G400 Problem and XP (maybe)

[DentyCracker]

I do have an old K6-2 Fan on my G400. My SBLive!5.1 is in PCI2, ATi TV-Wonder (BT878) is in PCI3, RT8139 NIC in PCI5, oh and I'm not running BeOS or Linux right now. The BeOS partition is still on the machine, when I want to overburn I use it. Triple booting Me, 2K, and XP at the moment. !@#$% EzCD 5.0 doesn't want to freakin' work under XP although I have it working on other machines with XP. Haven't tested Nero 5.5 yet. No spontaneous reboots or lockups with XP so far.

[PeTe]

XP and G400

Really dont know what's wrong with your setup, but i had XP running for 3 weeks now and never had a single BSOD.. (once one burning software started writing to hd and seemed it never stopped so i rebooted the machine, and this happened when i was trying out a new softwares options, really didnt know what the hell one switch did. ), but other than that, no problems here.

The machine has been up for 4 straight days with one session, so stability really isnt the issue here ( then i got tired of the fan's sound and wanted to get some quality sleep.

For me the only problem is the NEED, THE NEED FOR SPEED. So a moving to GF3 Ti200/GF3/ATI 8500, at the moment Ti200 seems to be the best buy, when released.

PeTe

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Sys specs: AMD Thunderbird 1.2@1.33 on Abit KT7, 256 PC133 SDRAM, Hitatchi 19" + Matrox G400MAX, 58G of HD, SB128PCI, ISA NIC-card, Lite-on 24/10/40 CDRW + Donremember DVD-drive, Logitech Formula Force Racing Wheel, etc..

[MatthewW]

I am thinking the same, though the 8500 is looking like my choice, depending on what the world thinks of the ATI XP drivers. I like dual head to much to give it up.

But if the drivers are bad then I will probably go for the GF3 Ti 200.


macrotech - the problems you are describing really sound like the the problems I had with the pre 5.71 drivers. I know that they are beta but they are aware of XP, which is more that can be said of the previous Win2k drivers. The particular error I was having with the earlier drivers mention that the card was caught in a loop.

If you look in the XP help somewhere it does say that you shouldn't use Win2k drivers as they may cause problems.

Upgrade to 5.71 and I think you will be a lot happier, it sounds like on your machine they can't be any worse so what do you have to lose?

[macrotech]

Matthew,

Thanks - you're right, the error message is that the card got caught in a loop. I haven't tried the beta drivers yet, so I will give it a go.

Cheers,

Kevin

[Goc]

Well, I've installed 5.71 and it still hangs, although rarely... I've had nearly a day without screen corruption... That's after I upgraded the BIOS on my MAX...

[PeTe]

Did you uninstall the drivers FULLY before installing the beta drivers ? Because these 5.71 Betas are great with XP. If you didnt uninstall them, try it out, only going to take few minutes and might even solve the problem. There is a "new" version of the matrox unistall-proggie that should work with XP, dont remeber did i try it out or not.. but give it a go anyway. =)

PeTe

[Goc]

Yep, I did a full uninstall. When that didn't work out, I did a clean install, and it still hangs... Something sucks in my system

[Greebe]

That realtek nic and winmodem would be the first POS to replace

[MagikMole]

Got it stable

After fiddlin around a little I got mine stable tonight, I updated to latest bios 2.51 and did a new install of the 5.71 betas, but that wasn't it, coz as soon as I clicked the powerdesk icon after bootup system froze. Booted it up again, started Q3a ran a few benchmarks all fine, not to fast tho :/ quit game, clicked on powerdesk icon, solid freeze... hmm so I went thinkin, I read somewhere WinXP uses Hardware Acceleration for some Visual Enhancements to the user interface, like alpha blending (I think) So I tought it would be once of those that keeps me crashin. So I turned those all off & switched to the plain unskinned layout and system didn't crash since then, watched some jackass episodes using TV out, played some Q3a all fine

[macrotech]

5.71 didn't work for me, same problems as MagikMole. I tried reducing hardware acceleration (but not to minimum) and still had freeze problems so I completely uninstalled the drivers.

If I use the Microsoft supplied driver and don't accept XP's kind offer to resize the display, it is stable but still with redraw glitches. However, this leaves me stuck at 640x480.

Come on Matrox let's see the official XP drivers please!

Kevin

[Goc]

Well I checked off Write combine in Advanced adapter properties... Let's see what happens now.