Panther04

FYI... from some reviews posted here a few days ago on reviews of the 9700, the starting point for their highest end card will be equal to that of Nvidia, about $399, with the low end around $130. (these are only estimates... ATI may well slash the prices to be really competitive, which means we all win!) To all those that claim the ATI drivers are great, that may be true right now, but the main complaint I've always heard on ATI and drivers is that it takes them multiple releases to get them right, which is what keeps people from equating ATI with a good video card. While their hardware may be top of the line, if they have the same old driver problems, the card will be forgotten and left behind. It will be interesting to see if they can finally shake that with the 9700... Nvidia on the other hand releases drivers that, for the most part, work very well out of the box and the revisions just add more value by increasing performance.

I checked out the settings and they were the default, but to be safe, I moved them up to the most conservative settings. I also removed the stick of memory from slot 2 (this MB only has 2 slots) and I have not experienced a crash yet. Is there anyway to tell if it's the stick that is bad or possibly the slot on the MB? The memory is "supposed" to be Micron, but on the chip I took out, it's labeled Samsung; also both sticks are single sided DIMMs, does that make a difference or not as to why having 2 sticks might have been causing crashes? Thanks for all the advice and help today!

Downloaded and tested with that program and it reports no errors on the standard 7 tests it runs. Does anyone else have any other ideas on what might be happening here? Thanks!

Well I have 2 -256 MB sticks, could it be both or just one, what's a good way to get it tested? Thanks!

They are pretty random, doesn't seem to happen in any particular pattern. Sometimes it just crashes while I'm working on it, then sometimes its after I first start to use it after being on all night. The stop codes are IRQ_NOT_LESS_THAN..., PAGE_IN_NONPAGED_AREA, and most of the time there is no specific error code, or driver mentioned. Within XP, I get some software that just crashes with memory read errors. I have had the memory tested and even tested it myself with a diagnostic tool and it did not find any errors. The temp of the system has gone up to 40C-MB, 41.5C-CPU, not sure if that could be a problem too? I've been battling this for about 1 month now and still have not found the primary culprit. It started to happen about 1 1/2 months ago after a power outage, and since then I've replaced the MB/CPU/Memory and have gotten a new vid card. I haven't replaced the sound card or network card, but I guess those could be next? Thanks again for any help in solving this...

Hello, I have been having some issues with my PC randomly crashing (XP BSOD mainly), but some software crashes also. I was wondering if having only a 300W PS with the configuration below could be my main problem? I've reloaded the system more than once, I've transferred my entire system from on HDD to another, thinking it was a bad HDD, and I've added fans to increase cooling (Current temps: 39C - MB, 40C - CPU) Would increasing the PS to 400W help my crashes? Thanks for any feedback/suggestions! The following are my system specs: ASUS P4B 266-C Intel Pentium 4 1.6 GHZ Northwood 512 MB PC 2100 Ram PNY Geforce 4 TI 4600 128mb Nvidia DET 4 29.42 Adaptec 1200A Raid Card WD 30GB IBM 10GB SeaGate 40GB x2 PowerMan 300W PS Windows XP Professional Sound Blaster Audigy Sound Card Cambridge Soundworks DTT 2100 Speakers 3COM 56K V.90 PCI Modem 12x Creative DVD IDE Sony G400 19" Monitor Microsoft Intellimouse Wireless Microsoft Natural Elite Keyboard

The biggest single new feature that I can think of is the new Firewire ports that it has on the "Audigy" drive (aka Live Drive) and on the back of the sound card. Although it still is a relatively new technology, it is in widespread use w/cameras and stuff and is a handy feature. The only other changes are the improved EAX which we'll probably start to see in new games; the 24 bit sound processing and the new sound processor which is claimed to be 4 times faster/better than the Live processor. The price was right for me so I went for it (Had the SBLive Platinum 5.1 which cost me $200 and this new setup was $175). There's another 2 cents...

I agree that many people were burned with Creative's lack of support for Win2k with the Live... but they finally did come through. I really believe that people who are still having problems are people with strange HW configs or are people who haven't reloaded their OS in a long time and have all kinds of old driver files. Windows is not the best OS in terms of changing hardware and then making sure that different driver file versions do not conflict with each other. I would be willing to say that probably 85-90% of people still having problems could be resolved by a simple OS reload. (I know that it isn't that simple of a process, but for argument's sake..) I've always been a fan of Creative sound cards and they have done quite abit for the sound card industry... just my 2 cents

The new SB Audigy Platinum works perfectly out of the box! Put in the card and drive, pop in the cd and install and voila! No problems whatsoever to report. Sounds great and works great!

Clutch - thanks for the insight. Do you happen to know if I uninstall PcAnywhere will it revert back to the old dll and fix the issue? Once again, thanks for the informative post!

Have you installed the same software like I did, or was it just random that it stopped working?

I'm just writing to find out if anyone else has lost the ability to have the graphical login w/the welcome screen. I'm running XP Beta2 and the only thing I can think that would have disabled this is I installed PCAnywhere 9.2 and Terminal Services Client. I can go to the control panel and check off use the graphical login, but when I go back to check if the option held, it is unchecked again. Just wondering if this is a bug or if this is normal after installing certain software. Thanks.

Yeah... I was able to get lw3 to install to, and have the same problem with the surround mixer, it just crashes when you try to start it. I think it has something to do with missing dll's for the mixer that don't get installed with the dell drivers... it would take quite a bit of hacking of the dell inf to add the right dll's and even then I don't think it would work properly... we'll just have to wait on creative unfortunately...

Well first off, you should have seen in other posts that the admins have said not to post stuff about the new 3dfx beta drivers in this forum.. as far as Homeworld, the ogl doesn't work correctly and I can only play in d3d, so you'll have to live with that until Sierra makes a fix or 3dfx makes better drivers.

I got the same results as you sandman... fargo- did you already have diskeeper 5 installed on your win2k? otherwise please post more info on how you got this to work..