Media Player Blue Screen Of Death

Dukebot

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Jan 24, 2001
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I have a Pentium 3 800MHz CPU with 128 MB of SDRAM and I have Win98. Sometimes when I try to play movies on Windows Media Player v7.0 i get blue screen of death then i try and load it again and i get an illegal error message saying something about ddraw.dll which i believe is DirectDraw. I re-installed DirectX 8 and downloaded WMP v7.1 and I still get the same sort of errors. Can somebody tell me how to stop these errors from occuring?

Thanks,
Dukebot
 
The only things that come to mind here are that there may be an issue with one of your drivers/devices. Since we're dealing with the media player, either the display adaptor may be an issue or it's driver, or your sound card and it's driver(s).

You may first have to start by deleting the devices for them in the "System" applet of control panel. Be prepared with the "original" drivers that came with the card/computer. You'll restart the computer, and the "New Hardware Found" dialog should pop up. Depending on the install method of the driver, you'll either search for the driver on CD/floppy, or just cancel it if your "stock" driver has a "setup" program associated with it. If it does have a Setup program, you'll cancel the hardware wizard, and run that setup program. That will put stock "Non-DirectX" or "Lagacy DirectX" drivers back in. It's possible you have a driver issue that; only looking at the compatibility notes for DirectX would know for sure.

Then if this doesn't solve it, do the same again with the video card driver. Delete it, and restart. Some drivers however will just reinstall themselves from whats on the hard drive. So you may need to go to the card makers web site and try looking for an updated driver for your card(s).

Lastly, faulty memory can be causing a problem. IF you are on an overclocked board, the memory scan timing may be just enough too fast for the RAM and will cause issues. If its overclocked, try removing the overclock changes and make it "normal". Then see if that doesn't resolve it. This applies to standard Dram as well as SIMM and DIMM memory of all kinds...

I've not seen "Processors" cause this issue but it's not impossible lately since a lot of folks are running them faster than they're rated at... Overclocking is a hot item and bragging rights for some people these days...

My rule of thumb is if you want faster, buy faster. The engineers designed it a certian way, and while it may work to overclock it, problems arising are your problem... <grin>