Hi,
I've been running a Dell 400sc (2.8ghz, 800fsb, ht, etc) with 2x512 OCZ (mated pair) 400mhz & 2x256 Kingston Value Ram (not mated) 400mhz, with both pairs running dual channel. The vid card is a Visiontek Ectasy (sp?) ATI 9100 w/ 128mb. This setup ran fine for approximately 5 weeks of uptime without a hiccup.
Anyway, last week I received a Hauppauge WinTV-Go (878/848 chipset) that I had ordered from surpluscomputers.com . While it's my understanding they don't actually sell used or refurbished items, I have heard of people receiving less than new items. In any case, for $20 I figured a time-tested tv tuner was a decent deal. I'd heard it was fairly stable card and that others commonly ran them in Dell 400scs without incident.
However, I consistently experience lockups with this card. Typically I have mirc, Opera and Xnews running at any given time, along with DScaler (4.1.10.) I previously used WinTV 2000 (v4.4) and thought the problem was resultant from that, so the switch to Dscaler culminated in a lull that I thought signified the dispersal of the problem. However, it continuously and intermittently appears. While as of yet it won't crash if just Wintv or Dscaler is running alone, it's almost always when I go to switch a window in mirc or Opera or right after xnews has completed downloading headers from a newsgroup (it's a known memory hog and I thought at first it was the culprit until the lockups continued when it wasn't running.)
I'm running XP Pro w/ SP2 and with all possible driver updates. The driver for the card is WDM 3.45 rev. 22320. I've tried the different modes from the Hauppauge utility "Primary" with no apparent bearing on the locking. The lockup freezes everything except the audio feed from the tv tuner. I tried some torture testing to see if it was the possible result from anything else, and other than some errors occured with Prime95 is ran in tandem with Hot Cpu's memory burn. Running P95 and Hot Cpu's memory burn without Dscaler returned no errors after 90 minutes. I've ran memtest86 v3.2 a few times and found that the OCZ and Kingston ram didn't actually behave well together so currently I'm running the OCZ alone. (First test with them together reported 2 errors in one pass, OCZ alone no errors, Kingston alone no errors, flipped slots no errors for Kingston [haven't tested the OCZ in the slot previously home to the Kingston ram.])
Other than the P95/Hot Cpu failing, the computer seems pretty rock solid, especially in light of it's 5 week uptime previous to the installation of the Hauppauge card. I'm not very good at diagnosing these sorts of things, but I'm hoping to confirm the tv tuner is the heart of this problem. Following that, I'm wondering if anyone can help clarify if this is a defective card or some sort of system incompatibility, and if I can hope that a replacement of this card will result in a friendlier version. I appreciate anyone's help as I'm almost completely out of my element now and I've exhausted almost all my knowledge in this area.
Thanks,
Jeff Day
Venom0000
I've been running a Dell 400sc (2.8ghz, 800fsb, ht, etc) with 2x512 OCZ (mated pair) 400mhz & 2x256 Kingston Value Ram (not mated) 400mhz, with both pairs running dual channel. The vid card is a Visiontek Ectasy (sp?) ATI 9100 w/ 128mb. This setup ran fine for approximately 5 weeks of uptime without a hiccup.
Anyway, last week I received a Hauppauge WinTV-Go (878/848 chipset) that I had ordered from surpluscomputers.com . While it's my understanding they don't actually sell used or refurbished items, I have heard of people receiving less than new items. In any case, for $20 I figured a time-tested tv tuner was a decent deal. I'd heard it was fairly stable card and that others commonly ran them in Dell 400scs without incident.
However, I consistently experience lockups with this card. Typically I have mirc, Opera and Xnews running at any given time, along with DScaler (4.1.10.) I previously used WinTV 2000 (v4.4) and thought the problem was resultant from that, so the switch to Dscaler culminated in a lull that I thought signified the dispersal of the problem. However, it continuously and intermittently appears. While as of yet it won't crash if just Wintv or Dscaler is running alone, it's almost always when I go to switch a window in mirc or Opera or right after xnews has completed downloading headers from a newsgroup (it's a known memory hog and I thought at first it was the culprit until the lockups continued when it wasn't running.)
I'm running XP Pro w/ SP2 and with all possible driver updates. The driver for the card is WDM 3.45 rev. 22320. I've tried the different modes from the Hauppauge utility "Primary" with no apparent bearing on the locking. The lockup freezes everything except the audio feed from the tv tuner. I tried some torture testing to see if it was the possible result from anything else, and other than some errors occured with Prime95 is ran in tandem with Hot Cpu's memory burn. Running P95 and Hot Cpu's memory burn without Dscaler returned no errors after 90 minutes. I've ran memtest86 v3.2 a few times and found that the OCZ and Kingston ram didn't actually behave well together so currently I'm running the OCZ alone. (First test with them together reported 2 errors in one pass, OCZ alone no errors, Kingston alone no errors, flipped slots no errors for Kingston [haven't tested the OCZ in the slot previously home to the Kingston ram.])
Other than the P95/Hot Cpu failing, the computer seems pretty rock solid, especially in light of it's 5 week uptime previous to the installation of the Hauppauge card. I'm not very good at diagnosing these sorts of things, but I'm hoping to confirm the tv tuner is the heart of this problem. Following that, I'm wondering if anyone can help clarify if this is a defective card or some sort of system incompatibility, and if I can hope that a replacement of this card will result in a friendlier version. I appreciate anyone's help as I'm almost completely out of my element now and I've exhausted almost all my knowledge in this area.
Thanks,
Jeff Day
Venom0000
