BSOD I thought they'd got rid of those...

J

Jonathan Fitt

Hello all,

I've just installed XP with SP1, and it's causing me grief.
When playing MP3s in media player or winamp 3, the computer will either kill
the program with no error, or flash up a BSOD too fast to read, and then
restart itself.

No problems with the game Homeworld, but Shogun: Total War also quits to
desktop, might be the same problem?

Any idea how I go about troubleshooting a problem with no discernable
symptoms?
I have no viruses, and a Duron 850, on a giga-byte GA-7VA, with 512Mb RAM,
and an ATI Radeon 7200

Help!
 
B

Brather

Your problem described itself :p

its your sound card.. update its drivers and reload
direct x..

other then that be sure that you are using the right
drivers for your mother board.
 
J

Jonathan Fitt

The 4 in 1 drivers are the ones provided with the motherboard.
The soundcard is an on motherboard one. It's listed as AC97, where would I
go to update the drivers?

The other weirdness is that it doesn't always crash media player or winamp
straight away, sometimes it will play 4 songs, sometimes 2, sometimes it'll
go on for ages.

Still think it could be the soundcard drivers?
 
L

Lorne Smith

Try visiting the motherboard manufacturers website and checking for known
issues & patches, as well as updates drivers. If there are none, get the
latest VIA 4-in-1 drivers from VIA themselves as they are fairly generic.

Also, you'll rapidly find you don't like the audio quality of the AC97
onboard audio so you might want to get a decent sound card. You can get a
Soundblaster Audigy quite cheap these days...

Lorne
 
J

Jonathan Fitt

I tried a memtest86 test run, and it came up with loads of errors. It looks
like I have a duff DIMM.
It's a DDR 333Mhz stick, is there a chance that memtest86 will falsely
report errors on new memory?
 
J

Jonathan Fitt

It is new in that I've only just started using it. However I've had it on my
desk for a couple of months waiting. I'm going to try taking it back. Wish
me luck...
 
L

Lorne Smith

Indeed I do... Best of luck :)

Jonathan Fitt said:
It is new in that I've only just started using it. However I've had it on my
desk for a couple of months waiting. I'm going to try taking it back. Wish
me luck...
Click to expand...
 
J

Jonathan Fitt

Excellent. The guy was very nice and replaced my RAM with some better
Kingston stuff. I've run the memtest86 once through with no errors, and I've
left my machine running mediaplayer non-stop. Hopefully when I get back it
will still be playing...
 
Top