DaveInVA

I just moved up to XP Pro from Win2k. I did a CLEAN install on a fresh reformat. The system was working well with Win2K. I have a couple of problems with XP Pro that will make it useless to me if I can't fix them. The problems are: 1: About every 30 or so seconds XP pauses for about 2 seconds. It does this no matter what you are doing. If you are playing Winamp it will stop playing for 2 secs and then start again about every 30 secs. The same with playing an AVI with Windows Media Player. The same with trying to burn a CD with NERO or DirectCD. Even if you are typing into an IM window it stops for 2 secs while you are typing. It does it in any application. 2: When you are going through any menu that has the drives listed it will freeze for several seconds over that entry during which you can't do anything. It even does it when you open "My Computer". 3: When you have the contents of "My Computer" displayed and any USB device is plugged in that shows as a drive it will constantly flip between displaying them and not displaying them back and forth while you watch as if you are plugging and unplugging the device over and over. Here is what I have tried so far with no change: Reinstalled XP Pro 3 times from dead scratch on a fresh format. Tried several versions of nVidia detenator drivers. Installed all the Windows Updates from Micro$oft. Installed any updated device drivers I could find. Turned off any Services to manual or disable that are not needed. Turned off System Restore. Turned off indexing. Tried turning off all tasks but the minimun needed to run. Tried pagefilesize tweaks. Tried different memory. Turned all BIOS settings to slowest. Unplugged all USB devices. And a few other things I can't remember right now. All 3 of the above problems are probably related. The system did not have these problems with Win2k Pro. Any help would be GREATLY appreciated. My only other choice is going back to Win2k. My System: ASUS AV7 800mhz TBird 384mb PC133 ram (3 -128mb) Promise ATA100 RAID 2 - Western Digital 30gb 7200RPM GeForce 2 GTS Pro SoundBlaster Live! Platinum TDK Velocity CDRW Pioneer 106 16x DVD Thanks in advance, Dave

I want to thank everyone for all the suggestions so far! In response to the last 2 suggestions: 1 Yes the Video board and USB have been assigned IRQ's in the BIOS. I also have the latest BIOS for the ASUS AV7 installed. 2 The USB stuff was working flawlessly before I installed XP Pro. I was using Win2k Pro previously. No hardware had been changed. The USB devices attached are: Epson 480SXU printer Logitech Wingman 3D Extreme Joystick Transcend card reader 3Com HomeConnect Webcam The device that causes the constant polling is the Transcend card reader. It did not do this under Win2k Pro. The only XP drivers for it are on the XP CD. The drivers on their website are the same ones. I suspect it may be a driver thats not quite ready for prime time. As far as the other problem I have tried the latest VIA drivers and the latest Promise drivers. With Sandra the drives score very nicely. All the other Sandra scores are within spec also. The MadOnion 3D2000/3D2001 scores seem reasonable also. Dave

Well Problem #1 is fixed thanks to OLEerror's suggestion but I still have Problems #2 & 3. Problem #1 turned out to be the XP drivers for the DLINK Card. I removed the DLINK Card and installed a Jaton XpressNet NIC card I had laying around and its XP drivers and now the pauses are gone!! There are no drivers on DLINKS website that correct the problem so I will just use the Jaton. Now Winamp, Windows Media Player etc all work without the pauses. However, it still has the weird USB Polling problem and it still hangs for a few seconds when placing the pointer over a menu selection that has drives listes (such as the My Computer link in the Start Menu). Thanks, Dave

Thanks for the suggestions. I haven't tried not using the raid card yet but I did try both the latest and previous to the latest Drivers from the Promise website. I will try installing on a drive on the MB's Primary IDE port later and see what that does. The Network card is a DLink DFE538TX. I tries both the drivers from the XP CD and the ones off DLinks website. The problem also happens just the same when you are not online. I can be disconnected and running Winamp from a local file, etc and it still does it. The Hardware is exactly the same as it was when I was running Win2k Pro. The XP Pro is the full version and has been installed on a freshly NTFS formatted drive.

I bought a SB Live! Platinum and installed it and it works with the WDM drivers but when I try to install LiveWare 2 or 3 for Win2k it always says "No SBLive! detected, make sure it is installed properly" and exits the install. When you install the board in any free PCI slot and turn on the puter, Win2k Hardware Wizard finds it and installs the Creative SBLIVE! WDM driver and the Game Port Driver. But if you try install LiveWare for win2k it doesn't detect the card. It does play sound with the WDM drivers. I sent the board back to Creative and they claim board is good. Tech support is no help. Any Ideas? My system: ASUS A7V/Raid 800mhz T-Bird 256mb eVGA GeForce2 GTS 2 - IBM GXP75 -30.7gb Pioneer 115 DVD Dlink NIC TV2000 TV/Video capture card

I tried both Liveware for 2000 from the CD that came with it and the Liveware for 2000 version 3 from the creative website. I have tried the card in every slot and it always says it can't detect the card. The sblive! does work with the WDM driver off the Win2k CD and does make sound. I have also heard some horror stories about problems with the SBLIVE! and ASUS A7V combo.

I did the entire installation as admin and tried it many ways and it never dectects the sblive!. I even completely did a clean format and reinstall of win2K from scratch.

DareBear, I still haven't gotten my SBLive! Platinum to work under Win2k with Liveware. Mine like yours minewill work fine under Win98ME. Creatives Techless support is no help and never even got back with me about the problem after many calls to them. I wonder if this problem only shows up with the ASUS A7V?

Quote: Originally posted by DosFreak: Are you using the downloaded sblive drivers? or the 9x ones from the CD? The Creative Live! WDM drivers from the Win2k pro CD. If you try and install even just the downloaded win2k drivers from the Creative website it claims it can't detect the board and won't install them and exits. Same thing if you try and install from the Liverware2 for win2000 CD that came with the SBLive!

I built a system that includes: ASUS A7V (modded for raid) 800mb T-Bird 256 cas 2 Kingston mem 2-IBM GXP75 - 30.6gb ata100 EVGA Geforce2 GTS 32mb Pioneer 115 DVD Sound Blaster Live! Platinum Win2k and Win98ME dual boot. When I run 3DMark2000 Version1.1 on Widows98ME it averages around 7000. But when I run it on win2k professional it averages only around 4800. I am using the latest Detonator drivers and Powerstrip. I didn't think there was going to be that much difference in performance, is this normal or am I overlooking something? I made sure AGP was enabled in win2k and that its at 4x, fastwrites, directx8, latest agp patch etc. Even overclocking with Powerstrip only brings it up a few points. Thanks!

Quote: Originally posted by STi Sev: Dosfreak, I'm not running VIA. I lowered AGP 4x to AGP 1x, i disabled fast write,had directx7a, then directx8, athlon 800mhz w/ Asus K7M Mobo, running 6.3.1 Official Det. Drivers and yet I STILL get low numbers in 3dmark. A lot of my friends told me it's win2k, since most of them are running pretty much identical setup as mine, except windows 98. :::How'se that for 'proving words' (not directed to u dosfreak) I got awful scores using the 6.3.1 drivers also. Try using 6.4.7 or the new 6.4.9 drivers. My score went from around 4800 to around 6500. Also get Powerstrip and make sure AGP is on etc. I use the final DirectX8. I tried the 7.17 drivers and it was much slower on my system and had artifacts while running "The Sims" and "Age of Empires2" would only work in 800x600. I'm using 6.4.9 now and it seems to be working fine. When I run 3Dmark2000 on the same system with WIDOWS1898ME I get around 7000 so the Win2k scores are not to far off. Also, Win98ME seems unstable on my system with lots of weird lockups that don't occur running Win2K. I did have problems with my Soundblaster Live! Platinum under Win2k even with LiveWare3 for win2k. I ended up using a cheapy Yamaha sound card for now and its very stable. The Live! card caused lockups and crashs when running Winamp and other sound apps for any length of time.

I'm having a problem installing Win2k on a system with a Promise Ultra100 modded for RAID. The system previously had Win2k on it using the Motherboards IDE. With the promise board installed it makes it to the point in the Win2k installation where is says its searching for plug and pray devices and gets a BSOD about 2/3 through that says "Hardware Failure". Win98 installs fine and the RAID works great. Win2k still installs properly if I use the onboard IDE ports instead of the Promise. The board works fine with Win2k on my other system (it has a different motherboard). The system: Epox K7XA w/audio Athalon SlotA 750mhz Maxtor G400 Dual Head 256mb ram 2 - Seagate 18.9gb ATA100/7200rpm 52X cdrom TDK VeloCD CDRW DLink NIC The same Promise board works fine with 2k in: ASUS A7V 800mhz TBIRD 256mb ram 2- IBM GXP75 30.6gb eVGA GeForce2 GTS Soundblaster Live! Platinum Pioneer 115 DVD DLink NIC It seems like Win2k doesn't like the EPOX MB with the Promise Card. Win98 installs fine. Thanks

The score I mentioned for win2k in my original post was using the Detonator 7.17 driver. I just tried 6.47 and ran 3DMark2000 again and this time I got scores from 6266 to 6344 in Win2k. Quite a difference from 4800 and almost as good as in Win98ME. Looks like the Detonator drivers are going backwards instead of forwards Guess I will stick with the 6.47 drivers for awhile.

I've been running Win2k Pro for about a month and its been very stable until a day ago. I was typing an email in Outlook Express and got a BSOD that said "a driver corrupted the memory managment PTE", after which it rebooted. It got into the starting Win2k screen and another BSOD occurred stating "a page error occurred in a non page area -win32k.sys" then rebooted. Now it just reboots over and over, each time with a slightly different BSOD. It will boot up into safe mode ok but everything looks fine. I've tried a new SDram, disabling startup stuff, etc. Once out of 100's of reboots it did finish loading but as soon as I moved the cursor. it got the BSOD and rebooted. At this point I don't know if its hardware or software related. Only recent change was enabling AGP win EPOX's VIAinf patch. I tried disabling AGP but no change. Any help would be greatly appreciated. My system: Antec Tower with 300watt supply AMD Athalon 750 256mb PC133 ram EPOX 7KXA Motherboard with onboard VIA audio Matrox G400MAX Dualhead Tekram DC390U2W LVD SCSI Controller Seagate ST118273LW LVD scsi 18.27gb HD Toshiba 40X scsi CD TDK VeloCD burner (only device on IDE) Jaton Xpressnet 10/100 NIC KDS 19" mon Win2k build 5.00.2195