Maximum PC

I believe my videocard may be dying based on what has happened the past few days:

1) Several days ago when playing any kind of 3-d games, my system started to do instant reboots. As in the power got cut off. When the system came back up, I would get Windows XP error messages indicating that the cause was in my video drivers.

2) Nothing had "changed" with my video drivers so I wanted to see if something else could be at work. I run chkdsk and set it to fix all errors and recover bad segments, then defrag. This did not help. I also flash the BIOS of my mobo to the latest version and this didn't help either.

3) Installed the latest nVidia drivers, forgetting to uninstall the old drivers. This of course didn't help.

4) Uninstalled all nVidia drivers, uninstall card from hardware manager, reboot, and install the latest drivers fresh. This SEEMS to help quite a bit and I start to think "problem solved". However, it begins happening again but this time only a lot less often. These kind of "instant" crashes / reboots are not acceptable so I proceed to 5.

5) My Windows XP install is 2 years old. I have done a good job keeping things in order, but still, it's 2 YEARS OLD, lol. I can use my current hard drive in another machine so I buy a new hard drive for this machine. I put the new hard drive in this machine.

6) Following the advice in last months MPC, I install XP, then service pack 1, then my motherboard chipset drivers, then the video drivers. Everything seems to work fine. Changed resolution to my LCD's native 1280 x 1024. Go grab all of the critical updates, works fine.

7) Go back to Windows Update, download some more updates. The system locks during the download. No access to keyboard or mouse - it's frozen solid. No choice but to hit the reset button.

8) During this reboot, it gets about 3/4 done but before it finishes, POP - "instant" reboot again. And now, it cycles like that, only getting a fraction of the way through the boot process before "popping". Once there was a blue screen "memory dump" message. I had checked this RIMMS with a diagnostic before putting in the new hard drive and they checked out fine.

I should note that the errors ONLY started occuring after installing the nVidia drivers. When running as a "vga card" before installing the drivers, these crashes did NOT occur. So could it BE anything but my videocard dying?

So now, I am planning to put in a card that's in a spare system, a Matrox G400 Max and see if the problem disappears. However, before I do that does anyone know if this could be the motherboard? I don't want to fry the Matrox as it is doing just fine in the application box it's currenty residing.

Any advice or suggestions are greatly appreciated. =)

System Specs:

P4 2.4 GHz 533 bus
Intel D850EMV2 mobo
512mb RDRAM (2 x 256 PC1066)
GeForce 5700 Ultra 128mb
Western Digital J1200 120mb HD
Windows XP Home

Windows doesn't do a good uninstall of Nvidia or ATI drivers. Shut off your antivirus first, then uninstall the video driver, use windows uninstall first,say no to restart, then use Detonator Destroyer to finish the uninstall, now say yes to restart. You can get it here:

http://majorgeeks.com/download806.html

Make sure you are disconnected from the internet (remove ethernet plug) before you load video drivers, windows tries to load them off the net as well, while you are installing them from your hard drive...causing a borked install. Once more shut off the antivirus before you load the video driver.

Do you have DX9b on your system?

Nasty

Thanks Nasty; I would have given this a shot on my original install. However, the new hard drive was totally fresh. No antivirus has been installed (I did shut it off before though, on the original hard drive) and no prior install of nVidia drivers.

Although I DID have the network cable plugged in, each time I restarted Windows XP when the "found new hardware" wizard popped up for the video card I cancelled it, leaving it as an unknown card running in vga mode. So XP should not have tried to download anything and this was a totally fresh install on a brand new hard drive.

I do indeed have DX9b on my system. I installed it before the video drivers. Page 36 of the July Maximum PC says for greatest stability, the order of install should be:

1) Windows XP
2) Service Pack 1
3) Motherboard chipset drivers
4) DirectX
5) Video Drivers
6) remaining critical updates

That's the exact order I went in. The problems don't seem to emerge until I install video drivers though. When the system thinks it's a generic vga card with the Windows VGA driver, these crashes don't occur. Considering it was done on a brand new hard drive and still happens I'm left wondering what else it could be.

I think I will pop that Matrox in. I hate to fry it as it's been rock solid since I bought it years ago. Obviously if problems still happen with the Matrox in there it's something else.

Did you check in the device manager to see if the Nvidia video card loaded properly, is it named correctly? Did you check in the event viewer to see what is going on? Look in the system log and the Application log within the event viewer for any problems. Start>settings>control panel>Admin>event viewer>system log>application log. You may have a bad install of Windows, you might try to boot to the XP cd and do a repair then service pack 1a and see if the drivers install after that proceedure was run.

The only other thing I can think of is bad ram, if you had a bad install of windows or any other app. Get memtest86 from here and make a floppy as it instructs, then reboot with the floppy in and run the program for a while. Any errors scrap the ram.

http://www.majorgeeks.com/download4226.html

Nasty

Look in your event viewer and see what it's say happened at the scene of the crash...

The problem here is that once this starts, I can't get back into
Windows at all. I can try getting into safe mode which should work.

I THINK I have solved the problem however: when I put the Matrox card into the machine, everything worked fine. The machine was in a "rolled back" state however. After being prompted to install critical updates I did, and immediately everything that happened with the 5700 Ultra happened with the Matrox. Exactly the same.

Now, looking back at what I've done these problems have ONLY occured after I've downloaded the remaining critical updates. Prior to that everything is fine. And, my system had never been unstable let alone repeatedly crashed... so, this tells me that a recent critical update has caused my crash fest. I should mention that both cards work just fine in a Windows 2000 box.

Any ideas what critical update in the past two weeks or so could cause system crashes like this? Anyone who has any ideas, I will be very greatful. In the meantime I will uninstall each critical update from the past month or so and then install them one at a time and see if I can deterimine a culprit. I will start a new thread about this.

Looking over this thread, you're doing all the right things and taking all the right steps. There's not a whole lot to recommend beyond the troubleshooting steps you've taken that have gotten you this far, and you should narrow down the culprit by doing the above single installs.

Thanks - unfortunately for me it appears that it was just coincidence that things didn't happen before the critical update installs. The same thing started happening with a fresh XP install with only service pack 1 BEFORE the suspected culprits were installed.

My next step was to switch my 2 RIMMs into the 2 empty RIMM slots. This actually worked fine for awhile and even the old cluttered hard drive install seemed to be fine! Then it started yet again so I'm thinking mobo now. I have never known anyone who has had as many mobos go bad over the years (or arrive DOA) than me, LOL. It seems to be a curse.

Shot in the dark, but have you tried checking for faulty dimms?

www.memtest86.com

Hmmm...only thing that I've noticed being odd is maybe a DirectX update. There was some DirectX update that looked funny to me with some warning about it being usable only with DX "gold" version, but I installed it anyway and no problems. But nothing really sticks specifically in the Critical update area. I was thinking "drivers" first...


Best advice I could give is do just that. I'll be looking for your thread because I'd love to discuss windows update as well. All of a sudden, MSN messenger 4.7 is on my list, and when I install it, it runs in two instances on my PC. I deleted...ah, nevermind...I'll save it for the UPDATE thread.

UGH

This is what happened to my machine last week . . .only thing is, since then it's ran fine. . . Same drivers, my Geforce 5200 stayed in . . .

only thing bad is the dang storage drive's boot sector is screwed (thanks to those who gave me advice on that) . . . which now I'm gonna pay a local shop to get the data off it . . .eesh

I haven't done anything to change mine. . .but thought about going with a build or two back in drivers. . . ones I know are stable . . . so it doesn't happen again . .

Mine happened when I had a 3d game running, in window, and a 3d screensaver popped up . . .it rebooted and got the same Error caused by message

good luck