CRASH!*?£@%&.....help!

nicked · Post by **nicked** » Tue Mar 19, 2002 2:02 am

upgraded my pc about 2 months ago, still have not got it to work. ideas please?

GA7DX mobo (AMD761 chipset) with onboard sound chip disabled in bios
AMD 1600 XP
512 Meg RAM
pulsar 2
geforce 2 video card
60 gig hard disk

windows 2000 clean install with service pack 2.
cubase 5.0r6
cool edit 2000

that's mostly the only software i've installed so far. windows seems to be stable eg when using media player.

what happens is, usually after 10 minutes of using pulsar 3.01 i get a 'pulsar has caused errors' message followed by an unhandled exception blue screen for a second followed by a reboot.

i have the pulsar on its own IRQ and have done the optimisations posted here as 'IMPORTANT' by subhuman.

i will try removing the software and re-installing it again, because you never know. anything else?

any ideas are more than welcome! thanks.

Spirit · Post by **Spirit** » Tue Mar 19, 2002 7:32 am

Why go with 2000 ? It seems 98SE is best, then perhaps ME and XP. But your reinstall idea is the best. I think it's what NASA used to call a "strip fix" (or something like that). It's when you don;t know what's wrong and don;t have much hope of ever really finding out, so instead of wasting your time looking you strip everything down, replace anything that looks suspicious, then put it all back together again and see what happens...

nicked · Post by **nicked** » Tue Mar 19, 2002 7:41 am

yeah...

although i've already tried this, twice.

maybe i'll try win98 then. i was using win2000 because i listened to advice from knowledgeable pc people..i guess problem with doing that is when you are a pulsar user, most other kinds of pc user effectively don't know shit..

nicked · Post by **nicked** » Tue Mar 19, 2002 7:44 am

oh one other thing. at the moment i have my program files on a different partition from my windows files, is that a bad idea?

Spirit · Post by **Spirit** » Tue Mar 19, 2002 7:54 am

Standard practice is all program files on one drive (or partition) and all recordings, wavs etc on the other. I wouldn't split programs over a partition...

And I'd definitely go for 98SE for Pulsar.

Does anything else make your PC crash, or just Pulsar ?

nicked · Post by **nicked** » Tue Mar 19, 2002 8:06 am

yes my pc only crashes when using the pulsar directly, ie using the pulsar software itself, or any other sound software - cool edit, cubase, reason. doesn't crash when using other software eg photoshop, and hasn't crashed when using media player either.

subhuman · Post by **subhuman** » Tue Mar 19, 2002 9:02 am

Did you try one RAM stick only? Could be bad ram.

nicked · Post by **nicked** » Tue Mar 19, 2002 9:16 am

ha, that would be funny, i just replaced one of them.

subhuman · Post by **subhuman** » Tue Mar 19, 2002 9:29 am

Or try lowering your memory timing (3,3,3 instead of 2,2,2), sometimes more RAM has a hard time running at the faster timings. My brother recently had a hard time playing Starcraft on his XP box, turned out it was one of the sticks of RAM, even though everything else was fine...

nicked · Post by **nicked** » Wed Mar 20, 2002 8:02 am

how do you do that with my board? is it a jumper thing? can't find any bios settings for that.

nicked · Post by **nicked** » Thu Mar 21, 2002 2:25 am

i've installed win98se and everything so far seems ok..

thanks anyway.

nicked · Post by **nicked** » Fri Mar 22, 2002 1:58 am

well well, campers, guess what? i spoke too soon. the long running soap opera of my pc pulsar nightmare continues.

it appears that the same problem causing crashes in win2000 is also causing crashes in win98. after 5-10 minutes of using cubase i get a big crash, total lockout, hit reset, do not pass go, do not creat any music at all. slight improvement over win2000, cos pulsar software doesn't seem to crash now - of course that could just be that win2000 is better at reporting faults.

anyway the similarity of these symptoms between different OS leads me to suspect a lower level setting (ie at the level of bios). so i looked at subhumans suggestion about memory timings. he surely does enough setting up of pc's with pulsars to have an intuitive understanding of these problems. my bios seemed to have loads of memory timing settings, only 2 of which had value 3, one was 2.5. so i changed these to 2. i don't have more than a very vague idea what that means. that makes me nervous (explanation subhuman? if you can be bothered). i then tested my system by opening loads of vst instruments while recording audio in cubase. managed a whole 35 minutes of recording and opening/closing windows, running in background etc, without a crash. running at 3 ms latency, i had some crackles playing back audio, but that's a result compared to before. so perhaps the man subhuman got it. needs more testing to make sure.

i may now go ahead and install win 2000, just out of interest.

Spirit · Post by **Spirit** » Fri Mar 22, 2002 4:42 am

Can I suggest on your next installation to choose just ONE piece of software to install and play with that for a day or two before installing anything else ? Thrash it and see if you get a crash. Then install the next package etc. I'd also stick with Win98 for now.

Your object is to isolate the problem.

nicked · Post by **nicked** » Fri Mar 22, 2002 4:48 am

hmm yes, good point. the reason for me having so much installed is i ghosted this from an earlier time when i naively believed it would just work.

it's getting to the point where i'm wishin i didn't have a pulsar again. i'm interested in music, not computing.

Spirit · Post by **Spirit** » Fri Mar 22, 2002 4:58 am

Frustrating, I know, but there's nothing so cleansing for the soul as a total install from scratch. Such perfect system purity

<i>btw, nothing to do with you Nicked, but I had a bad experience in the past with system stability and in the end I believe it was a single piece of warez that was to blame

My strong advice to everyone is to go 100% legit.</i>

Neutron · Post by **Neutron** » Fri Mar 22, 2002 10:06 am

What about IRQs? you do not say what slot your pulsar is in and what other cards are in there.

nicked · Post by **nicked** » Mon Mar 25, 2002 1:46 am

the latest news from the front line is that since tweaking memory timings as subhuman suggested, the crash frequency has dropped to an acceptable level of about once every 2 hours, rather than every 10 minutes. so that definitely had a positive effect.

irq - no conflict, each device on its own irq. does it matter which?

Rob van Berkel · Post by **Rob van Berkel** » Mon Mar 25, 2002 2:00 am

Since there's a slight improvement after altering the memory timing-settings I'd suggest to have your memory sticks checked (your dealer may be able to do so). I once had similar problems on PC100 memory. Turned out one of the sticks degraded to PC70 timings. I could boot, but as soon as things got a little bit warm the thing crashed, locked or rebooted.
How about your case-temp?

Rob