Thoughts anyone ??

[Welshie]

Just built a new system with the following specs :

AMD XP2800+ (Barton)
Titan D5TB/G/CU35 Skt A Cooling Fan
Asrock K7S8X mobo - 333MHz FSB
One strip of 256Mb PC2700 (DDR333) - no idea of manufacturer sorry
400W PSU
GeForce 4 TI 4200 64Mb AGP
MS Windows 98SE
Maxtor 40Gb IDE 7200 ATA133 HDD

The PC boots normally, shows the correct CPU speed etc in POST. I can use the PC without any problem UNTIL I try to play EA Sports Total Club Manager 2004.

Whilst playing the game it appears to randomly "freeze" the PC. However it's not a complete lockup as the mouse still moves and pressing "Numlock" turns on and off the num lock light. Pressing Alt+TAB or CTRL+ALT+DEL have no effect and I have to reboot the PC using the reset button.

Windows recognises the "improper shutdown" and runs scandisk at re-boot. When the desktop appears, the screen resolution has changed from 1024x760 to 800x600.

I have installed latest drivers for the graphics card (Nvidia 53.04); installed DirectX9.0b; installed the latest game patch from EA; updated the mouse, soundcard and mobo VIA drivers etc etc.

The game runs OK on my old PC so I don't think it's the game.

I'm sure I've missed something simple, but for the life of me I can't think of anything else.

Anyone have any suggestions please ??

[MaxVal]

Welcome To TechIMO!

Unfortunately, this sounds like a real challenge.
The first thing that comes to my mind is to substitute the RAM.
If the old system is DDR, borrow it from there since you know it works. Clock it as to it's ratting.
Another idea would be to intentionally slow down the system by reducing the FSB to 133MHz.
As a last resort I would substitute another quality P.S. as a test.
Other Ideas will be following!
Good luck,
MAX

[Atomic Rooster]

Have you tried an older set of drivers for your video card? Sometimes the neweset drivers don't play well with the GF4 series cards. Try the version 30.82 drivers. They work really well with the GF4 and Windows 98SE. You can get them from the Nvidia W98 Driver Archive.

[Welshie]

Thanks for the ideas guys - will try them later and let you know if there is any progress.

[RamonGTP]

The 30 series drivers are pretty old, i don't know if i'd go quite that far back as GF4 Ti cards got a really nice performance boost with the 40 series drivers, as well as added features like refresh rate over-ride for directx games.

[Dj-Icer]

Extra fans? Your cpu may need it. Over heat cpu can cause freezes or hanged.

[thegladiatorgy]

Why Win98?

[Welshie]

Originally posted by thegladiatorgy
Why Win98?

Because at the moment - that's all I have !!!

However, after extensive testing this evening, here's what I've found so far :

The Asrock K7S8X motherboard uses USB 2.0 which isn't supported by Win 98SE (or ME). The Asrock supplied "Win98SE USB 2.0 patch" simply installs a "don't use usb 2.0 exe" into the Autoexec.bat.

I have now disconnected all USB devices and for the last 3 hours have played TCM2004 game with no lockups at all (previously I was getting lockups or video corruption after 30 mins to 1.5 hours). I am going to leave the game run overnight and carry on playing in the morning to see what happens.

At the moment, I very much suspect the problem is being caused (in some mysterious way) by USB 2.0 hardware/software incompatibility !!!

Looks like I may have to update to Windows XP