Bought a new Dell 5i 650 with Win7 just for renderingpurposes,

so in the evening I left my office with the computer on, rendering away happily with 3 instances of AM.

When I came back next morning eager to see last nights work:

the computer had restarted, because of some update, so everything was lost. Arrrg! Dam Microsoft!

That`s so badly programmed!.

Next I retried and coming back after several hours found the computer in some kind of sleeping mode,
had to reenter my password and am not sure, if the computer had rendered on in the meamtime

well, guess there`s some solution for everything.....

Just wanted to share my frustrations...;>)

Oh thats annoying ,I have all that stuff ask first .I hate it doing things auto

Good thing you were rendering out to sequential images.
This is a perfect example of why everyone should do that.

Turn off auto update...... Its on by default.

And change your render options settings. Set sleep to never.

i was just thinking that too

>And change your render options settings. Set sleep to never.

<Can`t find this.
Is this a joke?

I don't have Win7, but in WinXP it is called "Power Options" in the Control Panel. You can set how much time of inactivity passes before the computer turns off the monitor, turns off the hard disks, or puts the computer into standby.

I recommend setting "Turn Off Disks" to "Never". I got an error once a long time ago while rendering a large image that was taking many hours to render. After some time, my computer turned off the hard disk and A:M couldn't do something it needed to do so the render crashed. When I made sure the hard disk is never turned off, I didn't have any more problems with that.

I have auto updates off on everything.
I did run into a problem with crappy Adobe updating flash when I don't even have the Adobe updater on my system!!!!!
Apparently they run it like some sort of back door hack on your system. When I cancelled it from trying to update it made my system very unstable and crashed me.

I since uninstalled flash components completely from the system including ALL registry entries and did just a single install for Firefox.

Unfortunate part of Dell, HP and others is they load the systems up with garbage including trial ware and bury tons of garbage in a hidden partition on the HD.

If I were to buy one of those systems it is almost worth deep 6'n the entire system and do a clean install of just the essential drivers etc and go from there.

Same with my new Acer Aspire laptop - I spend 4 hours uninstalling all the crap that they put on there - Trails or not. If I didn't need it - I uninstalled it. Thats why I prefer to build my own system rather than buy something off the shelf.

Cheers

Only real benefit of a prebuilt besides the ease is the warranty and most reputable builders will burn in the components so your more likely not replacing memory and other parts 3 months down the road. Costs between self built and one made by someone else are usually comparable.

One thing you really need to keep in mind when reformatting is making sure you have the proper drivers before you wipe the drive. There are subtle variations between models and even models over a period of just a few months.

A really nice uninstaller is the Revo found here:
http://www.revouninstaller.com/

This is far more thorough than the built in uninstaller and even has a sweet little hunter mode allowing you to uninstall poorly written apps that don't have an uninstaller of their own.

> don't have Win7, but in WinXP it is called "Power Options" in the Control Panel. You can set how much time of inactivity passes before the computer turns off the monitor, turns off the hard disks, or puts the computer into standby.

I recommend setting "Turn Off Disks" to "Never". I got an error once a long time ago while rendering a large image that was taking many hours to render. After some time, my computer turned off the hard disk and A:M couldn't do something it needed to do so the render crashed. When I made sure the hard disk is never turned off, I didn't have any more problems with that.


<Thank you, that helped a lot!

I tend to keep my fiddelings with the technical side of computers to a minimum to rather invest this time into
the creative process...

That`s why I wouldn`t build a computer myself....

I just built my own system and I got a lot of satifaction when completed.... right up to the part where I discovered my video card needed to be returned....