[chromecity]

Hi folks,

I'm trying to slag it out with Vista (32-bit) on a quad-core machine with 3.4GB RAM available to C4D & M~R. The problem I'm encountering is that Vista won't just look the other way and let the scene conversion take place if it's at all a complex scene. I'm not talking city blocks of complexity, but something a little bit complicated with a couple dozen materials to convert and so forth. It seems like Vista only wants to let it sit there for something like 30 seconds before it jumps in and tells me that Cinema 4D has "stopped working". At that point, it gives me no mechanism to tell Vista to just quit bothering me about it and I cannot get back to Cinema 4D's interface since the Vista message acts like a modal dialog in front of Cinema 4D's window. I've let it sit that way for a good 30 minutes, but it seems like once Vista interrupts, there's no hope of anything else being able to continuing processing back at the C4D/M~R side of things. This is the most paranoid operating system I have ever encountered but rather than just complain about it, I'm trying to persevere and figure out what work-arounds might be out there. Is there a way to tell Vista to quit watch-dogging my process?

[chromecity]

Here's the message that Vista pops. Neither choice leads to anything other than Vista ending my Cinema 4D process.

[Bogdan Coroi]

That's a Vista crash window. It tells you that C4D has crashed. It has nothing to do with Vista being paranoid. It's a C4D crash.

[chromecity]

Thanks for your reply, Bogdan. Over the years (I've been using Vista since several of the beta incarnations), I've seen that same window or other similar ones come up many times for various reasons and often a little while later they will just go away as the process becomes responsive enough for it to stop thinking it was a crash.

If it indeed is a genuine crash in this circumstance, then I'll have to try to narrow down what in my scene is causing it. I still have a decent amount of memory available, so it's not running out of that. But I'm concerned that it is just deemed unresponsive by Vista, and then the state that Vista creates causes things not to be able to finish processing.

I'm certainly open to the idea that there is an actual crash, but diagnosing that will take some more work on my end. Is there a way to attach a debugger to the crashed process when that happens, like in XP?

[Fernando Tella]

The X button closes C4D too?

[chromecity]

Hi Fernando. Yes, unfortunately, the X button also causes C4D to close instantly. Of course, if this is all the result of a genuine crash as Bogdan believes, then there's not really any C4D process left to go back to.

[Bogdan Coroi]

For debugging purposes, you can use any application that can attach itself to a process, based on its PID, and save its memory state in a dump file. You can use UserDump or Debugging tools for windows, since they're free and powerful. After that, if you're not a assembler guy, you'll need somebody to interpret the dump file for you and tell you in English what caused the crash. Here is a tutorial that teaches you how to set UserDump as a default postmortem debugger. Also, it saves you a dump file of the crashed process. I recommend WinDbg since it's easier to use than a command line debugger.

Regarding the paranoid Vista, maybe it's e better idea to switch UAC off if you haven't done it yet.

[chromecity]

Hi Bogdan,

Thanks for the debug info. I'll check that stuff out.

And believe me, shutting down UAC was about the first thing I did. I still have all sorts of odd things that it tells me I cannot do, but that's outside the scope of my M~R usage. I'm definitely not a Vista fan and am just trying to make do with it until I can afford a nice 8-core Mac Pro.

[Rochr]

Vista is unbelievably bad in oh so many ways. I would have a hard time finding even one feature to be an improvement over XP.

I´m just a little curious, why run a 32-bit OS on a quad?

If i were in your shoes, i´ld grab a cheap copy of XP64 and get myself a solid and properly working OS.
There were a few links posted here where you could get a legit license for as little as $50.
Just a thought.

[chromecity]

Hi Rochr,

As a developer by day, I have access to all the O/S licenses I want already. So the cost of any MS O/S doesn't even factor in. XP 64 doesn't get me too excited at this point because it was essentially a stopgap measure that's not going to receive a whole lot of new development. And being 64-bits, several of the plug-ins for C4D apparently won't work with it. Of course, my initial reason for going to a different O/S was to jump to 64-bits. But now that I know the motherboard of this quad doesn't support more than 4GB of RAM, that took a lot of my motivation away from that effort. I'll make sure that the next computer's motherboard doesn't have that issue. But for the time being, I'm making do with Vista 32-bits which shows 3.4GB of memory available to C4D/M~R. Even that is far more than I ever had under XP. (I mentioned a little earlier that 3 GB switch always had problems on my previous XP Pro 32-bit machine).

So now I just have to battle Vista's idiosyncrasies (of which it has a seemingly endless amount) into submission and figure out workarounds as needed. Fortunately, in this communication age, we have the web to help hunt down a lot solutions for issues that other people have already successfully overcome.

Regarding the initial post I made in this thread, it turns out that something about my C4D scene was causing M~R to essentially crash or hang, and that's what the system message was trying to tell me (as was verified by other posters - thanks). I spent a lot of time paring down that scene into different portions hoping to find a particular mesh or material that was causing the problem. Unfortunately, it wasn't that cut and dry. But there were a few different combinations that clearly caused the problem and a few that did not, so I do have some ideas about where I might be able to revise things in hopes of getting the scene back to a workable M~R state.

BTW, this post was entered using Leopard 10.5.