Annoying problem

swiss

Okay, I've finally come to the end of my tether and decided to post about this here.

I find that when I play certain games (for example C&C Generals, Freelancer) after a period of time the game will freeze, and the sound will loop several times, it sounds like a loud woodpecker in my speakers sometimes. My computer will not respond, ctrl + alt + delete won't work, and I have to reboot my pc to bring it back to a running state.

Now, other games run perfectly. For example I have no problems with playing CS at 1600 x 1200. Q3 runs fine too. But a 5 year old game, Dungeon Keeper 2 has exhibited the same problem. The only conclusion I can reach is that some resource, either on my motherboard or on my graphics card, is unavailable.

Occasionally when it goes into one of these freezing 'cycles' the PC will reboot itself, and Windows will report that my Graphics card "failed to complete the drawing operation", advising me to update the graphics drivers (which I have done several times).

Now, my current rig is:

MS8308E motherboard
xp1600+ processor
768MB PC133 RAM
Daytona GeForce4 Ti 4200 64MB
Windoze XP Professional

Originally I was running Windows 2k Professional with the same problem. I decided to install Win XP over this as I felt it was my OS and/or directx that was causing the problems (I am currently using DirectX 9.0a). I have also tried flashing a new BIOS on my motherboard, which was sucessfully done, and seemed to fix it for a little while.

Another possible explanation is perhaps my hard drive. My games are installed on a 120 Gig hard drive, that has maybe 3 - 4 Gigs free space (don't ask me what I have on it). I decided to pump up my virtual memory to around this figure too, so I wonder if freeing up another 10 gigs or so (which I don't really want to do but will if it might fix my problem) will help.

I've really run out of ideas at this stage, except for fdisking and formatting the hard drive completely, reinstalling an OS, and reinstalling the games.

Anyone any insights/theories?

Ronan|Raven

Swiss I was having problems similar to that with my PC a while ago, Do you have a via chipset? if so then I have a patch at home which may cure the problem for you, I cant think of the name of it off hand but will dcc it later if your on irc. It is due to some bug between the nvidia drivers and via chipset drivers... afaik

swiss

The chipset is SiS afaik, my USB and sound (onboard) show as SiS in my device manager.