Brian Frank

Which cpu do you have running at 450MHz? What is your power supply wattage? How long has this been going on? Can you put in some different RAM? What cards do you have in? Video: Sound: Modem: Ethernet: Other:

Well, yes it's a Via Apollo Pro 133A board, but the Tyan Trinity 400 is a very good board. Extremely stable, never had a problem with it, and the only reason I don't have it right now is because I went to a dual board. The only thing you need to be aware of is that Tyan does not make their boards to overclock, but that may not mean anything to you. If you do want to OC, Abit is probably your safest bet, and they produce good boards too.

Best driver support is Nvidia, from the graphics I've used. I've had bad experiences running ATI cards, so I'm biased against them. However, it seems that almost every month,or two, we see a new detonator driver out. And they work well. For pure gaming, you can't beat Nvidia. If you're more inclined along 2D apps, Matrox will serve you better. May look at the G450, or 550, but as stated earlier, Matrox is not the best for gaming, but it's playable, in lower resolutions. Nvidia and Matrox are your best bets right now, other's I can't say.

I don't want to sound mean, but that honestly doesn't tell us much. Does the BSOD list any file, such as a .sys or .dll? And please list your system specs. Give as much info as you can, we're not mind readers. And when does the BSOD occur? Give more info, and I'm sure we can fix this up.

Yeah, watch out for the AMD cores--really fragile SOB's. Cracked a 600 Duron that may of hit 1GHz, but I'll never know. I'd hold out until we see a P4 DDR board from Via, as the prelim results look pretty sweet, see [H]ardOCP for details. Intel is pissed about Via's P4, and says they don't have an offical P4 license. If, and that's a big if, we see the i845 bearing DDR, and not crippled, I heard someone say it could be the next BX, but I don't know--that's a pretty hard task to do now. If you want dual P4's, you'll have to settle for the uber-expensive Xeon's 8) and motherboard, RDRAM, and such. Probably not the route you'd wanna take. If you want duallies, you can't beat the Abit VP6 with a couple of PIII's---1GHz if you can afford it. Oh, and the SBLive issues are with Via chipsets, specifically boards carrying the 686B south bridge and the KT133/A northbridge. It does affect Intel setups, but I haven't heard as many ppl be-atching about it. Ah, well, Creative seems to pissoff quite a few ppl anyway, so the SBLive! might not be an issue any longer.

Well, what you could do is add a small fan and run that off the fan header, and plug the FOP38 into the 3-to-4 pin connector. The GF2's do consume much less juice than the original GF's. If you've had the FOP38 plugged into the header for a long time with the GF DDR, I'm not sure the hardware would be to blame. Try setting the AGP drive strength to DA, change your drivers to something different. Personally, I've found the 10.80's to be speediest, but I stopped testing new drivers after the 12.20's. It could also be that your motherboard is bad too, but let's not jump to conclusions. The "duh" list: check your cables for any bare wire and that they are plugged in completely, remove all cards save for the GF2 Pro, set bios back to the safe defaults--and leave the settings alone as much as possible. Try that if you haven't already. Make sure that the temp isn't getting too hot there either, as that can darken your day really fast. Well, see how this goes.

This is weird. It's not frequent, and I can figure out what I do to start it, and it's been doing it only in the past month or so. It's BSOD'd me before firing up UT, IE, or trying to play a media file. It's a KMODE_EXCEPTION_NOT_HANDLED and points at wdmaud.sys as the culprit. Win2k SP2. Specs on sig line, it's the first rig.

Hmmm, I may just have to live with it, or snag it and replace the file with another from a different pc. I really wish I could just find out what exactly triggers it, but it doesn't happen on a consistant enough basis to really work out well

Yeah, not getting enough juice is a problem. If you're unable to try eddie's suggestion, I'd check my Power Supply. If it's not at least 300watts, there's your problem.

I have noticed it to be faster, but it's not like living with Win2k is bad. XP is just bringing Win2k to the masses. It's not crash prone like the POS we know to be Windows ME. I haven't seen much in the way of the faster start time, but I personally don't care. XP takes the bells and whistles of Win9x and puts them onto the NT code. A lot of XP is Win2k with a face lift, but it's not affecting stability. I've run it, and it is good, however, I dislike the fact that it is geared more toward the newbie who doesn't know squat in regards to computing. Fine, the only problem is, IMO, that MS makes it increasingly difficult to find where they put certain things, in which case you have to find yourself. For those coming strictly from a 9x background, it's something that should've been done long ago--run both home and professional OS's off the same, stable core. And stability is not the BS they said was supposed to come with ME and didn't.

I found it, and it works, but it's slow as hell even to shared folders. At least I got it tho. I gotta book here, but I'll try to remember to post where NetBEUI is at on the RC1 disc.

You don't need dialup for DSL. All you should need to use the DSL is the network card installed with TCP/IP and whatever else MS installs as the default. What are your settings, and what protocols do you have installed, sir? It could also be that your ISP is having problems, you know.

In case you guys haven't heard, Nvidia told M3DZone that the statement about the 20.80's being released this week were incorrect. It on the main page at M3DZone. Nvidia did say it will release them soon though, so you guys can all take a breather.

Have you always had it overclocked? XP doesn't seem to be too friendly toward OC'ers, and that has caused me some problems. Try some different ram next. Sounds like something corrupted, and overclocking can do that, so try backing off some or setting it all the way back and see if the problems go away.

I'm not sure about anything related to NT, so I'll skip that part. As far as your machine dying, depends on what dies. If your hard drive goes kaput completely, you may have to get spe[censored]ts to recover the data--so get some sort of backup drive (ie: CD-RW, Zip, Tape, etc.). NTFS can't be read naturally by dos or Win9x without having a program--I think it's called NTFSDOS, not sure--but the free version gets DOS to read NTFS. The programs themselves won't care what filesystem they're under tho. If you have a 2GB partition setup for DOS, you should be okay, but then were talking a dual boot here. In that case, install DOS first, then NT. I'm not sure about the first question, because I've only used Win2k and XP, and I'm not sure about the NTFS in NT applying the same. I believe it doesn't have the same limitations in NT as FAT does, but I can't be totally sure.

I did think it was related to sound in some way, however I've also had the BSOD with Media Player 6.4 and even when I upgraded to 7.1.

Cool.

I'm just wondering how XP users have fared with oc'ing your cpu's, specifically Intel, but AMD is okay too. I got the VP6 and 900MHz was the highest I got with my brand new CPU's. Of course I haven't tried everything yet, but I'd like to know if you guys have had to throttle it back from using Win2k to XP. I'd heard something about XP being worse about overclocking, can't remember where I saw it tho...

Yes, I was doing it wrong. Had to play around with some settings, and it's running at 906MHz currently. Left the RAM at 133 and just used the controls for the FSB. Nooowww I feel dumb ;(

I don't have it, but I thought I'd heard of some problems with it. May want to check the Games section of the NTCompatible site, not the forums, too.

Anyone got an idea? *prod* *prod*

Change your video card drivers, preferrably not the Herc drivers unless the card has some specific function you need. The Herc drivers gave me Blue screens in Win2k so I stopped using them and have used the reference drivers since. I know this is XP, but I found this out pretty soon after I got my Herc MX card. Also, snag the latest BIOS for your motherboard. Question: Does this happen randomly, or only on certain apps or games or specific files. I could also be your ram, so you might want to take out a stick if possible and bearable.

Ewww... I'm not sure what else to tell you, as I've not done AA on my MX for obvious reasons. Not really sure what to make of the refresh rate thing you got going on either.

Me likes 10.80's.

The only games that have caused a lot of hubub have been from EA, which seems to refuse to support Win2k. I've heard something about Tribes being an issue, but I can't verify that. Same deal with SoF. I found out something that has worked so far: if the box supports NT4 and 98, it should run under Win2k. You can also check the NTCompatible database for even faster response too. Helped me before.