CRASH!*?£@%&.....help!
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
Your object is to isolate the problem.
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>
<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>
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?
irq - no conflict, each device on its own irq. does it matter which?
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- Location: Rotterdam, The Netherlands
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
How about your case-temp?
Rob