Win2000 Freezes/Hangups + Hardware Conflicts

[Guest]

I've just upgraded my computer to the following:
AMD Athlon 900
Asus A7V Motherboard
256Mb PC133 RAM
nVidia GeForce2 MX (AGP)
Sound Blaster Live!Value
And i have just installed Windows2000. The problem is Windows freezes or hangsup every so often. Some of the occasions happen when i load too much software at one(too quickyly) or when i'm switching between windows to quickly, and other times it just freezes for no reason. I've used Windows2000 before on my old system, and nothing like this has ever happened.
I'm suspecting their could be some hardware conflict goin on, but i don't know how to go about fixing it. Could someone tell me what to do. It's really disturbing, especially when its a new computer.

skeetx

 

[Guest]

Have you installed the VIA AGP driver? The latest version can be found here:

http://www.viatech.com/drivers/VAGP404.EXE

There is a hotfix available from MS concerning the VIA chipset that you have. Detailed info is here:

http://support.microsoft.com/support/kb/articles/Q261/6/06.asp

The next thing to look at would be the nVidia drivers. I don't own one of their cards so maybe someone can give advice on W2K drivers and settings.

 

[Guest]

Thanks Buckeyefan
I have installed all of the drivers relating to and for AGP, ATA, even BIOS, but it still happens.
So this is a matter of incompatibility between Asus A7V and GeForce2 AGP card? or is anything else??
I've read the other posts as well, and wonder if there anyway of fixing this problem at all. Surely there must be.

 

[Guest]

I'm also working on a similar machine
AMD Thunderbird 900 Mhz
ASUS A7V
128 MB RAM Infini.. something or other
Elsa Gladiac GeForce2 MX
Forte Media FM801 sound card (cheep but ok..)
3Com 3C905 NIC
Operating System: Windows 2000

This machine that i'm working on (girlfriend's) is also stalling once in a while sometimes in windows sometimes in 3d games.. but especially when running 3D Mark 2000 it will stall at different points without a dought..
It was brought to my attention by the guy who instaled her high speed internet service that the NIC, Video adapter, and sound card are using the same IRQ?? 9 to be exact.. He says that this may cause a system to be unstable. So i try to set the irqs manually in the bois for each slot. Windows 2000 does not want to adjust to those. I cannot change the irqs in the device manager, the option to disable automatic settings cannot be unchecked.. it is grayed out.. although i can ajust the irqs of the com ports.. oh yeah i am logged in with Administrator so I should be able to adjust those.. Also when i boot into safe mode the irq for the video card is 11.. wish i could change the irqs to see if the machine becomes more stable. Does anyone know how that could be done.. Please..

Paladin Omega

 

[Guest]

hi.
i have the same problems as you all.
system:
T-bird 1.1Ghz
a7v
Asus V7100T Nvidia AGP 32
disk: IBM 30Gb on ATA 100.
OS: Win2K
the rest is not important, i think.
i installed Microsoft's patch for "win2k supporting VIA's AGP" - useless.
anyone checked if it is the ATA 100 causing the problems?
i ll be glad to hear someone has found the fix for it.
Jus.

 

[Guest]

I have tried numerous so claimed fixes..
I asjusted the computer driver under device manager to be a standardPC (you will find it right at the top of the list) this allows you to adjust the irqs. since windows 2000 likes to send all of the devices to one irq. I am told that this is not a problem. Even though i tried to adjust the irqs manually but nothing changed.
I have also tried to change the BIOS. Some places told me to change to version 1005A while others told to downgrade to 1003... still this did not help with stability...
I was told to change the performace setting in the bios to normal from optimal and disable fast write... nop didn't solve the problem.
I tried to install the lastest 4in1 via drivers 425a.. and AGP drivers 404... nothing...
I applied the HOT fix patch from Microsoft... This gave me some hope since after applying the patch i was able to run 3D Mark 2000 twice sucessfuly... but upon rebooting the machine the problem came back...
BTW that is how i tested to see if the machine was stable running the benchmark...
What else... I tried removing all PCI card in hope nothing was conflicting some some odd reason (i didn't think it would work but i was desperate leme tell you i have spent the past WEEK trying to figue this one out)
I also disabled PNP OS from the bios... it did not help.
well that's about it.. then i gave up on windows 2000.. So i installed windows 98 SE.. I had read that people where also having trouble under 98 and 98 SE but i tried it anyways.. well what do you know the system works... (btw i still have PNP OS off, and i have installed the nvidia drivers at normal not turbo mode) i have run 3D mark about 12 times and it didn't crash once. I'm still going to check up on the machine in a few days to see how it keeps up.. my installation of windows 2000 seemed to be ok for about 3days... and in those three days i hadsn't any driver installs or modifications to the OS... I'm hopeful that my current installation of 98SE will keep running stable... It seems that this is the route some people are taking... i'm going to be hopefull and wait for a real fix to come along... There are many out there... good luck finding the right one for you... This whole issue has traumatized me. i'm not kidding.. i can't watch 3D mark 2000 without stressing it. This is not a insignificant problem with only a few lockups, it is wide spread with people all over the message boards screaming for help. If yo don't believe me checkout Sharkey's extreme and ASUS's message boards. I'm really disapointed in... well i don't know who to blame but apparently it may be an A7V problem with perhaps having the promise integrated into the board.. i don't know for sure what i do know is that the board is a common denominator and on monday when i go back to work i will tell my co workers about the problem, our distributors (which btw have had problems with the board before i just didn't head their advice thinking "ASUS nahh.. it's the best brand"), my friend who plans on bying one soon. All these people with get one recommendation. Don't even think about buying the board. If you don't want to get taumatised from the frustration this board can give you, do yourself a favor and buy something else. I think ASUS has made a big mistake with this a board and better deliver some solution.

 

[Guest]

hi.
well, one thing we haven't checked: putting the hard disk on the regular IDE (uDMA66), and check it out.
i think i ll do it, and if it doesnt work, i ll install WinME.
i hope a fix will come from ASUS.
well, thanx anyway.
Jus.

 

[Guest]

I have the same intermitent Win2000 hang problem, but my system is:
AMD K6-III/400
FIC PA-2013 motherboard
128MB PC100 RAM
Matrox Millenium PCI graphics card
I can't find a pattern to when it happens. I don't recall that my machine hung when I was running Win98SE so I think
it has something to do with Win2000, but I'm not sure because I upgraded to Win2000 and now I can't test with Win98SE.

Any ideas?

edwingo

 

[Guest]

hey all.
i saw on the 'drivers' forum that someone had his GeForce locking win98, and it was solved by adding a fan that cools down the AGP card.
maybe that's the reason for our locks also?
i ve noticed that when it happens once, it happens again more often.
we should check it out.
Jus.

 

[Guest]

In my situation, I don't have an AGP card, just a PCI graphics card. Also, I touched my AMD K6-III/400 heatsink/fan assembly and it didn't seem to be particularly hot, just slightly warm. So I am at a loss.

-Edwin

 

[Guest]

Asus A7V
600MHz AMD Duron
GeForce256 DDR
256MB Kingston PC133
20GB DMA100 IBM Deskstar 2MB
15GB DMA100 IBM Deskstar 2MB
Windows2000 Server

I've had absolutely no problems with this setup. I highly doubt that Asus it to blame for the problems people are having. 8 years ago I worked as a systems builder, and one of the first things I learned was that random lockups/crashes are most often attributed to hardware problems. If you can crash the machine intentionally, then your software is usually to blame. A buddy of mine has a nearly identical setup, and ran into problems with cheap RAM. I've got a K6-2 500MHz CPU that will crash any PC its in simply because its flawed. The crashes are random and unpredictable, and I only discovered the source of the problem by replacing the CPU. Based on my experiences, Windows2000 plays wonderfully with the Asus A7V! Test your other hardware before you decide who to blame!!

 

[Guest]

hi.
first, i m sharing you thought about faulty hardware, but i think that in this case specificaly it is the Win2K, and let me tell you why:
I have solved the problems (so far it is running stable).
i looked in EZboard, and someone had solved this exact problem. he did it by disabling the ACPI - he installed Win2K, by pressing F7 at installation boot, and now his computer is defined as "Standard PC" instead of ACPI.
that caused win2k to choose different IRQ's for every device. i have done this also, and now it is stable!
check if on your system, all the devices are on the same IRQ.
hope it will help you all,
Jus.

 

[Guest]

...well they don't tell you that at Mickysoft. But thanks for the tip.

I'm another poor sod who thought he'd be clever and buy an Asus AV7 board, a Hercules Prophet II Ultra card and run 2000. And yep I get all those crashes too. After doing a bit of sloothing I found out some usefull info. Hercules support sight states that the grpahics card mustn't share an IRQ with anything other than the IRQ steering. Now checking the device manager I see that there are like 9 devices sharing IRQ 9! No wonder the machine was crashing. So off I go to Microsoft's support site to see what they say about this. Well it turns out that if your motherboard supports ACPI Win 2000 on install will automaticaly install ACPI support. Now you wouldn't think anything bad about this, Win 98 has ACPI support and that works okay, but Microsoft in their infinate wisdom decided that not even administrators are clever enough to manage their own resources so when 2000 is installed with ACPI support there is no option at all to change the resource settings. According to them the only way to change this is to turn off ACPI in your BIOS (if that option is available) and reinstall 2000. Of course they also say that if the BIOS is PC99 complaint then once an os has been installed with ACPI support this option to turn it off in the BIOS must be dissabled!!!!!! Oh and there is no mention of this F7 option... typical.

So I'm off to reinstall 2000 for the 4th time and try this F7 thing. I'll let you know if it works.

Cheers
Rob

 

[Guest]

hi. stop what your doing!!!
i figured it out!!!!
there is a message board all dedicated to athlon motherboards and stuff: www.athlonmb.com
there i found out that it was my BIOS. version 1004D is so [-peep-] up. i flashed to the 1005A version (found on the site i gave you above), and then installed Win2K in the regular way (without the F7), and everything is stable, and running PERFECTLY!!!

try it before the F7.
Hope that catches you in time.
Jus.

 

[dinoX]

I have the Asus A7V133 mobo and had alot of problems trying to install Win2k while hooked to the ata100 controller. What I did on my 3rd install fixed all my installation problems. I moved the Hard drive over to the dma66 controller but I still installed the promise ata100 drivers with the mobo. Everything came up and ran smoothly. I haven't moved my hard drive back over, although I really should. For me it might be quite a headache b/c for some reason its allowing other things to share the same IRQ as the ata100 controller, namingly my NIC. But as of yet I haven't moved it back over.

Although I am experiencing another problem that has no relation to the motherboard...but thats in another thread. 😉

 

[jc14all]

Just a shot in the dark. Have you updated your mouse drivers to a Win 2000 version yet? Especially, if you are using a Logitech mouse. The ver 8x drivers will cause instability, you must uninstall and then install ver 9x logitech mouse drives.

http://www.logitech.com/cf/support/28.cfm#mice

As I said just a shot in the dark. I hope this can be useful info. Good luck.

JC-------<*){{{>{~~~~~
Fisher of men

 

[NickM]

[Posted by Skeetx: “…The problem is Windows freezes or hangsup every so often…]

[Posted by Paladin Omega: ‘…This machine that i'm working on (girlfriend's) is also stalling once in a while sometimes in windows sometimes in 3d games..”

[Posted by Jus: “…i have the same problems as you all.”

What can you read in the Event Viewer after crash, what abnormal can you see from other log files, and what is possible to recognize for you from the dump?