My G400 MAX woes

[adhesive]

I'm encountering similar Windows locking up problem.
I have:
G400 32MB
AOpen AX6BC
PIII 450

Windows just seems to stall while it's loading. The only way I can boot is to go into safe mode and turn hardware acceleration off. Then Windows can load properly. Of course having accelaration off makes tehe card useless.

I spoke to Matrox today. They gave me some BIOS settings to try, but it didn't work.

[sixpac]

Whenever you install a new video card I found
that reformatting and doing a clean install
of Win98 saves alot of time and aspirin

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Amd K6-2 350@452,Fic 503+ 1.2a,64mb Mushkin Samsung GHcas2,Maxtor 8.4gb,G200 Mill.8mb Sgram,Yamaha sound

[BishopSawyer]

My G400 MAX woes

I've seen similar posts to mine in here, but I thought I'd add my woes to the mix. My G400 MAX is not working properly. Here are all of the things I have tried in order to get it working:

1) Updating the drivers
2) Removing all of the old drivers and reg entries, and then installing the newest drivers.
3) Moving my PCI cards around so that there are zero conflicting IRQs.
4) Forcing AGP 1x with a reg hack.
5) Setting the video aperture to 256 megs.
6) Disabling various features of the card.
7) Removing and/or disabling unnecessary hardware (sound card, SCSI card, etc.)

It's had the same effect every time. I load up Windows fine (sometimes it locks up, though, which never happened before). Sometimes it doesn't ever load the GUI (LiteSTEP) I can move the mouse around, but that's it. Ctrl-Alt-Del doesn't work, Alt-F4 doesn't work. When I load up a 3D intensive thing (Q3A, Matrox G400 Tech Demo, Expendable, Half-Life, etc.), it gets goony. It apparently doesn't matter if it's running D3D or OpenGL. It inevitably crashes. Sometimes it runs for 2 seconds, sometimes for five minutes. However, it _always_ crashes unless I exit ASAP. The crash is
sometimes accompanied by a sustained sound from the sound card. Sometimes the sound continues on a loop. I cannot power down using the Baby ATX tower's switch. I have to reset.

I have the following system specs:

* ASUS P2B-F with latest BIOS flashed
* Celeron 433, not overclocked, running at about 96 degrees Fahrenheit when I'm just messing around in the BIOS.
* 256 megs of PC100 8 ns SDRAM -- two 128 meg DIMMs.
* SB Live! PCI sound card
* 3COM Fast Etherlink III PCI network card
* Adaptec 2920C SCSI adapter
* Matrox Millennium G400 MAX, 32 MB AGP 2X with the latest drivers for the hardware and PowerDesk
* 13 GB WDC UDMA/33 hard drive
* External SCSI Jaz drive
* Internal SCSI-2 NEC 24x CD-ROM
* Creative Labs 5x PC-DVD
* Hitachi SuperScan 811 21" .22 dp monitor
* Running Windows 98 with LiteSTEP shell replacement

Any help you could give would be appreciated.

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BishopSawyer
Webmaster, Black Isle Studios

[chuck]

List all the IRQ assignments windows has.
Also, start in safe mode and go to the device list in system properties and see what all is there. Some things will show that do not when you are not in safe mode.
Tell us what they are.
chuck


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(erstwhile cjolley) celery 333@500mz 2.2V, Abit BH6, 128meg@cas2 gh, 10gig IBM 7200rpm UltraStar, Princton EO75, SB Live Value, V3 2000 PCI (still waiting on my MAX!)

[Smiff.]

I'd ditch liteSTEP for a start. You need to strip the machine down to the basics (uninstall software first, then if that doesn't work start pulling out hardware). I know its drastic but there's a good chance you'll never find the culprit otherwise. If all that doesn't work its reinstall windows time. Urggh.

Good luck!

Smiff

[VISADE]

a) Remove all drivers and registry entries.
b) Set motherboard BIOS default settings.
c) Set video to standard VGA.
d) reboot and change drivers to 5.13.

regards

[KvHagedorn]

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