XP Hangs

[Rob]

XP hangs during Fish screensaver and graphics-intensive
games (Quake 3, Half Life Blue Shift). Never did it with
Win98SE. I thought the graphics card was bad (GeForce
2), so I bought a GeForce 4 128meg. Still does it,
reliably in screensaver, erratic in games. I do have a
fairly large overhead in taskbar programs, but it still
happened when I unloaded everything.

Norton Machine specs:
AMD Athlon(tm) Processor 1.1 GHz
512 Meg memory

This is odd because my screen rez is set to 1024 x 768:
800 x 600 in 64K Colors, NVIDIA GeForce4 MX 440 Ver. 6.14

Also: Any idea why a DVD ROM drive (Liteon LTD163) would
stop reading disks? It doesn't even know if one is there.

 

[Malke]

XP hangs during Fish screensaver and graphics-intensive
games (Quake 3, Half Life Blue Shift). Never did it with
Win98SE. I thought the graphics card was bad (GeForce
2), so I bought a GeForce 4 128meg. Still does it,
reliably in screensaver, erratic in games. I do have a
fairly large overhead in taskbar programs, but it still
happened when I unloaded everything.

Norton Machine specs:
AMD Athlon(tm) Processor 1.1 GHz
512 Meg memory

This is odd because my screen rez is set to 1024 x 768:
800 x 600 in 64K Colors, NVIDIA GeForce4 MX 440 Ver. 6.14

Also: Any idea why a DVD ROM drive (Liteon LTD163) would
stop reading disks? It doesn't even know if one is there.

When you say you have a "fairly large overhead" in taskbar programs,
what exactly do you mean? A simple way of determining if a) something
you are running is causing your machine to crash; b) you have too many
programs running; is to stop all those programs from running with
Windows. Then try your game or screensaver. My guess is that you won't
have any more problems. My kids know that when they game
(Counterstrike, Quake III Arena, Warcraft III Max Payne, etc.) they
have all other programs - including the AV - turned OFF. If they don't,
their machines will crash, and their machines have beefier hardware
specs than yours.

Malke

 

[rob]

It turns out the problem is an underpowered/faulty power
supply.

I ran the system with all tasks removed; same problem -
it hung up the screensaver. When I took one of the two
hard drives I run offline, no problem. The power supply
is a 300 watt unit. Time to upgrade, I guess.

Thanks for replying.

Rob


"Insanity comes quietly to the structured mind." ---
Janis Ian