Reply With QuoteI'll bet dollars to donuts that it's the soundblaster thingy. That sounds like a problem I had with my soundblaster thingy. I replaced it with a Turtlebeach whatchamacallit and I stopped getting lock-ups.
I have a couple of games that start and then freeze, Shadowbane and a gold of an unreleased game. My drivers are all up to date, I have the latest DirectX version, I did a virus scan and found nothing and even did a Windows XP Pro reinstall over the old install, and I can't fix the problem.
These games start, run for 30-60 seconds, and then do a hard lockup and I have to do a reboot. The game will freeze and the sound will be stuck and do that annoying stutter thing.
I have an Athlon 1800, 512 MBs ram, Radeon 9600 Pro with 128 MBs video ram, gigs of empty hard drive space, and some kind of Soundblaster card -- it's Denny's old PC I bought from him, so it's whatever card he put in there.
I also have a Netgear wireless thing connected to the PC through a port in the back, though I can't imagine that has anything to do with this. The router's connected to my old PC.
This just drives me nuts because I can't figure out what the heck to even try to do. Other games work fine. I don't want to play the other games though. I want to play these two games.
I'll bet dollars to donuts that it's the soundblaster thingy. That sounds like a problem I had with my soundblaster thingy. I replaced it with a Turtlebeach whatchamacallit and I stopped getting lock-ups.
Yeah, I was actually thinking of getting a generic soundcard and trying it. I just don't understand why most of the games work and these two don't. I'm just as inclined to blame it on the ATI drivers too.Originally Posted by Timemaster Tim
Next motherboard I get will have the sound integrated on the board.
New Catalyst drivers? I'm generally happy with my Radeon 9800 Pro, but I have found that the drivers get corrupted every now and again causing hard lockups in games of the sort you're describing. Always get the message that the Radeon driver caused the system problem when I restart XP. I've started to just uninstall then reinstall the driver right after these crashes.
If all else fails, start looking into heat issues. That causes weird lockups like that.
I'd definitely recommend removing the Catalyst drivers at first (Driver Clean inclusive) and switching back to 3.7. I've heard lots of complaints about 3.8 and don't know if 3.9 fixed some of those issues.
It could be a bad RAM chip. Try running Prime95 and using its "burn in" setting (or something like that). It'll fill up your RAM, and if it returns a rounding error, chances are you have a bad RAM chip.
I had a few games that would get hard locks or re-boots, while others didn't, and running this, I was able to isolate it to one particular piece of RAM. Once out of the system, no more lockups.
It can't be heat if the games lock up within one minute of being started and other games never lock up at all. These two games consistently lock about 30 seconds in or so.
If I yank out the soundcard, and the card is the problem (not the soundcard drivers), the games should run, correct? I can try this. If it doesn't work, does that mean the card could still be the problem or I have eliminated the card as a possibility? That is, could the problem be in the soundcard drivers? Do the drivers still try to execute if the card is removed from the system?
To borrow from Rumsfeld, there are things I know I know, and things I know I don't know. There may also be unknown things I don't know I don't know. Could the problem be one of the unknown things I don't know I don't know? Thank you.
It's a SoundBlaster Live! card.
FWIW, never had any lockups, but I was running a GF4 Ti4600 in the rig, and it was under a different install of XP Pro. So perhaps it's some interaction between the SB card and the Radeon?
Maybe pull the sound card, remove the Creative drivers, put the card back in a different slot, and just use the stock Windows SB drivers and see if that helps?
Sounds like something to try, at least. Thanks for the idea.
I would get a different sound card, anything rather than the SB Live. The SB Lives as they are today are multi-faceted pieces of crap. Some use different form, different chipsets, onboard memory, etc. and can wholly function differently depending on the card you get. See if turning off sound hardware acceleration helps any as well.
I'd personally would like to see all SB Live cards thrown in a giant pile of muck and crushed by a rampaging horde of virulent rhinos.
--- Alan
Heh. Well, Creative sure isn't in a hurry to update their old drivers. I think the most recent Live drivers are nearly a year and a half old.
You guys think a cheap, generic soundcard is likely to have more or fewer problems? I'm not a fanatic on sound. As long as I can hear the blips and beeps I'm happy. I don't use the PC for listening to music or anything like that.
I chucked my SBLive for a TurtleBeach on my last rig. It became much more stable. On my current machine, I opted to just use the onboard sound. The quality of the sound is acceptable (not great, but good enough), and no screwy lockups and crap.
Onboard sound is okay, the AC'97 works for the most part.. I'd go with an Audigy 2 OEM or something similar, or the Turtle Beach. The Philips ones aren't too bad either, I dunno if they are making/supporting those any more.
--- Alan
I'd test the memory before going after sound.
I used to think it was my NVIDIA chipset causing lockup problems, particularly with Lithtech games. I'd disable 3D sound, futz with drivers, etc. It turned out that those games were very intolerant of memory problems.
More recently, the Dungeon Siege expansion refused to run. Most other games were fine, but it gave an install error when I tried to run it (i.e. "please reinstall"). Ran the Prime95 and it generated an error. Replaced a RAM stick and voila, no problems.
The RAM's on two DIMMs, so you could easy remove one. Also, reseating would be a good idea, since the system's been shipped.
I've had similar problems twice due to bad RAM. The computer would reboot though, instead of totally locking. In both cases it occurred within a minute of booting a game. I could run in Windows all day with nary a problem otherwise.
I had similar problems that ended up being due to a bad power supply. The voltage would spike from time to time, and if the video card was handling something that was pushing it's limits, it would crash the system entirely.
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