JediBaron

I'm currently using a SB128 (1373 - also Ensoniq ) without even a hickup. After a hard search for 1373 drivers, they eventually turned up at Intel's website. Creative's been giving them certified drivers since Feb 2000, but haven't given the public any drivers (damn Creative support!). Since I started using those drivers though it's worked flawlessly. I agree with euankirkhope in that I like the card much better than the Live! card I used to own. I have no problems and it's mixer definately performs a lot better.

Sweet the only SCSI device I'm using is my CD-R. Never even seen a SCSI DVD - rock on. Th only other thing I can think of is perhaps you power management. In the old days of Win98 (very old days now) sometimes the power management caused my Dxr3 to kick out like an hour or so into the movie. It for some reason thought that it could power down the card while I was using it - hehe. I had to just move the mouse and stuff around to wake the hd and stuff up every 30 mins or so and it didn't do it anymore. It may have been the switch to Win2k or my motherboard switch, but after that it never happened again and I've had the decoder in 3 seperate systems since. PS - I've been assuming that you did the obvious and have reinstalled both your Dxr3 drivers (or the Hollywood drivers if you prefer - I also used the beta ones until I got tired of it and created that registry patch for the Creative) and your Video cards drivers after SP1. On one of my installs SP1 broke some strange things like Half-Life's frame rate and stuff. After reinstalling Win2k on that same machine though, everything worked flawlessly. Even after installing SP1. It was weird, and the only drivers that were different on the reinstall was that this time I never even installed the Hollywood beta drivers. Before I had removed them when I figured out the registry fix. I had tried to remove them manually out of the registry and the files, but some part of it still hung on because my auto-align for the decoder's window wouldn't work. I had to adjust it manually. That worked perfect after the reinstall though. Sorry for the long post Operating System: Windows 2000 Pro sp1 (running fully PNP w/ ACPI) Processor: AMD K7 T-Bird 800 w/ 256 Megs PC133 Motherboard: Asus K7a (1004c BIOS) w/ the newest Via 4 in 1, Promise 100 drivers b25 Hard Drive: Maxtor 1536H2 on the Promise 100 Video: Asus 6600 SGRAM w/ Asus sba bios (AGP Geforce 256,32meg - Nvidia drivers v6.31 - certified) Sound: SB 128 PCI (1373 chip w/ 5.12.01.4035 WDM drivers - certified) Modem: USR 56K PCI Network: NETGEAR FA310TX Fast Ethernet Adapter (PCI 10/100 card) SCSI: PCI Advansys SCSI Host Adapter CD Burner: Smart&Friendly 4x SCSI Printer: Epson Stylus 740 (USB) Scanner: UMAX Astra 1220U (USB) Misc: Creative PC-DVD 5X drive, USB Intellimouse Optical w/ intellipoint 3.2 (ver. 3.20.0.484), Gravis Xterminator gamepad with 4.2.0.2 driver DirectX: 8.0 RC0 (4.08.00.0183) [This message has been edited by JediBaron (edited 17 October 2000).]

Ahha - the problem is probably with the drive and the IDE then. Try changing your UDMA settings on the drive. If UDMA is on then shut it off, if it's off then turn it on. You can also try moving it around the drive chains. I have mine alone on the secondary as slave. Also if you have a writer then you should have it all alone on your secondary and have your DVD drive as a slave on your primary chain. IDE cd writers don't seem to get along well with many drives, especially other cd roms.

Hey bud, you're in the wrong website for Win98 But, because I'm a nice guy and I've encountered the problem many times before, here's the answer: http://support.microsoft.com/support/kb/articles/q141/8/58.asp?LN=EN-US&SD=gn&FR=0

Yeah, I was in constant contact with tech support, testing all their drivers for the BSOD. They kept sending me beta drivers. The last one that they sent me was the most stable, I still had a BSOD with the official release though. I'm running a driver that is 1 revision below the official release and it only has caused one BSOD condition. When I play Earth2150 and I try to load a saved skirmish it crashes. I just shut off my stick in the Joystick control pannel before I play that game. Other than that I've had 0 problems. If you want I can e-mail you the beta ntgrip.sys (I'm using ver 4.2.0.2 the official release has ver 4.2.0.3)

It definately sounds like a BIOS problem. Go to the manufacturer online and make sure you have the newest BIOS for your mb.

The fix was found out nearly a month agao: http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/1/13374.html

So your only getting 100fps now in OpenGL which again has nothing to do with DirectX. Is that a good assessment of the problem? I would suggest you take a better look at the Nvidia drivers that you are running. I can not stress it enough that OpenGL has it's own API and is completely seperate from DirectX. OpenGL is controlled by the Nvidia options panel, but can also be controlled by video tweek programs that you may have installed. I'd start there if I were you.

There haven't been any reports of problems with dx8 and I'm using it and all my progs work just fine. Why do you want to remove it?

Nice try, but unfortunately OpenGL is not part of DirectX You probably just didn't have your tweak settings to VSink='Off by Default' in the OpenGL panel. If you did everything then you should have no more probs. But if your still having them, go into your bios. I assume your running at least ver 1004, if not GET IT! then just hit your "restore to default settings". Make sure you have your memory set to the right speed (100 or 133) that corresponds to your memory type. Then go in and change the AGP to 'Normal'. Then go into the boot section and set everything from pnp on down to yes and enabled. The only thing you'll want to disable is the last setting which is the ATA100 (unless your using it of course ) Then reboot and you should be just perfect.

From my testing with the Geforce 256, increasing the card to 4X only accounted for a <5% increase in speed on my Athlon T-Bird 800. But it made the system really unstable. Direct3d crashed in a few mins and OpenGL lasted somewhere around 10 to 20 mins. I suspect that the performance difference may be higher with different m/b chipsets and video cards. But I have yet to see any substantial numbers one way or the other. I assume you have no more probs anymore either, Flasher?

Yep on both accounts. It goes to 2X, but more importantly, it shuts off 2 other settings in the chipset settings that cause the problems. One last note, I forgot to mention it, but you should also have Fastwrites off in the BIOS settings too. Enjoy your newly stable Athlon [This message has been edited by JediBaron (edited 03 October 2000).]

I have almost the exact setup as you an have absolutely NO problems at all anymore. All you have to do is have the AMD/MS patch installed, have the VIA 4 in 1 installed, and last but not least - set your performance level in your BIOS to Normal, rather than Optimal. Operating System: Windows 2000 Pro sp1 (running fully PNP w/ ACPI) Processor: AMD K7 T-Bird 800 w/ 256 Megs PC133 Motherboard: Asus K7a (1004c BIOS) w/ the newest Via 4 in 1 Hard Drive: Seagate 20 Gig UDMA66 7200rpm (formatted in NTFS 5) Video: Asus 6600 SGRAM w/ Asus sba bios (AGP Geforce 256,32meg - Nvidia drivers v6.31) Sound: SB 128 PCI (1373 chip w/ 5.12.01.4035 WDM drivers - certified) Modem: USR 56K PCI Network: NETGEAR FA310TX Fast Ethernet Adapter (PCI 10/100 card) SCSI: PCI Advansys SCSI Host Adapter CD Burner: Smart&Friendly 4x SCSI Printer: Epson Stylus 740 (USB) Scanner: UMAX Astra 1220U (USB) Misc: Creative PC-DVD 5X drive, USB Intellimouse Optical w/ intellipoint 3.2 (ver. 3.20.0.484), Gravis Xterminator gamepad with the new no-bsod driver that Gravis tech has me beta testing - thanks dude the drivers finally rock! ) DirectX: 8.0 RC0 (4.08.00.0183)

Why didn't he just use the Win2k Disk Management to format and add the extra disk space? Sounds like using Partition Magic was mucho overkill.

I have the exact same card and had the exact same problem. What I did was went to http://zoiah.m3dzone.com/ and flashed the 4400 with the latest reference bios with the TV chip (I have a the Brooktree on mine). After that the card ran perfectly w/ Detinator 3. The TV out also works perfectly too. STB has the WORST driver and BIOS update program. They never, ever update a damn thing on any of their cards. Switching your BIOS makes the card an NVidia reference card and gets you out from under STB crappy service. [This message has been edited by JediBaron (edited 01 October 2000).]

It is possible to have the network card cause delays on the system bus which would easily crash a CD writer. What kind of network card are you using? Is it fully PnP? Does it have the ability to detect if the cable's unplugged? If you don't have these features I'd recommend grabbing a new card. Personally, I'm using a Netgear FA310TX and it works great. I have used different cards in the past and I have had some 10base that caused lots of headaches on my network so be carefull what you get. The best adapters out there are Intel, of course, but most >$25 10/100 PCI cards work very well.

I had the same problem with my Live! card too. It turned out that the leads on the bottom of the card where it plugs into a slot are VERY small. The card didn't sit well at all and it liked to disappear at will. I finally took a screwdriver and pried the gap open that you use to hold the card down with the screw. After playing with it for a while with some pliers I was able to tighten the screw down with the card all the way in the board. I rigged it in such a way so that it was also tight if you tried to pull on the ports. That fixed all problems with it.

Stupid HP writer just killed all my CD devices in my friend's machine. Went to burn a cd - then lockup and no more CD drives . I haven't figured any way of getting them back. Some people have reinstalled and then got them back, but how can I be sure that that will work?

Well boys and girls, just thought I'd let you know that the HP fix worked without a hitch. As soon as I uninstalled the Adaptec Writer plug-in out of Media Player 7, the computer rebooted and all the CD Roms came back.

Yahoo! It appears that the registar figured it out and finally got to the truth of the problem. Thwy said that HP is not to blame, that it is Adaptec's CD writing plugin in Media Player 7. HP said that the problem could be fixed by simply removing that one plugin on the MP7's install menu. I am going to try this. I still think that there's no way that HP's blameless as I've never seen it happen to any other brand of CD Writer, but their's. Obviously they have some sort of issue in the firmware that makes their drives just a little bit incompatible with Adaptec ASPI. I just can't see all the blame going on Adaptec, is a software manufacturer supposed to write a special case in their software just for HP? Not to mention that the special case would be for a CD writer system that's been standardized for years. Thanks for all the good help, JediBaron

Thanks for the suggestion. I will try that this afternoon before I reformat. I will let you know what, if anything, that I find out.

I had the exact same problem with my SB Live! The problem always happened when a progam was using both the D3D api (never during normal DirectX or OpenGl) and the Digital Sound Decoder features on the Live! card. I did narrow down the problem to something on the motherboard that the Live! drivers didn't like. I had to finally switch boards. I still had a bunch of other probs with it though. Eventually I just decided to downgrade my card to a Sb128 PCI. But then I found out that my chip (1373) was the only 128 that Creative had no Win2k drivers for! Well yesterday I found out the sheer extent to which Creative is screwing us all. I happened to find 1373 drivers for Win2k on Intel's site and they have even been certified! Not only that, but they also had another driver dated late Feb that was also certified!!! This means that they've had drivers since Feb which went through the M$ certification program (obviously before Feb), but didn't give them to the public! All I have to say is : BASTARDS!!!!!!!!!! DON'T LET ME CATCH YOU CREATIVE GUYS IN A BACK ALLEY SOMEWHERE!!!! I hope they're reading these posts [This message has been edited by JediBaron (edited 19 September 2000).]

You should have no problem Ghosting the IDE to a SCSI. The only problem that you may have is that some SCSI controllers can only boot off of a < 8gig partition. This problem is usually only on RAID controllers though.

The newest one - 4.02c I believe. I know that it uses it's own internal ASPI, but that in no way explains why it crushed all CD devices on the system.

Yeah - I'm on that path right now unless something else comes up. Why is it that only HP's seem to have this problem, everybody else's CD Writers work without a hitch, but HP's are nothing but constant headaches??!?!?!?