XP completely freezes, esp. when using Media Player,Movie Maker or IE! ALL the time!

[Katja Flarestar]

Hey!

I've got big time trouble repairing a computer here.

It is a mainboard with via chipset, Geforce 2 Ti video card,
SoundBlaster AudioPCI (creative) sound, win XP prof. with SP2.

it happens that the PC crashes all the time, and with crash I mean
TOTAL freeze with no reacting until pressing reset, or, in some rare
cases, it just resets itself.

The problem appears mostly when using Media Player, Movie Maker or
Internet Explorer.
When using Media Player, it crashes immediately sometimes, sometimes
it doesn't. When it doesn't, and I try to open movie maker as well, it
won't take long until the crash. When it crashes,the sound of the
media file will get stuck and repeat all the time the same moment,
like when a cd hangs or gets stuck. The video stays frozen. sometimes
the cd-hang repeating sound is gone, and itstead there is a
continuous, horrifying beeeeeep.

So, what I tried so far:

Updating chipset drivers to via hyperion 4 in one
Updating video card drivers
chaged PCI cards (so that sound no longer shares an IRQ with video
card)
installed "vlatency" patch (supposed to cure southbridge-bug and other
stuff for via chipsets);

what else could I do?

 

[Guest]

Go to control-panel,open administration,then open event viewer.Chk the
events and warnings that have/are taken place,click on the url for one,
this opens help/support in xp,usually with an answer or a fix.

 

[Guest]

I have the very same problem, just with other apps. If
the computer is just siting there it will hang. Sometimes
I get a hardware related STOP code.

I ran the Microsoft memory utility all night no errors
were reported. (see post from a few days ago.) I called
the memory manufacturer who said they rely on that utility
and were confident that it was correct.

I called the motherboard manufacturer, who told me that
there was a ~80% chance that problem is SP2 related and
~60% it is memory chip based - do to incompatible speeds.
He suggested removing one memory module and run the
computer to see if it stablized. If the removal of one
chip corrects the problem then replace that chip. If that
does not work, he recommend a clean reinstall with SP2
installed before anything else.

GOOD LUCK