what's the problem?

[mom]

almost a new comp,
MSI KT4VL 8x agp/audio/lan
amd athlon xp 2100+ 266 mhz oem
512 mb ram pc-2700 ddr 333
asus geforce4 v9180TD mx440 8x 64mb
60 gb hd, cdrw, dvd

when playing games (any kind): the game would shut down OR
comp reboots OR black screen with vertical short green or yellow lines on top over the screen OR blue screen with fatal exception at some address. usually happens every 15-20 seconds OR comp just freezes.
Games ( ghost recon, rainbow six etc) does not run very smooth after playing for some time if they don't shut down or freeze before that.
I had WIN 98 but was told all this was happening because I was using an old operating system so I installed Win2000. The same thing.
Can anyone help on this one please?

thanks/mom

 

[roho]

Overclocked card?

Incorrectly seated gfx card/memory/cpu?

Overheating?

Faulty drivers/OpenGl?

Bad Memory?

Sound card probs?

How about telling us what the BSOD says?

Have you updated anything on your system, gfx drivers/agp drivers/BIOS etc.

Have you tried running the card at 4X?

 

[Lostman]

What version of Direct X are you using? Open the DX confix (dxdiag I think?) and run some test from in there to see if that is your issue.

 

[dethangel]

first thing i would try is buying a new stick of ram (another 512) and adding it, if it still crashes, remove the old stick, if it doenst crash, put the old stick in slot 2, and see if it crashes (all remove and replace memory should be done with poewr disconnected btw) it sounds like a memory problem since it is giving you a BSOD with a memory address, so that ram might be fried, the reason it doenst crash before is that games are really memory intensive, much more so than just OS progs, IE, or word processing and you might not be accessing the bad memory until you play your games, if you could, please post the address that it is giving and i could probably tell you for certain what it is

 

[Lostman]

I know a trick with the CMOS battery that might help....................

 

[mom]

Hi guys

not overclocked, updated drivers, no sound problems, memory I don't know. I ran memtest86 and it said it was ok.

I have taken the comp to where I bought it 3-4 times and they have checked it, says everything is working fine including memory and graphic card.

blue screen: fatal exception 06 at 0028:C0031482 in VxD VWIN32(01) + 00000DE6
fatal exc. 0D at 0028:00000000...
fatal exc. 0E at 0028:00000078...
fatal exc. 0D at 0377:00003860...
fatal exc.0E at 0028:C00598C0 in Vxd VMCPD(01)
and many many many more.

Direct X was 8.2 but is upgraded to 9.0, no change of course
run the tests there, OK

games usually shuts down to the desktop within 10 to 15 seconds
not always with a blue screen though.( age of empire)

thanks again/mom

 

[Lostman]

Dumb question, have you tried a virus scan?

 

[mom]

yes i have until i got a blue screen and norton crashed

mom

 

[Lostman]

That's no good.

If you can't even run a virus scan, I suggest starting over. format and reinstall. Just try to get a copy of XP. Win9x isn't worth the problems and 2k isn't a multimedia OS.

 

[mom]

I've re-installed everything sooo many times by now so I guess one more time is ok. and yep I will get XP too and try and see if it makes a difference.

mom