Tough MSI K7T PRO2-A And GeForce DDR 256 Lockup problem

[barlav]

I?m having a spurious lockup problem with my MSI K7T PRO2-A and My GeForce 256 DDR Video Card. My OS is Windows 2000 professional. My video card is a Creative Labs GeForce 256 DDR video card. I bought it OEM. It?s model number is (CT6970) and therefore it has the Nvidia BIOS as opposed to the Creative Labes BIOS. Since I can?t install the Creative drivers I?m using the latest Nvidia drivers for it (Version 6.31 for Windows 2000) which is fine. Unless I flash the BIOS of my card with Creative?s BIOS, Creative?s drivers will not recognize my video card as a Creative product and therefore won?t install properly. Now for my lockup problem: My PC is locking up when I leave it running a 3d screen saver for a while. I?ve tried many different ones and it happens with all of them. It will run fine for several hours. I will go to use my PC and the screen saver will stop as it should when I use the mouse and everything will be fine but when I come back to it the second time it will have locked up completely. The last image of the current screen saver will be frozen on the screen and I have to reboot. I am 100% positive I have the correct drivers and they are installed properly. I have made the following adjustment to my BIOS as an attempt to optimize the functionality of my video card:

1. Assign IRQ to VGA = Enabled
2. VGA Palette Snoop = Disabled
3. Video BIOS Shadow = Disabled
4. C800-CBFFF = Disabled
5. AGP Aperture Size = 128 MB (I have 256MB of system memory)

After all this it still happens. This isn?t a HUGE issue but I?m a perfectionist and I want everything to be 100%. I?ve never had a lockup or crash while using the PC, and I have never had a lockup using a regular 2D screen saver of no screen saver at all.

So, my question is: Is there anything else I can try (Other than buying a different video card) that will perhaps make this problem go away? Thanks for any input ahead of time.

 

[barlav]

I've installed some NVIDA beta drivers (Version 6.47) and I haven't been able to lockup my video since. The current NVIDIA Detonator drivers are at version 6.31. I also tried 6.34. There was an improvement with 6.34 but I would still lockup, just not as frequently. Version 6.47 seems to have done the trick. So if you are having a video lockup problem with a GeForce DDR, MSI K7T PRO2-A and an AMD T-Bird 1Ghz, then these beta drivers should make a difference.

 

[dman]

Check Here

May be something useful...

 

[barlav]

Thanks for the tip dman6666. This isn't the problem I'm having. I believe my problem is AGP related. It has to do with the W2K + KT133 Chipset + GeForce DDR video card combination. I'm still getting lockups even after I installed the beta drivers but they're mich less frequent now. I've also downloaded a Microsoft patch for the problem that may help and I've made a registry change that might help.

 

[vester]

I don't know if this applies here, but here it is.

I used to have a Compaq PII that would lock up when running certain 3D screen savers. It ended up being a problem with the Anti-Virus software and the screensaver. The AV software would try and do something and the SS would not shut down properly, resulting in a lockup. Never figured out why it was happening. I installed a different AV and it worked fine after that. Go figure!

It may be worth a try, but it could have just been that crappy computer I had.

It was running WIN95 and I think McAfee at first, maybe another AV. I switched to Norton and that took care of the problem.

Edit - I am running the same setup as you now, except Win98, and have no problems. Using the newest driver off Creative's site and the original bios. I have not gotten around to upgrading the BIOS yet.

 

[barlav]

Ok. I think I have found the solution. According to Microsoft, this problem is known to occur with Nvidia GeForce 256 video adapters on computers with AMD Athlon processors running Windows 2000. The cause of the problem is Memory that is allocated by the video driver is being corrupted. The following addition to the registry can be made to solve the problem:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Memory Management

Add value:
Value Name: LargePageMinimum
Data Type: REG_DWORD
Radix: Hexadecimal
Value: 0xffffffff

I have made this change and I've been running for about 2 days without a crash. So, hopefully this did the trick. I took a small perfomance hit by making this change but, at this point, stability is much more important to me. I hope this helps anyone else that encounters this problem.

Microsoft Article On This Issue