M6400 Covet crashing in Maya

Hi there,

Sounds like a nightmare.
I run xsi, and maya and was thinking of picking up an M6400 for this reason. However I'm not getting a good feeling about reading this thread.

Somethings I'd try..

Get a normal mouse, then turn bluetooth and wifi off.. Test and report back.
Uninstall the video driver (go back to the default Vista one) test and report back.

I hope you sort this out..

Regards,
Simon

 

What exactly are you doing in Maya to make it crash? I am using Maya 2008 with out SP1 applied yet. I use Max more, but I am also constantly learning Maya as well. Does it crash if it is just open or is is something specific?

 

It's a very simple scene. Two character rigs with animation, and it's not even dense animation yet (because I've been fighting with the laptop instead of doing my work...) Three props that are simple polygon models. Total polygons visible 30,686, and 22,000 of those are a stationary firepit that I only added two days ago. No dynamics.

It crashes randomly and I could be interacting with the program in any way really. It's done it while I'm moving an object, while I'm resizing a window, moving a keyframe. There aren't really any scripts involved. It's the Norman rig that my school has been using as standard. Component highlights aren't coming into play because I'm not using components. Sometimes it has crashed with an empty scene. I only got the bluetooth mouse yesterday, and I've worked both with and without wifi on so those aren't a factor either. Uninstalling Dell's ControlPoint connection manager software did make an audio stuttering problem on the login screen go away, but the invalid hash on tcpip.sys remains and still sometimes coincides with a driver crash.

Specifically Maya is not crashing, the video drivers are rebooting, but Maya is unable to recover from that. I suspect the drivers are rebooting when some event within the system occurs while Maya is drawing the scene. If I say Maya crash, I'm slipping up and I really mean the video drivers are going down and then recovering.

I should warn the Maya users out there that I'm also having a lot of difficulty locating a codec that can be used for playblasts in Vista 64... No Cinepak available period, though I'm trying to get that changed... The only options so far are Microsoft RLE (terrible quality), Video 1 (bad quality), Intel IYUV (34 MB/sec) and Uncompressed. I can't even locate a freeware mjpeg or indeo.

EDIT:
The graphics drivers never crash when Maya is just sitting there open. I have to be interacting with it in some way, i.e. it will happen while my mouse is dragging something.

 

Have you tried turning off bluetooth and wifi?
Or uninstalling the drivers?

 

Yeah, it happens with or without bluetooth and wifi. I haven't uninstalled any drivers. I sort of doubt mouse drivers could have anything to do with it, and up until yesterday I was working with a normal mouse not bluetooth. Also there's only one Dell video driver so far... The driver that came on the laptop crashed almost instantly in maya, so I upgraded to the one they have now.

The jog/shuttle is always on when I'm working, but that just sends keyboard events when I touch it... Seems too basic to be killing drivers.

Aero interface is off. I'm set to Windows Classic with pretty much everything disabled except showing window contents while dragging. (It crashed a few times with that off so I just turned it back on.) The biggest thing I can do to change how often it crashes is changing power management settings on the PCI-e bus.

I'm thinking the only way to get real information would be for someone else to try Maya 2008 Ext. 2 on their M6400 with Quadro 3700, and see if it also dies or if it runs solid. If that happens, I know it's hardware and Dell will replace the card.

I did experience very strange Vista Aero glitches on window borders, title bars and the taskbar, out of the box. I'm starting to wonder about the hardware.

 

If I was you I'd ring Dell and kick off about it. You've just spent a HELL of a lot of money on this thing and it doesn't work, ask them to replace it or give you a refund.

Regards,
Simon

 

Well, they DID offer me that 10% monitor discount.

[/sarcasm]

 

Probably a stupid question, but are you running Vista Ultimate or Business 64? Autodesk's site is saying Maya only runs on Business... (same with Mudbox 2009 apparently)

Had no clue. Guess I gotta get a Business disc.

 

That makes no sense whatsoever. Did they specifically that it would not run in Ultimate, or did they simply forget to include Ultimate in the list of OS' it runs on?

 

Yeah its just weird. Here's the link:
http://usa.autodesk.com/adsk/servlet/index?siteID=123112&id=7639522