Parhelia and 3dsmax

[Ryu Connor]

Nearly impossible?

Hardly. I've seen it happen and I've seen it be solely related to the driver in question.

Rare? Mayhap. Impossible? Nah.

[DGhost]

in the last two years of running Windows XP and the last three years of Windows 2000, the only times i have seen it spontaneously reboot without bluescreening are when the system is misconfigured or there is a hardware problem (AGP 4x enabled on one motherboard would do it, memory timings being wrong have done it, bad power supplies have done it). In addition to my experience with my own computer systems, a majority of the times i saw such phenomenon at work was either when a piece of hardware was damaged, the system was overheating, or the system was misconfigured. the only time i saw drivers fix a system randomly rebooting inside Windows XP is when it was correcting a system misconfiguration (some motherboards don't allow you to specify AGP settings, for instance, or some have stability problems with DMA enabled).

If you are having random rebooting without bluescreen problems inside Windows XP, i highly suggest that you check the rest of your system before blaming Matrox's drivers.

[Ryu Connor]

I'm guess that was aimed at me.

Matrox drivers were not in question.

I was only commenting that drivers can cause a fatal exception that will lead to a reboot.

That's it. Don't add extra and don't try to interpet some subtle political context. I say what I mean and I mean what I say.

If you need a specific example take a look at the 23.11 NVIDIA drivers. They did all sorts of different ****ed up things to people. Including complete resets.

[MaxMan]

Oooops - didn't mean to start a war!

It just struck me as strange that it would reboot if I zoomed into an object in 3dsmax. Plus the fact that there is obviously a problem with the driver running in max (see the original post attachment). I can recreate the problem time and again.

I am running 1.0.0.223 dated 2002/03/15 - I installed the later one and it was worse!

[Pace]

Software can't really cause a reboot, but it could lead to the driver causing problems. The point was a spontaneous reboot though - I've yet to see this outside of an Abit motherboard

Drivers can crash Win2k, but rarely will they reboot it. WinXP might be different

[afterburn]

A bad driver can make a piece of hardware go beyond specifications, either of the hardware for which the driver is for (unlikely, unless things like o/c) or some connected hardware. Nvidia's (shouldn't that be a banned word ) out of spec PCI timing issue springs to mind. I have seen drivers cause bluescreens, hard resets and even instant power-offs. (all related directly to nvidia drivers in fact)

[Zao]

I had a pretty cute problem with my Parhelia and Windows .NET RC1.
I have a 250W PSU, so I expected some trouble.

The computer booted fine, everything worked good, until I decided to run some OpenGL demos I'd coded.
Wham, insta-reboot.

So I thought, bad code, so I went on testing other GL apps, each and every one of them rebooting.

Then I got kinda angry, and decided, what the heck, let's ghost the machine back to WinXP Pro again.

Said and done, after the ghost, the system worked flawless, except for the acknowledged bugs with some software (NWN).


System: Intel 845 Mobo, P4 2.0GHz, 512MB, 120GB, Parhelia Retail, 250W PSU. Compaq.