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I am about to GIVE UP

S

SlingBlade

Member
I am at the end of my rope. Everything I do to try to get everything working properly in win2000 only makes things worse. I've tried updating every driver, reformating, installing directX 8.0, moving cards around, disabling ACPI, reinstalling win2000, upgrading to SP2, changing the wave buffer size, and now after ALL that work, the problem STILL isn't solved and my system crashes whenever I load Counter-Strike and play it for 5 min. It isn't overheating, I ripped the case off and stuck a HUGE fan in there to cool it off. GKLDJGKLDGJKLF. What started as a slight glitch with my sound card skipping every now and then has turned into something completely unplayable and unstable. Win2000 is a mess. I don't care HOW many people say how cool it is, I think it is the biggest piece of trash Microsoft has shoved out the door yet.
 
Make sure your cards are still not sharing... Do not place a card in your PCI slot by the AGP... Certain slots share IRQ's stay away from putting cards in two slots that share...

What is your motherboard?
 

To Shooters astute and genteely worded question I would add some more.

Have you overclocked your cpu?

Have you ever at any time changed any other bios values? If so, which ones?

Do you have any newly added hardware?

Have you tried removing all of your cards, with the exception of the graphics adapter, to see what impact that has on operation?

What sort of system stability have you experienced prior to this set of problems?

Does Win200 appear to work OK with all programs other than counterstrike?

Are you aware that Counter-Strike's own 'General' forum has posts by other users who appear to be having a similar problem? (Note: I did a search for '2000'.)

I performed a search of the Microsoft Support & Knowledge Base for both "Counter-Strike" and "Counter Strike" and got no hits.

I am not a Win2000 user. It has been my understanding that there are some games that just plain do not transition to Win2000.

Anyone else with some ideas on this?
 
If you ar able to, take a time to reformat and try win 98 on it, tell us if it crashes and etc on that. That will reveal a lot more clues than pulling your hair out.
 
As well, I don't agree with people saying "WIN2k IS fine". That's a lot of garbage, I agree. Win 2k may perform fine and no crashes on OTHER systems, but you haven't seen perfectly configured systems crash on it have you? If you have, that means you've seen every damn PC in the world...no OS is fine for every PC. I thought win 98 ruled until the damn mobo made me put 4 in 1 VIA drivers, had to format and install 3 times before I got it right!
 
I know for a fact that Counter-Strike is fine with Windows 2k, I use it myself.

Explain the symptoms a little more.... is it just constantly beeping like its overheating?? Is it freezing???
 
Thanks guys, I appriciate your help 🙂

Everything in my computer is running at spec, with the exception being the memory. It is PC133 Cas3, and is running at 133Mhz 2,3,2. I'll try setting that to normal... but I don't see why it would run fine for weeks and be fine when not in games. I've considered the overheating issue, amd so I took off the case of my computer and stuck a fan (a real one) right next to it to blow directly into my case. This didn't help in the least. Here are my system specs:

PC 133 cas3
Sound Blaster Live! Platinum (not 5.1)
Asus K7V 686A southbridge and Via KX133 chipset
Athlon Classic 850
3D Prophet 2 GF2 GTS
Western Digital ATA/66 18G HDD
16X/32X Pioneer DVD/CD-ROM
8x/4x/32x Creative CD-R

Here is what I did. I had windows 98, so I decided to install win2000 because It started crashing (by rebooting itself) so I decided I would load a more stable operating System. I had heard great things about win2000, so I went for it and did a clean install of win2000. I loaded all the drivers necessary, as well as SP2. I alsod defraged. I had a few initial troubles, but resolved most of them. Win2000 was finally running fine on my machine with ONE exception. In games or while web surfing and playing MP3s (Intense HDD activity did not seem to affect it at all) The system would sometimes freeze for a second, playing the same sound 5 times, and then resume. This was not terribly frequent, but it was annoying enough that I wanted to get it fixed. So I posted here in the Anandtech forums, and recived many good suggestions, but unfortunantly none of them worked. Many people with 686B south bridges and Via chipsets had had the same problem, and there is actually a fix for the 686B problem, but not for 686A. They also suggested that I see what IRQs my cards were on. I checked and found they were ALL sharing IRQ 9. Not being a windows 2000 savy person, I had no idea that was perfectly normal and actually a "feature". I learned otherwise but decided it was worth trying anyways. I tried to reinstall windows 2000 using the "update" option where it would keep my programs. I tried several times but every time it got to the "Checking Hardware Configuration" part it would get a "KMODE Exception not handled" error. do a memory dump, and restart. I tried this 5 times and gave up, booted on the CD, and reinstalled windows with a fresh install. This worked, and I reloaded all my programs and drivers. I checked my IRQ settings and they were all perfect. Only 2 things were sharing the same IRQ, my network card and USB hubs. I tried playing HL and had the SAME problem. By then I had gotten a support answer from Creative, and among the other things he had suggested that I had already tried, he suggested I raise the WAV buffer and install directX 8. I did both of these. I then went and played a clan match for an hour without any problems, other than that the annoying skipping problem didn't work. I then went back to windows after the match, talked to the clan, and we had another scrim that we were gonna do, so I reloaded Half Life. It started out on Dust, but we were playing on Train so they switched the map and Train started to load. My system froze at the "loading" sign. I rebooted and tried again. I played for 5 min and the system froze again. This continued for about 4 reboots until I gave up. I tried reinstalling my vid drivers, reinstalling my Sound Card drivers, changing the wave buffer back to 4. This did not work. I would unistall directX 8, but I can't find a copy of directX 7. :/
 
Sigh. I just tried reinstalling win2000 with the "upgrade" option. Didn't fix it :/ I also tried reinstalling Half Life and Counter-Strike... didn't work either :/
 
Have you tried installing win2k on a fresh format with only the minimum hardware to boot and load windows? Then installing the rest of your devices one at a time, verifying that each device works, and you can play CS without a crash. I myself would go with the ACPI hal, and not use PCI slot 1 for any devices if possible. Also, try moving your Ram to another slot.

Win2k is most definately a stable OS..but can be frustratingly difficult to trouble shoot hardware/software errors. Have you had any odd messages in event viewer?
 
Perhaps you have a hardware problem. (My guess is SBlive - Do you have the latest drivers?)

You did say you ALSO had problems with WIN98.

Otherwise, I'd suggest a dual-boot.

EDIT: Set your memory timings to 3-3-3 (since it is CAS3).
 
Well I just did a clean install of win2k and HL is working now. I still have the mementary freezing, but I can live with that. What puzzles me though is that even though I got the latest liveware and drivers from Creative, the driver is dated 5/5/2000. Their NEWEST driver is over a year old? That is kind of pathetic.
 
Have you tried running your card at AGP 1x? I had a similiar problem playing Quake 2, the game would suddenly freeze and the sounds would go into a loop. Sometimes it recovered out of it, but in most times it would lock up the machine hard. I fiddled with almost every setting imaginable and the problem finally ceased when I back down the AGP multiplier. Anyway good luck!
 
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