Windows 2k, G400 MAX, High pitch sound & crash

[seangw]

Ok, my system:

Asus P2B-LS
P3 500mhz
512mb RAM (pc 100)
G400 MAX
SB Live Value
Western Digital Caviar 27gb 7200rpm
UW SCSI2 4gb HD
Yamaha CD-RW 4x4x16
Creative PC-DVD Encore
56x CD-ROM
4 Internal fans
300W Power supply w/ fan
3.5" Floppy
Logitech iTouch Keyboard & mouse
All latest drivers
windows 2000 advanced server (on 2 NTFS drives)

Ok, I apologize for the lengthy detail but so far I've narrowed it down to a few possibilities, they are:

1) Matrox drivers still are buggy (surprise). Whenever I"m moving the mouse on my computer, eveyr few hours I will get an entire computer lockup, NOTHING will work, nothing happens except I get a slowly building up in volume high pitch sound coming out of my speakers. Nothing is functioning once this happens, all processes stop (I tested since this computer serves a domain, even the IIS stops workin in this). The only way out is ot reboot, when it happens again usually on boot sometimes, or it eventually happens again in windows.

This problem isn't related to opengl or anything to do with games, this just happens looking at web pages, or moving the mouse around the screen.

I contacted my keyboard & mouse people (logitech) and was told that since I had uninstalled their drivers (which I did cause they just took up space) and was running standard drivers, it had to be the mouses calls to the video drivers.

This makes sense to me. By the way, I had the same problem before uninstalling my mouse/keyboard drivers.

If anyone can shed any light on my situation I would greatly appreciate it.

seangw@bu.edu

[Rags]

Hi seangw,

Okay first of all, that is a pretty broad assumtion you are making about the lockups being due to your G400 or it's drivers. Just because it's video related does not mean it's the drivers or the card's fault. I have, myself, seen this problem in win2k with several types of video cards on my system. Here are the things that caused them, and things you should check into as well.

1. Are you running the final release of win2k, and not a beta?
2. Memory. Try taking out one stick of RAM at a time and see if you get the same problems, try swapping the sticks around. I had this problem in the release version of win2k when I had a flakey DIMM. Try setting your CAS latencies to 3, or try some different memory if possible.
3. Make sure that your AGP aperture is set to 256 in your bios.
4. Make sure your AGP frequency is set to 2/3.

Hope this helps

Rags

[Rags]

Oh, and I forgot to tell you, on my system when this would happen, occasionally it would occur during boot up, but if I got into windows, the error could be brought out immediately by moving the mouse pointer around the screen really fast for a while.

Rags

[CannyOne]

Sounds very much like the issues I was having. It finally boiled down to USB instability, which a bios update seems to have eliminated.

Also you should note that Creative Labs released a new set of Win2K Liveware / drivers on 4/12. You should make sure you have this update.

It strikes me as quite curious that so many people assume lock ups are allways the video card's fault!?! There are alot of different components in any system. The way they react as a group can make it difficult to troubleshoot. It doesn't help when you contact "Technical Support" either! The vast majority of these organizations don't really have the time to thoroughly troubleshoot. So they fall back on "pat answers"...."get certified drivers" and "try different settings".

But there are many of us who have Win2k running well with a G400. So in this case don't be so swift to blame the Matrox card and it's drivers. Here are some ideas for other things you might try:
1. How recently have you updated your BIOS?
2. Try the new version of LiveWare!
3. Maybe you should check the output of the power supply. (That may seem like I'm reaching! But have you ever even cleaned it out?) You have lots of drives, and I'd guess you have both IDE channels enabled. All of these together will be putting a pretty good load on the power supply.
4. Is an IRQ being assigned to USB? Win2k has a way of "masking" this if you are using ACPI interface. Boot to a DOS floppy and make sure there aren't IRQ conflicts there, if ACPI is enabled. Make sure the Video card isn't sharing an IRQ with anything under these circumstances.

But honestly!, I'd suspect the Logitech stuff, considering what you've described. I shouldn't be to expensive to swap that stuff out should you chose to do so.

[CannyOne]

DOH!! Double post. Sorry folks, the server was responding kinda slow and I got impatient.

[This message has been edited by CannyOne (edited 16 April 2000).]

[seangw]

actually the new liveware drivers force my computer to continuously reboot . . so I don'thave any drivers installed besides those that came with the OS for my sound card.

Actually I treid removing 2 of my 3 ram modules (the 2 128's) and the computer doesn't seem to be having any trouble.

[Jorden]

Okay, so you look for a problem about locking up with a high pitching sound through your speakers, in your G400 only?

What if you try to move your SB "whatever" to another slot and see (hear ) if your problem persists?

Jord.

[seangw]

Ok, me blaming the G400 is not a preliminary thing. It obviously makes no sense to blame the video card first for lockup that has a high pitch sound output.

In actuality I had first investigated my sound card, then my keyboard/mouse, both of which can be installed without any drivers and i still achieve lockup (standard sound driver, and standard keyboard/mouse driver).

I personally LOVE my G400, the graphics that I get out of it have been excellent. The reason I am thinking it's the video card now is because currently I have games that do ont work with it properly, dual head doesn't work properly, nor do some other features.

The general feeling I get is that the matrox drivers are far sub par for the hardware.

My G400 isn't overclocked, so I'd hope that none of it's settings would be a problem. I just recently changed my aperture to 256 (can someone explain to me what the aperture is? I'm not familiar with it).

So far with 2 ram sticks in I haven't reproduced my problem, I believe it was my original ram stick.

Thanks to all who have been helping me, I appreciate it.

-sean

[seangw]

btw, I've already moved my sound card to every one of the slots, even uninstalled it (physically removed it from the system) and get this problem.

At other points I've used another keyboard/mouse and had the same problem.

-sean