PC Lock Up

[JackDownUnder]

I have had mine Trainz on a separate SSD for a couple of years.

I am beginning to suspect that this drive has problems. When saving my game it saves OK however when exiting and saving it often reports not enough space.

I will be taking to my PC service tech soon.

This is the current situation regarding changes that I have carried out in view of the extensive problems that I have been experiencing for a few months.

To eliminate PC locking up and seizure problems requiring a hard reboot to restart I have performed the following changes.

- decided to increase size of my C: drive to 1TB and put virtual memory back on this drive managed by Windows.
- due to continuing error messages warning that there was insufficient space to save route and session decided to replace the current 500GB SSD drive with 1TB one.
Copied all of the old drive to the new one and repointed the install to the new drive.
Also set up with video on max settings.
This drive also is where I retain all my Trainz knowledge
- video card cooling module was removed and reseated by my service tech with a minor increase in fan speed. this has resulted in CPU temperature hovering around 70 deg C.

This resulted in the best performance that I have experienced for a long while with frame rates exceeding 50.

There remains a continuing issue with slow redraws when selecting a different driver running my Session. This requires a manual Pause selection with an immediate cancelling of this function.

However I raise a couple of question concerning
- how much drive use is commandeered by the game during editing and running the session, in other words how much of the cache is written to the drive.
- why is there a lag with redraws

[johnwhelan]

You should keep the drive running at no more than 80% capacity. On an SSD the life expectancy is much greater for drives that have more space on them.

At the back of my mind trainz has an internal backup which can consume disk space but doesn't really do very much and it is possible to reduce the number of copies.

Have a dig and see what else is on the drive you maybe able to free some space up.

Cheerio John

[JCitron]

I would suspect the SSD as well. This is why I don't use one for data at all especially with a program such as Trainz which writes data a lot.

The cached data isn't so much an issue. What you want to watch is your backups folder. If you are concerned about space, you can limit the number of backups to a specific number of days. The default is 7-days not necessarily consecutively, but 7-backup-days. After that period, the program will delete the oldest of them. If you limit your backup to 3 or 4 days, that may work for you. I never thought about these folders until recently when I needed to scour them as I looked for something I stupidly deleted one time, and another time I ruined something that I needed to recover and successfully did so. In both cases, my backups I went to were about 4 days back.

[hert]

If you save the game and then try to save and exit pretty close to after doing this. Trainz says the file is in use (saw this in the trainz logs)and try's over and over to try and save and quit after about 40 times of this it finally says that there is no room on the SD to save. So sometimes just wait a few minutes between saving and quitting and saving. Or make sure you quit and save at the same time. Dont know if this is the case for you but this is what has happened to me.

[JackDownUnder]

Here is a follow up of my determinations in relation to PC lockup.
It all came down to overheating of the CPU, fan speed was increased and max temperature recorded to date is 82 degC.
There remains one other problem and that is the regeneration of the scene when changing to another driver during the Session.
I changed the setting under Dev, Compatibility mode from Maximum Compatibility to Maximum Performance.
These looked like it may solve the problem however the Driver Command Couple To stopped working.
Have reverted and the command now work.

[ColPrice2002]

HI,
Glad to hear your problem has been diagnosed.

I'd seriously suggest buying an enhanced cooler for the CPU. One of my previous PCs had toe stock PSU fan - Using TS2009 it just overheated and died! (The earlier Trainz programs were harder on the CPU than now!).
It's quite possible that the thermal paste (between the CPU and the heatsink) has hardened and isn't as effective as it could be.

Add a tube of good quality thermal paste, and a better CPU cooler to your PC and monitor temperatures closelr.
My i5-4670 is overclocked from 3.4GHz to 4.2Gz, but with liquid cooling it doesn't reach 50C

Colin

[JCitron]

That's great news regarding your PC hardware.

Unfortunately, until driver commands are updated completely, we need to run in compatibility mode, otherwise as you've found out, things don't work. It's not only driver commands that are affected. This issue applies to portals and other scripted assets as well.