vaporware

The motherboard in question is a Gigabyte 7ZXE (Socket A) with a KT133A chipset. I just ordered a Sound Blaster Audigy2 and am expecting it in a few days. I've heard that there were many issues (data corruption, instability, no POST) with the SB Live and Audigy1 cards when paired with KT133 motherboards. Did these issues solely affect the KT133 chipsets? Were these issues sorted out in the Audigy2 cards? I appreciate any info given.

The Audigy2 is installed and so far, so good. The computer booted fine, I prompty disabled my AC97 onboard sound, installed the drivers, and updated to the latest ones. No crashes, BSODs, or any other unusual behavior.

Heh. Good analogy. What sound card would you recommend, then?

Last November I freshly installed Windows 2000 on my computer. It ran fine up until early this month when applications began to crash far more frequently than normal. Counter-Strike would quit with "hl.exe has generated an error" and just last week svchost.exe crashed while I was running regedit. That's a first for both of those programs. It generated it's first BSOD last week with "A thread to release a resource that it did not own." And again a few days later with "IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL." I reformatted and freshly installed Windows 2000 again this past weekend. It's running SP3 with all latest updates and drivers (which I'll get to in a moment). Not even a day after the install, it BSOD'd again. I wasn't sure what the exact STOP error message was, because I had forgotten to disable the "Immediately reboot" setting under the Startup and Recovery tab. Here's what happened today within a timespan of about 10 minutes. KMODE EXCEPTION NOT HANDLED - SAVRT.SYS <restarted> (Several minutes later) "An attempt was made to write to read-only memory - wdmaud.sys" <restarted> (This time, Windows 2000 does not even boot) CONFIG INITIALIZATION FAILED <restarted> (Again, Windows 2000 doesn't boot) "Your motherboard's ACPI BIOS is not fully compliant" (I didn't write down the entire message. It was about a paragraph in length.) System Specs: AMD Athlon XP 1800 w/ Coolermaster heatsink+fan Gigabyte 7ZXE with latest BIOS (August 2002/F9) and Via 4-in-1 drivers 512 MB PC133 SDRAM (Unknown brand; purchased from www.tcwo.com) GeForce Ti 200 64 MB (Visiontek) with latest drivers from Nvidia (December 3, 2002) Netgear FA311 with latest drivers (1.80 or 1.90 - I forget) AC97 onboard sound (I was using Gigabyte's drivers, but then switched over to Microsoft's, which were found on Windows Update) One more thing: my computer has been locking up while I was navigating various BIOS settings today after all this started to happen. I'm really leaning towards bad motherboard/processor. Am I right? Thanks, -- vaporware

I ran Memtest86 overnight for 7 hours. Here are the results: WallTime: 7:00 Cached: 511 MB RsvdMem: 121 K MemMap: e820-std Cache: on Pattern: Test: Pass: 13 Errors: 210 Looks like bad memory. Fortunately, I'm using 1 512 MB DIMM, so it's rather obvious which one it is. Hahaha. Before I actually buy some decent memory from www.crucial.com or www.mushkin.com, is it still possible that the processor or mainboard could be bad?

Quote: I'm leaning towards processor but memory could quite easily be the culprit. (Especially since it's an "Unknown Brand") Have you tried Memtest 86? Nope. I haven't tried Memtest 86. Will do that first thing when I get home tonight.