win2k/xp MAJOR problems... help appreciated!

[Quixotic]

I'm running WIN2K with the following hardware.

ASUS A7M266-D
2x Athlon XP 1700+
ATI Radeon 8500DV
3Com 3CR990-TX-97

I currently have my Turtle Beach Santa Cruz and USB 2.0 PCI card disconnected, and my serial and parallel ports disabled, because I thought it was a simple IRQ conflict problem, but this is about the bare minimum and I'm still having problems. I thought disabling ACPI would help like in the past, but no luck this time. For some reason I can't hardcode the IRQs in the BIOS -- Windows keeps overriding them with virtual IRQs (i.e. 20, 24, 32, 128). Some of the IRQs used to be shared, but right now every device has a unique IRQ on boot up and to the best of my knowledge in Windows as well, but who knows with the virtual IRQs.

Some symptoms:

- LAN connection always says its connected but every now and then my ethernet would crap out and I would need to either reboot Windows or manually disable and re-enable the LAN connection via Network and Dial-Up Connections. In the past, when I tried re-enabling the connection, it would blue screen but now it seems to re-enable fine. Still, the random network failures is annoying. This happened to my old Linksys card a year ago but I temporarily fixed it by getting a new network card. The only clue I have is in Event Viewer, it says Adapter: Microcode Dead every couple seconds or something to that effect. I don't think the network card is faulty, or is it?

- The lockups used to be different (with Win2K, computer would kinda freeze, but mouse would work, but as soon as I click the mouse it would freeze completely, but with WinXP it would blue screen and say something about infinite loop and report an ATI driver file) and they seemed to be caused by my ATI card (other people with similar problems, albeit with nVidia cards and not ATI, fixed their problem by changing aperture size and updating their drivers but neither approach helped any for me) but now its all reduced down to IRQ_NOT_EQUAL_OR_LESS BSODs. The error code was 0x000000D1 (0x<something here>, 0x00000002 (so IRQ 2?), 0x0000000 (sometimes 0x00000001, so both read and write), 0xBDFE77xx). The computer never used to do BSOD, but now it will do this even when nothing is being done on the computer. I can boot it up, and leave it sitting and within minutes (or sometimes if I'm lucky I can play 30 mins of some game) it will BSOD.

- Sometimes when Windows starts up, Device Manager will say my network card failed to start or it say it detected new hardware (my santa cruz or my ethernet card) even though they've been installed perfectly fine.

- A minor and unrelated problem is the game port on my Santa Cruz always reports lack of resources and none of the available memory location settings report as being free when I try to manually configure the resources for it.

If I install my Sound Card and USB card back in and have them sharing IRQs (this is almost inevitable as I only have 3 uniquely IRQed PCI slots with my ASUS board, and even then when I install the USB, it branches out and claims two of the other IRQs... for instance, as reported on boot up, network card on 10, sound card on 5, agp on 11, usb on 9, 10 and 11), the network failures happen even more frequently. Also of note is even though my duallie system used to crash, it was only once every couple days at max. But then the network failures came up and I tried to fix it by unsharing the IRQs (seemed to help a little bit) and now I get BSODs as well. Some of the information, like when certain problems started, may be inaccurate as I've reinstalled Windows so many times now and with so many different slot setups and combinations.

Any help much appreciated! If I can't fix it, I might just have to turn to the dark side and get a P4 cpu and mobo =)

 

[Adul]

trya new network card. I had a few do those and it was maddening. I finaly ditched it for a new one and all was well. Has for forcing your IRQ's in win2k/xp, don't bother. You are really better off letting the system handle it. In my current system I have 2 nics, ide raid, scsi, TBSC, and a modem. I let XP handle the irq business. I do locate my TBSC in the 2nd PCI slot has it is the only slot where it wont stutter.

 

[Quixotic]

Originally posted by: Adul
trya new network card. I had a few do those and it was maddening. I finaly ditched it for a new one and all was well. Has for forcing your IRQ's in win2k/xp, don't bother. You are really better off letting the system handle it. In my current system I have 2 nics, ide raid, scsi, TBSC, and a modem. I let XP handle the irq business. I do locate my TBSC in the 2nd PCI slot has it is the only slot where it wont stutter.

Yes, quite maddening indeed. What I'm wondering though is if it was just a coincidence that both my network cards did this. This most recent network card of mine only lasted a couple months before acting up.

The problem with letting the system handle my IRQs is that when I did that, it either put my network card or my graphics card on the same IRQ as my sound card. My motherboard only has 3 32bit PCI slots (2 if I want any USB capability) and that doesn't leave that many permutations =)

Plus, my computer was crashing even when I let it take care of IRQs (though different type of crashing).

 

[SwampsterFL]

Go to www.google.com and search for MemoryTester and download a trial version of what you find . . . I forget their address.

The symptoms listed sound like a bad chip on one of your sticks.

Swampster

 

[krunk7]

Memtest86 is a great little utility for detecting bad ram. It runs in dos and can access every address.

 

[Quixotic]

Memory tested fine... so what now? LOL...

 

[WW]

sounds like a couple of different things going on there...might be difficult to sort them all out at once.

that infinite loop problem is a toughy...some people think a marginal power supply causes it.

what ATI says about it

what is your power supply? do you have another one so you could switch it out to troubleshoot?

do the lockup occur more frequently now that the weather is getting hotter? what are the system temps?

what happens if you remove the ethernet card...does it ever lock up? try it overnight....running a burn in program or some heavy benchmark

 

[Quixotic]

I'm using a Enermax 431W power supply... should be fine? Actually the earlier crashes came during the winter when it was nice and chilly... cpus are at 46 idle and 53 load... actually I just removed my network card and tried Windows without it and it seems to have solved the blue screens at the very least. Seems like all 3 of the network cards I tested have the same problem? I'm using a USB ethernet dongle right now and it works fine. I'll try the benchmarking to see if it will crash now, but the weird freezes I had before that I associated with my ATI card couldn't be enticed by heavy benchmarking, they just happened whenever I was using Windows Explorer / Internet Explorer / Outlook Express... I don't remember if I ever tried duplicating that particular problem with my ethernet card removed. The hardest part was sometimes the problem would go into remission for a week or two and sometimes it would strike 3 times in a 10 minute span so unless I went ethernet card-less for a VERY long period of time, I wouldn't know whether or not it was attributed to it. Sigh.

 

[Quixotic]

Oh, and what ATI says is pretty much bunk! Hehe... I have the latest BIOS, I *think* I have an adequate power supply, I tried both fast write settings, my memory settings weren't set aggressively, and my chipset drivers were the latest as well. All I can say is this is probably my fault as I continued to buy another magnficent ATI product with crappy drivers/support after a bad experience with the Radeon VE and vowing never to buy ATI again. LOL.

 

[brow]

If you think it might be an issue with virtual IRQs, you could try this: In Device Manger, way up at the top you will see computer, if you click next to that, it will probably say something about ACPI. Double-click on this and then go to the Driver tab, then hit Update Driver.. hit next, choose to display a list, hit next, and then choose to show all hardware, then choose Standard PC. After doing this, you restart, and your computer will Plug and Play EVERY device in the device manager, and they will all be on real IRQs (although there might still be sharing). DO THIS AT YOUR OWN RISK!!!!!!!

 

[Quixotic]

I already didn't install my OS with ACPI. The only problem is I can't use Standard PC cuz I have a multiprocessor system so it defaults to MPS Multiprocessor PC.