How to Use Prime95: Possible Hardware Failure |
Could it be a software problem? If the error is ILLEGAL SUMOUT, then there is a good chance that this is a software problem. A device driver or VxD may not be saving and restoring FPU state correctly. The good news is that prime95 recovers very well from ILLEGAL SUMOUT errors. Try seeing if the problem occurs only when a specific device is active or a specific program is running.
The other two errors messages, SUMINP! = SUMOUT and ROUND OFF > 0.40 are caused
by one of two things:
If you do not get the "Disregard last error..." message or this happens more than once, then your machine is a good candidate for a torture test. See the stress.txt file or click here for more information.
Running the program on a computer with hardware problems may produce incorrect
results. This won't hurt the GIMPS project since all results will be
double-checked. However, you could be wasting your CPU time. If you are getting
several errors during each primality test, then I recommend using your machine
to factor Mersenne numbers or run less strenuous distributed computing projects
at http://www.mersenne.org/projects.htm.