Serious computer stability issue with Games!!

[Spagina]

Ok, I have had this damn problem for two months, yes... 2 friggin' months, of which that entire time I've been trying to resolve it. My problem is that any 3D games or any game for that matter, will hang within 10-20 minutes of playing. I'm talking about the hard freeze, sound looping and have to hit reset freeze.

The odd problem with this is not so much the game freezing, it is the fact that my computer will run the game perfectly fine if I reset my machine and go directly into the game without using anything else (e.g. Outlook Express, Internet Explorer, Photoshop, etc.) If I load directly into the game after Windows starts, I can play for hours on end until I get bored. But the moment I load some minial programs and then want to play a game, all hell breaks loose. It's absolutely driving me insane, I need to resolve this now before I take a sledgehammer to my computer, and at this point I'm seriously considering doing it.

I'm running Windows 2000 Pro/Windows 98SE dual boot, and the problem occurs within both installations of windows, so this has to be a hardware related issue. But it's weird how whenever my game crashes, Half-life, it will throw what looks like a minor memory dump file inside my C: directory. It does this on both Windows 2000 Pro and Windows 98SE and I've never seen it before. Always, whenever HL crashes, it'll make this small memory dump file, usually averaging between 50-100k in size. I would also like to note I turned off memory dumping in Windows 2000 Pro, so I don't know how or what is generating this file.

To continue, these were the tests I have gone through so far... I checked to see if my video card was causing the issue so I replaced it with an old TNT. Nope, game still crashed. I then replaced my memory and individually tested each stick using memtestx86. Nope, program still crashed hard. I tested to see if my sound card was causing the issue, so I replaced with my old SBLive, nope, program still crashes, sound is not an issue. I then commmenced to replace my Netgear network card with an old Intel, still crashed. At this point, I'm tossing my hands in the air as to what's going on. I have a nagging feeling it's my motherboard, but I keep feeling hesitant on that note since my games run perfectly fine off a freshboot, but crash after I load and use a few programs and then proceed to play games. Note, my CPU temps are 45C full load under games, so I'm well aware that it is NOT a heat issue. If heat were a factor, my games would crash regardless whether I reset the machine or ran programs before.

At this point, as I stated, I think it's either my motherboard or processor, but I'm hesitant, as described above. This problem has been driving me nuts and I need some kind soul out there to help me fix this. Here are my full specs as well as BIOS options...

AMD Athlon T-Bird 1 GHZ @ 1 GHZ (Machine not overclocked.)
MSI K7t-Pro2a w/Overclocker 1.06 Bios (Note, I tried both the 2.7 and 1.06B Bios and it hung on both BIOSes. I'm using 1.06 because it doesn't mess up the IRQ's like the 2.7's do.)
512 Mb Crucial and Generic RAM
Western Digital 40 Gig HD
Visiontek Geforce 2 GTS 64 MB
Netgear F311 Network Card
Hercules GametheaterXP
Windows 2000 Pro/Windows 98SE Dual Boot

BIOS Settings:
I turned off 4x AGP down to 2x AGP
Shadowing and Caching of BIOS or Video are off.
ACPI Power is OFF
AGP Aperture is 128MB

Each device is on it's own IRQ right now...
Video IRQ 10
USB IRQ 7
Network IRQ 11
Sound IRQ 5

None of my peripherals are conflicting anywhere.

With the note of Windows 2000 PRO and Windows 98SE, both Operating Systems are fully up-to-date with all patches, and I'm using all up-to-date drivers, including...
Via 4-in-1 Drivers v.4.32
Nvidia Geforce 12.60 Betas (Games crash regardless of driver version.)
Hercules Gametheater XP Win2k V.2.02 98 V.2.00
Netgear F311 V.1.30 Drivers
Windows 2000 PRO is using Service Pack 2 with the AGP fix

This computer ran perfect till 2 months ago when it started doing this crazy crap on me, I didn't change any hardware, I just recieved Windows 2000 Pro and did a clean install on my machine. Since then, it's been toasted.

Note: I installed Win2k over 10 times, each time by itself. I only recently installed Windows 98SE to see if I could play games in that but no dice, it subsequently crashes in Windows 98 as well.

Sorry for posting such a long post, but I am very sick of this machine and it's problem and I wanted to provide you guys with enough information in hopes that someone out there will have a solution for my dilemma.

Thanks for your time and I hope to hear a response soon.

 

[Grant]

Sounds like you are having some of the same problems that my wifes machine was having. I was finally able to get it fixed this weekend. I did a couple of things and it helped and the machine hasn't crashed on her yet in Diablo II.

The first thing that i did was make sure that the hard drive was using DMA.

Secondly i followed this guide as tweaked W2k. http://www.3dspotlight.com/tweaks/memory-win2k/index.shtml

After i followed that it worked great.

Hopefully this helps.

 

[Bosec]

Sounds like something in your startup group might want to clear that out of junk ... in 98se it is start .. run .. msconfig.exe.
Go to the startup tab and you can see what is all starting up when your machine boots, take out some unesscarry stuff to clear up your resources.

 

[ugh]

This is similar to the prob I'm having. But I'm using an Intel based system. I tried disabling AGP by cutting the aperture size to 16 or so and the problem went away. But that's definitely not the solution. Games were slow as hell. I've also tried setting the AGP to 1x. The games still hung, but it occured a lot later. Under Win2kPro, the games fared better. However, it finally succumbed to crazy hanging a while later. I should point out that this thing happens ONLY on D3D games. I can play Quake3, Alice, Half-Life (OpenGL) for hours. The worst game is Colin McRae Rally 2. It hangs rite after the stage is loaded.

I'm still finding the solution myself. I'm thinking of changing the motherboard (which is a MSI BX Master) to a KT133A based mobo. But seeing that you're having the same prob, I'm not sure whether that's the way to go or not.

 

[ugh]

Dbl post...