical memory, the system will start to thrash as it swaps pages between RAM and the paging file on disk.

Our GX-270 systems came with 256MB. That was enough until we installed Desktop 5.5, which included Symantec Anti-Virus, a resource hog.

You should have switched from SAV to Sophos by now, but I'm not sure if that will speed things up if you still only have 256MB or less of physical memory installed. You need at least 512MB.

Dana

FM

Posted: Mon Feb 08, 2010 4:14 pm
by drepouille
MorettiDP wrote:i have another hard problem. I'm the STS in our stake and a strong rain killed the computer of one of our wards. Brazilian Dell Support can't help me because the machines are purchased in Brazil with a worldwide contract with Dell in USA and I can't know wjat is the corporate name the Church used to sign the contract with Dell. Without this name we can't request support to call a technician. Anyone in the Brazil Area ICS office can help me... and the war returned to the old weekly donations form.

You probably need to contact your local Facilities Management office.

A program called "memtest86" can test RAM.

Posted: Mon Feb 08, 2010 6:10 pm
by rmrichesjr
WenU wrote:As often as not, when a Windows based PC "crashes", the problem lies in the RAM. I find RAM can be damaged by a whole range of things, including not properly shutting down the PC before 'killing' it with the wall switch!!

...
Dana.Repouille wrote:You don't have bad RAM. You just don't have enough RAM.
...
If there is reason to believe the RAM is actually bad, you can test the RAM on many/most PCs by running a program called memtest86. It's best to run memtest86 directly from the BIOS. While I imagine there are other places to get it, one place is to download a Mandriva Linux installation ISO, find another ISO image called "boot.iso" in the "images" directory inside the larger ISO. Burn "boot.iso" to a CD and boot from it. Select memtest86 from the menu and let it run for several hours.

Posted: Mon Feb 08, 2010 7:18 pm
by krhellyer
Dana.Repouille wrote:I am always interested when someone says a computer crashed, because I can't tell exactly what happened. Is the hard drive unreadable, or can it be inserted into another computer to rescue the data files?

If the hard drive is physically OK, is the file system corrupted?
If the file system is OK, is Windows corrupted?

Anyway, I am curious what is meant by "crashed" in this case.

Dana

I'm definitely not a computer guru, but our Stake IT guy first told us that our Hard Drive had "crashed". Later, we were being told that our "mother board" was also toast and nothing was recoverable and the entire needed to be replaced. I don't know enough about computers to verify or doubt what I was told, so we just waited until we got a new computer.

Sorry I couldn't be any more descriptive on what the problems were.