MediaLab freezes, running on Vista

[jarvis24]

This is really useful information. I agree it certainly sounds like some kind of memory issue--especially if closing and restarting MediaLab allows for the "count" to reset. My only remaining question is whether this also depends on some specific content in the experiment (i.e., a 3-way OS x #Items x Content interaction) or a simple 2-way OS x #Items interaction. Without seeing the content of your questionnaires I can't say. But one way to tell would be to administer a 200 item questionnaire, with the most basic content possible--say 200 instruction items. I've attached such a sample que file. Would you mind running it on your system and see if the result is the same?

[braseg]

The 200 item questionnaire freezes right after instruction item number 156 (every time, for three consecutive trials).

[jarvis24]

OK, that's hugely useful info. I don't think I asked you this yet--is this happening on multiple machines or is it unique to this single Vista machine?

[braseg]

The same thing happens on every Vista-loaded machine in the lab (n=8)

[Jasper Wijnen]

We have the exact same thing. 6 Vista laptops. Medialab freezes after item 150 or so. The experiment runs fine on any XP PC. When the sequence of questionnaires is changed Medialab will freeze on a different trial. Splitting up the experiment in 2 parts and restarting Medialab between the 2 sections resolves the issue.

[EDONNY]

We are experiencing the same problem in our lab on our vista computer. We seem to have maybe gotten further than item 150 (though I am not sure exactly how many items were complete), however, we experience the same purple freezing screen. If we do the exit code immediately (ctrl,alt,right arrow) we can save the data we have accumulated so far, but if other buttons are pressed, we have to ctrl, alt, delete out and lose all data. The funny thing is that we are experiencing the same problem with a machine that came with vista, but was later switched to XP??? Is it something about the vista computers and not necessarily the OS itself???

[jarvis24]

Did you do a clean install of XP on this machine that used to have Vista? e.g., first formatting the hard drive? If so, that is super odd and, yes, I would expect that would be a hardware issue. Would be curious to see the dxdiag.txt files from all these machines to compare their hardware.

For info on how to generate a dxdiag.txt file:
www.empirisoft.com/support/showthread.php?t=75