Blender crashes on Windows Vista while Rendering.

Blender frequently crashes in Windows Vista while rendering. A popup window says:
“blender.exe has stopped working” and then blender is gone.
I am using Blender 2.43 optimized on an HP tx1120us laptop with AMD Turion X2 with 2 Gig ram.
It never crashes when I am building models - only when rendering.
Anyone know a fix? Please - no Windows Vista remarks - I know, I know.

Aw c’mon, just one Vista remark? Please?

Seriously, I use vista as well. Dont move your mouse. Vista seems overly aggressive at stopping runaway programs, and is quick to jump to conclusions. I think it uses the mouse interrupt as a guide; that is what I have found, at least.

So it might be a security feature of Vista? Something that checks for programs that run for a really long time and kill them? Vista kills the Blender job overnight, when i am asleep so it isn’t a mouse issue. I wonder if there is a way to tell Vista that certain programs are OK to run in batch mode?

Task Manager, maybe? under XP it was the three finger salute to get it, and give Blender High priority. And yes, most probably, Blender is not crashing. It only happens to me when I load up a big file too quick and click on other windows and such. Doing it again without jittering the mouse and it loads fine, so that tells me it is an OS oversight thing making it look like a non-responsive program.

Blender seems to work fine on my Vista machine. I haven’t had any problems.

Blender seems to work fine on my Vista machine. I haven’t had any problems.

Do you run Blender in a non-administrator account?

I think the problem might be that I didn’t use the installer - I just copied the blender executable and libraries to a folder on the C drive so Vista registery doesn’t know about the program. I used the installer and am going to see if it renders all night.

It crashed again even with the proper installation. But this time I see the message

“Calloc returns nill: len=28789992 in particlekeys, total 353769360”

in the blender console window. I read on the Microsoft site that Vista puts up the " — has stopped working" popup window when a program access beyond memory. Anyone make sense of this?

aha. you’re running out of physical memory.

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aha. you’re running out of physical memory.

I have 2GB of ram and the performance monitor says I am using 1.6GB max. It always runs for an hour before crashing. I am now running a different, smaller scene to see if it crashes.

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aha. you’re running out of physical memory.

Thanks PapaSmurf, it was physical memory issue. I turned off some objects that weren’t in camera view and it rendered all night. One thing I really like about the dualcore processor, (AMD x2 Turion in my case) is that I can build models and develop my scene in one blender window while another scene is rendering in another Blender window, with 2 threads on. I get practically no slow down. This HP tx1120us laptop has a Nvidia graphics card with 64 Meg dedicated and 230 shared video memory so the graphics interaction are smooth even with over 200,000 faces. I was searching the web to see if I could put Ubuntu or windows XP on the laptop but there don’t appear to be any drivers to support the laptop’s touch screen which I use like crazy - it is a great way to interact with Blender. But for now, just selectively turning off parts of the scene that are not visible in the camera is an acceptable solution so Windows Vista is going to stay on the machine.

I’m glad yours is working, because mine is really starting to piss me off. (just with this one video that I am trying to edit a different way)…but my issue is most probably codecs.

Sooner or later that little trick is going to run out on you, unless you’re only rendering stills.
You can split your objects between scenes and reconnect your scenes via render layer nodes and the scene selection arrows on their lower left corners. This way you get to use the max 2GB limit per scene without memory crash issue. This is an extremely flexible approach and is easy to implement.

Thanks for the tip on rendering large scenes. I didn’t know there was a 2 Gb limit per scene. maybe that was 'my problem to start with. I guess all. theobjects in one scene have to be in front of the other scene? so that. theoverlay node will work ?

No, you use a z-combine node. The limit is different depending on which OS you use. Windows is “supposed” to handle up to 2.7 GB and Macs are supposed to handle uup to either 2 or 2.3 . Theoreticaly either should handle 4 GB but theory, suppose3d to and practical seem to be completely different things. With your graphics card sharing 230 MB of system memory and at least and equal amount dedicated to your OS you can see why you were crashing at 1.6 gigs. Linux reportedly handles 3+ GB per frame w/ no problem. I acn’t say for sure cuz I have 64bit Ubuntu and can’t seem to get any version of Blender to run on it, even with the proper c-library. I don’t hear a lot of complaints out of linux users though.

If you want to play back those massive renders of yours be sure you have an NTFS formatted drive (if you’re on Windoze) else you’ll run into a 4GB file size limit with FAT32 and may not even be able to compile an image sequence into a video format.

my problem is bigger and thanls for ericsh6 for this thread becouse when i leave a render for more than 4 hours it restarts and says please insert bootable disk a have reinstalled it to vista ultimate edition but still it happens