My pooter is constantly stalling.

The_Bullman

Please help, for some bizarre reason my computer is stalling regularly.

It is especially noticable in a game that i just purchased, Red Faction. The game played grand, no hassle at all until one point where i cannot go any further. The game just quits and jumps back to windows. If i reload the game it will play ok again until this point(it is when i get into the lift after sneaking around some office block-just after the sub part)

The computer gliches are also apperant in Max Payne which will not even play. the opening scenes are ok, sometimes, and then, depending on the mood of the computer, it will stall and the computer will have to be restarted.

Even the legandary ctrl+alt+delete doesn't work. the only cure is the restart button.

apart from those two examples a stall can occur at anytime and for no apperant reason. i am not taxing the system, as it is a 1200MHz AMD processor with 768MB of RAM.

I dunno, please help.

If you guys have any questions i will endevor to get back to you as soon as possible.
ta

Renton

Hmm sounds like you might have an overheating problem, Give us some more info, Are you sure that its not overheating ?

If its a VIA chipset, have you installed the relavent patchs (Via4in1) etc ?

What OS are you running ? If its win2k, have you installed the service packs ?

Gimme more info, I'll be able to throw a few more idea's your way then.

The_Bullman

it hopefully cannot be overheating as i have 3 fans and 2 exhaust fans

1 fan on heatsink
2nd on front near bottom
3rd on back just under power-level with cpu

2 exhaust fans
1st under geforce 2 pro
2nd under dvd hardware card(or sound card, i am not 100% sure which)

i am running windows 98SE

what are you talking about in relation to the chipset, as i am not sure about this at all

anyway, i hope that this info helps you help me if not i will be online again in a while, few hours or something

tribble

same as me! :-)

some games just crash out cleanly to windows (eg unreal tournament) and others freeze (deus ex and unreal) and i need to hit reset (reset not crtl. alt. del. )

it all started when i bought new ram from peats - i cured the problem by chaging the dram timings and monkeying with the currents on the memory drive and address buses.
(I dropped the currents and and shortened the delay settings down to 0.5 ns)

download DocMemory to test your chips - mine reported errors until i changed the dram settings!
http://www.simmtester.com/

BabyEater

I believe he has the ABIT KT7A motherboard which uses the VIA KT133 chipset
Hope this is of some help

JustHalf

The KT7A uses the KT133A chipset.
The KT7 uses the KT133 chipset.

Supercell

Sounds more like a vid card problem to me, what drivers(try older ones if you are using the detonator xp rev..buggy), what version of direct x?, does it happen @640x480 256 colours?

Gerry

Try this:

Get the latest via 4-in-1 drivers from www.viahardware.com, and the latest video card drivers from www.nvidia.com

Install them, and try your games again. If they don't crash now, great. If they still crash, continue reading.

Take out all the pci cards, so you just have cpu, memory and graphics card.

Go into the bios, load optimized defaults.

Boot up windows, and try the games. Hopefully now they should work. Add back in your cards one by one, if it starts crashing again try arranging the cards differently.

_CreeD_

If you havent already add this to your SYSTEM.INI file

[Vcache]
MaxFileCache=128000

Win9x has problems with anything over 512mb of ram (system will freeze, crash the shell etc). You can set the Vcache to anything you like really but I found this to be a decent setting.

The_Bullman

how about this for a computer
it stalled when running simtester doc memonry thing
by the way is it meant to take 2 days to run, because it would have taken that long on my computer-yes, i am serious.

also when i did that 4 in 1 thing i had to reinstall some hardware, i think, after restarting the computer, where was i meant to getr the drivers for these, where they meant to come packaged with 4 in 1, or install off windows?

TacT

as Gerry suggested.....I found that re-installing the games themselves under win9x seems to help sometimes, I had the same problem with age of empires II myself and after 2 re-installs it worked fine, make sure you have no background problems running, my guess is that memory addresses are stepping all over each other, you don't really need more than 512mb of ram on a win9x machine for gaming purposes imho, in fact 256 would do just fine because win9x can only address 256mb at any one time when maxed out anyway
re-install directx8.0a
re-install s.card drivers
re-install video drivers
then re-install via 4-in-1's.

Still no joy, then load standard bios defaults/optimized defaults and if it works, then try turning the performance options on one by one, if it starts to crash then go back to it's original state and never look at your bios again, or look at flashing it, what bios revision is on it atm? Are there any issues with it's current bios?
go to www.viahardware.com the guys there will more than likely be able to help you if we can't

if you have an intel chipset make sure you get the chipset software installation utility, and ata driver, then firmware hub driver.
Follow the steps outlined above and instead of the 4-in-1's then install the chipset software installation util, then the ata driver, then the firmware security driver.

go to www.geforcefaq.com and look for some answers there also, have you got all power options disabled, the geforce is v.sensitive to bios settings like agp aperture size, but moreso..video ram cacheable and system bios cacheable, disable both of these in bios, make sure all shadowing is disabled...............finally do you have more than 2 objects on each irq..............start>programs>accessories>systemtools>system information>hardware-resources>irq's, try and put your devices on seperate irq's where possible, make sure the geforce has it's irq cascaded with the pci holder for pci irq steering............hmmmm enough for now....give that a go and if it still doesn't work.........may the farce be with you, I spent months trying to get performance and stability out of my last via chipset so I'm gonna steer clear for a while, even though they have some tasty things on offer i.e the p4X266 omnyommies.....rant rant blah blah....hf

Gerry

well, if it stalled running the memorytester, you have a hardware/bios settings problem, and theres no point worrying about windows issues until that is sorted out.

Heres a few things:

Check what temperature the cpu is running in the bios. If its over 40 when idle you will have a problem when the cpu is under full load.

I presume you loaded the bios defaults before running the memory tester.

Make sure your ram is in slot 1, or slot 1 and 2 if your 512mb is in 2 dimms. By slot 1 and 2, I mean the slots closest to the cpu and the middle one, as I think they are labelled the other way around on the kt7a.

If it is in 2 dimms, take 1 one out, see is it any better.
If thats still no good, try to get a lend of another dimm to try in it.

try the machine with a bare minimum of stuff in it, and let us know how you get on.

The_Bullman

well lads, you may have thought that all was sorted but you were wrong..

I followed Gerry's advice and got the 4 in 1 drivers as i previously stated and installed them as i said.

i also stripped the pc down to the just the graphics card in the slot and ran optimized defaults. but the comp seems to be the same, red faction still stalls at the same point and the comp still stalls at unusual places.

there is no overheating as i checked the temp in the bios and it was 32 degrees

i changed the [Vcache] setting to MaxFileCache=128000

i also checked the irq settings and it seems ok.......don't know what not ok would be.

i also changed the ram about as gerry said.

one other funny thing that i never mentioned is that the icons on my desktop are looking funny. Most of them are ok buy ones like My documents and punkbuster, for example, you cannot make out the folder, for documents, or the punkbuster logo. i wonder is this related.
and another thing, my internet connection speed had halved recently i had no idea why. but when i put it in to check out the web this evening it is back up to speed, i am not sure if it is in the same pci slot but i think that it is not, would this matter??

anyways what do you guys think now?