Non-fatal 6second freezes

[exedanni]

Specs first which might be causing the problem:

KT7A 1.2 with latest BIOS and TBird 1GHz.
256MB Kingston ECC SDRAM
TNT2 16 MB (Det 21.83) - 1152x864@100Hz
Acoustic Edge (1.57 drivers)
IBM 15.1GB 5,400rpm ATA66 HD

Win2K Pro SP2 w/latest patches, swapfile at 384MB minimum
typically always 200megs of memory in use.
4in1 4.38

These 6s freezes happen quite randomly, but when they do, everything stops, mouse pointer, HDD activity etc. Like a real crash. Then there is some major HD activity and everything resumes. They occur maybe once every 3 hours (but they are not regular by any means) and I can't reproduce them. The system is rock solid otherwise.

BUT, here is the problem, when these freezes occur in a game that uses 3D acceleration, i.e. Q3, NFS5, HL, but not Starcraft, then the system can't recover. The HD becomes active again, and I have a feeling everything is working in the background, but the screen is still frozen. So this is rather annoying to say the least.

Anyone ever experienced something like this?

exedanni

 

[swifty3]

sounds like your vid card is being pushed to much. plus it looks like your resolution is on the higher side. u might want to check out a newer, more powerful vid card. if not, try turning off some of the performance features, and see if that helps. 16 megs of ram on your vid card isn't very much. also check your bios settings for video cacheing and things like that. disable them and see if that helps.

 

[xospec1alk]

I think i have the same problems as you do exedanni, when i play ghost recon, i get 6 second freezes, and when i play black and white, or tony hawk 3, the screen locks up and the sound keeps playing. I am running

win 2k SP2 latest 4in1, laster bios
radeon 8500 64mb
sb live
athlon xp1900+
epox 8kha+
256 mb ddr RAm

video caching is off, im still stumped by this, im thinking now that vid card may be running too hot? although it worked w/ these games perfectly fine on chaintech p3 500