Hi, I've been having this problem ever since I recently upgraded my computer hardcore. I had a powerfailure, I think the psu went out and possibly damaged my motherboard so I decided to upgrade to a MSI K8N Neo4 Platinum board, with a 6600GT video card, and an AMD Athlon 64 3000+ winchester. Probably a month before my computer wrecked, I put in a new stick of ram for it, if that has anything to do with it but I didn't have any problems after the installation. It worked fine.

I don't get this message very often but it happens every single time I try to exit Unreal Tournament 2004. I found a way to avoid it which is to type "flush" in the console which I guess it dumps the memory in the game and I'm able to disconnect from a server and then quit the game with usually no problems. It's pretty rare that I get the bsod error message when I quit it like that. I haven't had my "new" computer very long so it's still not optimized. I had to fix some sound card issues by updating some drivers. I also went into the bios and disabled the AC97 onboard sound thing. After that, occaisionally when I play Thief - Deadly Shadows, I get that same error message and my comp reboots but it's very rare and could have been caused by other things like playing UT2004 before hand. I'm also using a Logitech MX500. Someone posted before that old drivers with logitech mice had something to do with it. But I thought this whole thing had to do with the 64 bit processor. Some people with these processors have problems and others don't.

Since my upgrade, my audigy 2 card hasn't been working right which I think the lack of updates is to blame so I downloaded some driver updates. The first one worked fine but I decided to go ahead and install the rest of them; in which my comp. started acting up. Things weren't booting right, programs wouldn't start up right and it just slowed down, and also I saw a lot more BSoD's and memory dumps that weren't related to games or intensive graphics or anything. So I just reinstalled the first one and it's pretty much back to normal, except with the occaisional memory dump.

Because of all the problems I've been having and messing around with the drivers so much (installing, uninstalling and such), my friend recommended that I bite the bullet and reformat and install a fresh Windows XP. I don't think it's necessary but I will if I need/have to. Should I reformat?

About the memory test: Do I burn the whole downloaded file to the disc or do I extract it, then burn the extracted file to a cd? I tried extracting then burning and rebooted but it just loaded up windows. Do I need to change a BIOS setting?

Are you using XP on the machine now? If so, run Restore. Restore to a point before you installed the wrong drivers. Update the audigy driver that you are sure was the correct one.

Re memtest, yes, you burn the iso file to cd. Make sure you are set to boot from cd first and restart with the memtest cd in the drive. If you did it right, you should get the menu for memtest.

I tried going through the bios, set the first boot sequence as CDROM and it still didn't work. I'm pretty sure I burned it correctly.

First, I just realized you were not specific enough. Since WHAT upgrade? I was assuming you were talking about a soundcard upgrade, but lets be sure.

Second, did you try the restore? A bad/wrong driver will cause these problems. If I am understanding you correctly, the problems started with the installation of the said drivers.

Third, what do you get when you boot with the memtest cdrom?

1: My PSU got fried about 3 months ago or so, at the end of april. So I just upgraded to a MSI K8N Neo4 Platinum 939, AMD 64 3000+ winchester, and a gigabyte 6600GT. That's my big upgrade. I had the audigy 2 before without any problems. It's just since this, it's started acting up. As I was trying to fix the audigy 2 with driver updates, I realized that it's somehow connected with the memory dump that I've been having which is the main big problem.

2: I'm not familiar with the restore feature and I don't want to mess with anything I don't know about. I've never used it before so I haven't tried it yet.

3: It just boots up regularly, doesn't even go through memtest nor did I see anything about it. It just started up windows.

Memtest is an iso file. You will need to select "burn as image" on your burning program.

If the problem started with the drivers, I doubt you have a memory problem. Windows XP has system restore running by default. Check the windows helpfile for instructions on system restore. XP sets a restore point each time you install something. If it causes a problem, you restore to before the install. Problem(s) solved (usually).

Restore sounds like a good option. But I don't think it will fix the crashing because I still had problems with memory dumps before I started messing with drivers.

Update: Just restored before messing with drivers. I just reinstalled the audigy 2 because I guess it got rid of those too.

How is it working? Did you re-burn memtest as an image? Hopefully, the restore will fix it and your memory is not the cause.

about probably 10-20 minutes in-game of thief 3 after restore I saw the BSoD. And that was after the audigy 2 update install btw (the one that was working well). It rebooted, loaded up again and no problems, except when ingame, it acted funny like maybe an overheat problem since there were just a couple weird noises coming out but I had no problems since. I did a disk clean up and I just defragmented (which is probably waaaay overdue). I think it may run more smoothly possibly, but I think the memory dump still exists. And I haven't got around to reburning the memtest. I'll try to find some time tomorrow to do it.

Also there's some weird stuff going on. When my computer restarts, it sits at the Welcome screen for longer than it should take, and it also takes a long time for the task bar to load up. Before my restore, The items in My Computer went out of order and the dividers weren't there anymore (the one that specifies the different types of hardware: hardrives/ removable harddrives/ etc.

When I've been getting the memory dumps, it says if you see this again, make sure all hardware is installed correctly and if it is then remove the latest installed programs or disable shadowing and cacheing in the bios. What would disabling shadowing or cacheing in the bios do?

QUOTE

since there were just a couple weird noises coming out

Like what?

And did you get memtest burned correctly?

like the sound cut off from the speakers and the ingame sound was replaced by weird beeps and noises.

No I didn't get memtest to work. I used Nero to burn it as an image and it still didn't work.

Check the below article (with links) for more memtest info.
http://insight.zdnet.co.uk/hardware/server...,2132568,00.htm


If you are getting the error often, you can try going into device manager and disabling your soundcard in all profiles. If the errors go away (and hte memory is not faulty), you know the problem is with the soundcard. Granted, you will have NO sound during this time, but it could help pinpoint or eliminate the soundcard as the cause.

Sounds like a plan. Thanks. I'll see what happens.


Update: Well that's a bummer. I disabled my sound card so I could see if I could make my computer crash. There was one part in thief where it never failed to crash once I did a certain action, but I tried running it and it said that it can't detect a sound card so therefore I can't play. Arg.

I don't get this. I enabled AC97 in the bios so I could use onboard sound instead of my audigy. So I tried to make it crash and well, it didn't. So I go back in the bios to disable it to see if the audigy makes the game crash and lo and behold, it doesn't either. It made it crash 2 days ago but now it decides it wants to work.

I have another problem with UT2004. Some automatic weapon sounds cut off short when they shouldn't. I really have no clue how to fix that one.

Hi Yellowbelly,

have you tried the Creative's auto-update detection and downloading program at http://us.creative.com/support/downloads/s...dDspLangID=1033 ?

Chris

I'll try that. Right now I'm thinking I have faulty memory and possibly a faulty sound card. Sound card isn't much of a problem because I'll just use onboard if it won't work right. But as for memory, my computer is acting strangely really and it kinda goes along with that last memtest link efabes posted (said faulty ram could make a computer run erradically or weird or something). Things are taking too long to load up sometimes and it's just not acting properly a lot of the time. I'm going to try and take out the latest stick of ram I got and see if it does any better. I can also try and put it in a different slot too I guess.


Update: started thief again thinking it won't crash anymore and sure enough it did. Is it possible that a memory clock setting is off?

Ok, I decide to ditch the audigy 2. I load up the ac97 thing in the bios and it's working fine... kinda. I can get sound out of it except when using the hardware mode in games (instead of in-game sound). I disabled both the audigy driver and audigy game port in device manager (because I'm not sure if I want to completely get rid of them yet) so there was no confusion on which device to use. I made sure Sound and Audio device settings were all on onboard sound.