Sooo, I need help.

[Ford 1st MRB]

This one is a lil' tricky, good luck.

A while back I purchased Band of Brothers on BluRay. I let a friend borrow it, his son literally destroyed the disc 1. When I say destroyed, I mean destroyed. It was in several pieces.

So, I went surfing the net and found a torrent for the 1080p version, started the download which is like 45GB, left it running while I went to work.

I get home, to find the torrent is sitting at 96.3% and there is an error message in my system tray:

ERROR: Semaphore timeout period has expired. The torrent cannot be downloaded.

I clicked resume, the transfer started up again, and stopped about a minute later:

ERROR: Semaphore timeout period has expired. The torrent cannot be downloaded.

Rinse, repeat, about 15 times.

Then, things get fun. Now, I get random freezes, for 5 - 10 seconds. It's like my CPU is trying to catch it's breath, so everything freezes, my mouse, keyboard, everything. Then, it just goes back to normal.

Naturally I freaked out.

I searched and scoured looking for resolutions to this problem.

So far i have:

Restored to an earlier system restore point.

Flashed my BIOS

Installed new Video, Ethernet, and Sound Drivers for the hell of it.

Flashed my Hard Drives.

Ran a Memory stress test.

Did a full system scan including the files I was downloading.

Did a full system stress test to check for any failing devices.

Reset my modem about umpteen thousand times.

Nothing.

No errors, no failing devices, all drivers up to date and functioning normally.

Now I should mention, my PC only freezes when I'm trying to finish this stupid torrent, which is now at 98.7%, and I don't want to start over. When it freezes, I get the error message again, and have to resume the torrent. It has frozen about 35 times in the time it has taken me to type this.

Any help would be appreciated, since I don't even know what a semaphore is in the first place.

HELP ME!!!

[Zahl 1st MRB]

I would beat your friends kid

[B. Farr]

lol, I'll d/l it for ya and mail ya the disc, then beat the kid for ya.........

[Ford 1st MRB]

Should probably also mention I'm using uTorrent.

Oh, and in a new development, my nvidia display driver just recovered from an unexpected error. Screen went black for about 30 seconds, then switched through all the input channels, finally settling on the HDMI channel.

This is odd, since I ran a 12 hour stress test on my card last night without a single hiccup. It's an eVga GTX 590 if that helps.

IDK, I'm about to give up on it since it only seems to happen with this file and uTorrent. PC is running like a champ now that I closed uTorrent.

On a different note, Nvidia just released a new set of drivers on the 11th I believe. For those of you playing Portal 2, I gained about a 12% fps boost with the new drivers, go check em out.

[Dawson 1st MRB]

A random guess.

It could be that another program running is conflicting with utorrent. I've had this problem with itunes and another download program.

[McKenzie 1st MRB]

Ford, good to hear from you again, just thought I'd say that first.

Second of all, I too have had that issue of freezing randomly lately, and I BELIEVE its due to an error with the new update utorrent released recently. I have heard of others having that issue recently as well. So you can either wait it out, or just keep it closed until they launch a new update.

Just a thought.

[Luna 1st MRB]

I don't know much about computers, but I used to use utorrent all the time, with the last update my computer started doin weird shit, so i just stopped using it, everything is fine. Not sure if you can use a new torrent program to pick up where utorrent left off.

Also stupid suggestion, but, you do have enough space left on your HD right?

[Dillon 1st MRB]

Do you have an external hd attached? Remove it and see if that is the cause.

There is some piece of software that is conflicting with your uTorrent for access to the internet. It could be your AV, firewall, or something else.

One biggie from a while ago is Intel's Application Accelerator. Any chance you have it installed? Uninstall it and see if that works. But you may end up with having to kill some programs.

Finally, you may have some malware. Try downloading Malwarebytes, run a scan, see what happens.

[Ford 1st MRB]

Problem solved.

I spent about an hour today on the phone with eVga, awesome tech support btw.

My IDE controller had a bad SATA port. It was SATA port 6, which I wasn't even using, but it was causing problems with the other 5. My hard drives were randomly disappearing, which was causing the strange hiccups in my system. uTorrent was trying to download the files to my F drive, and everytime the drive disappeared, it caused the semaphore timeout error. My system would freeze until it recovered the drive, and then go back to normal.

I went through all three drives, plugging them into each sata port and restarting to see what happened. It didn't recognize anything that was plugged into port 6.

Sadly, it corrupted my SSD so I need to get a new one.

Thank god for extended warranties eh?

eVga shipped me a new MOBO and when it gets here I can send the old one back free of charge.

So now I sit here on my crappy laptop. The most graphics intense game this thing can handle is freecell.

Oh well, thanks for the help guys.

[Ford 1st MRB]

Oh, and I told my buddy he now owes me a new copy of Band of Brothers, and his kid needs an ass whooping.