Bsod

Macker

A friend of mine has a puter that crashes every 5 mins no matter what he's doing ,as soon as he opens 2 windows it crashes,so I ran fdisk ,formatted ,reinstalled windows and all the hard ware except the sound card (no drivers at the time) and it seemed to run ok,would play DVDs no problem ,setup an Internet account ,worked fine, when I gave it back to him he installed the sound card and it seemed to run ok for a couple of days and then bang it went haywire again so I got him to disable the soundcard in the bios (it's onboard sound blaster 64) but no joy ,still crashing

Could this be a ram problem he has 2 sticks of 64 mb , I installed memturbo and it told me the resourses went very low at one point

or could the mobo be gone,can't think of anything else

Thanks
Macker

Samson

Is the PC overclocked ?
If so, there is the possibility of it being a cooling problem.

Of course, there is still this possibility even if the machine is not overclocked.

seamus

Hmmm......What version of Windows? All I can think of is Win95/98 having trouble with a modern motherboard. I'm terrible at diagnosing without actually sitting at the thing.

Also you turned off the sound thru BIOS - did you uninstall/disable the drivers in Windoze too? It sounds like they were the trouble in the first place

leeroybrown

Lack of resources shouldn't cause that kind of system instability.

Its seems from reading that the problems are in some way tied to the on-board sound and the drivers for it. Maybe if you disabled the onboard sound again, removed the drivers, borrowed a proper sound card from somewhere and installed it for few days to see if the system was stable with onboard sound completly unsupported.

Typedef

If it started to bsod after the install of the sound card drivers, then uninstall the sound card drivers, disable the device in the bios sure, and remove any entries in the registry that pertain to the device or the manufacturer of the device, it it still bsod's then it can't be the card &/or it's drivers now can it? If the OS is a 9x variant simply dump it ok?

You could try a reinstall without installing anything other than the OS and drivers bar the sound card, next run the OS for longer then when you would expect it to crash, with just the os files (ie no other software other than what the install disk itself put in), after x amount of time has passed, install the sound card drivers, if this prompts bsod, the you probably have some kind of resource conflict with that sound device, therefore allocated a different irq or io space to the card, if that doesn't work then it must be the drivers or sumthing?

Cuidado con el gato!

Macker

Thanks Folks

Going to go with XP and stick a little ol' sound blaster 16 in.

Macker