Diagnosing Computer Crashes

[DougLorenz]

DougLorenz: Does Reliability History give you any info ? You can click on previous days and it gives you the errors from that day. You can then double click on each event to see what it is about.

Other than that, as as been said before, it's likely to be drivers or hardware. You just have to rule them out one by one. For example:

1. If it freezes once a day, and you suspect overheating, take the side off the pc and leave a fan blowing air into it. Did that change the time to the crash ?
2. Are there any exclamation marks in "Device Manager" ?
3. Does this pc have built in diagnostics at BIOS level ? If so, run them all.

Please note that if you think I am trying to teach you to suck eggs, it is only because I am trying to help you, but I don't know how techy you are !

I have used software such as Sisoft Sandra to do burn-in tests on faulty pc's, but if you use that, be aware that it can finish off a failing pc. Reliability History, if it can help, is a very low risk, and easy way to see what is happening to your pc.

As they used to tell Sparky Tim down t'pit "If you can't fix it with a hammer, it's an electrical problem.". Such wise words

I ran the built in diagnostics, which came back fine. No problems in device manager, and the time and regularity of the crashes are inconsistent.

I'm good with the extended details in your suggestions. I used to be a computer tech many years ago, and I understand the stuff well, but there are always things that can be learned. I didn't know about windows 10's "Reliability History", but probably should have. Additionally, this is all being saved on this discussion forum for other people, so might as well write for a more inclusive audience anyway.

I think I might look into Sisoft Sandra. If a burn in test is capable of smoking my Blue Iris system, then I'd expect that just running Blue Iris on that computer 24/7 would kill it in a few months anyway... I'd prefer to know.

[MikeBwca]

Take a look at "Reliability History". Type it into the search bar. It keeps a record of failures. That was one of my biggest helpers in my recent pc fiasco.

OMG! Amazing. This will help a lot. Thanks Tim.

[cosmokaoz]

I have the same issue I've sent a message to support and they just say to change the service account from Local System with my own account which makes no sense.
It happened again yesterday in BI version 5.3.2.2 for me and have no recordings for the last 36hours+.
Thankfully I have BI v4 running as a backup which has been rock solid.
But this is a constant annoyance going to the server just check if it's up or to start the service because it crashed and even the windows service recovery actions do not seem to be working.

I've installed the latest copy of the VS C++ Redistributable to see if it helps as seems to be an issue with their library but it did not work.

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/hel ... -downloads

I've ended doing some very simple watcher Windows PowerShell script to start the service if is offline and sleeps in between.
Just make sure to run it as an Administrator in order to be able to start the service.
--- Ensure-BlueIris.ps1 --

Code: Select all

while($true) {
    echo "Ensuring BlueIris is up"
    $s = Get-Service BlueIris
    if ($s.Status -ne 'Running') {
        echo "BlueIris service is not running. status: $($s.Status)"
        Start-Service BlueIris
        echo "BlueIris service has been started."
    }
    else {
        echo "BlueIris service is already up. status: $($s.Status)"
    }
    sleep 60
}

---

[TimG]

I have the same issue I've sent a message to support and they just say to change the service account from Local System with my own account which makes no sense.

Hi, if the response came from Ken, then there is normally a very good reason behind the advice; after all, he is the BI5 author. I would ask for clarification on why he thinks it will help. And let us know the response

[cosmokaoz]

I did change it to my own user even though it doesn't make sense and I still get the same failures so I have no real solution until something gets fixed. I'll play around with the settings of both BI5 and the configuration of the VM (maybe less processors) to see if something gets it fixed for me and report otherwise at some point I'll re-install windows and set everything from scratch to remove any weirdness that might be there.

I don't know if there are any commonality on the system setup I think it might be worth mentioned how I'm running BI5:
- Hyper-V Virtual Machine
- Windows 10 OS
- 12GB RAM (~57% utilization)
- 32 vCPUs (~13% utilization)
- the database and alerts are in an NVME disk
- the OS (256GB) and Videos (20TB) are in a very fast spinning disks array (8 Disk RAID 6) with a 3 tier cache at the host [8GB RAM / 35GB NvME / 2GB Raid Card]

[cosmokaoz]

Seems like version 5.3.5.1 the issues has been fixed as I have not seen the issue for more than a week which is pretty unusual.

I have not upgraded just because it seems stable now!

I'll upgrade when they fix the Push Notifications showing the images when on the same LAN.

Good luck to you guys!

cheers