Windows 2000 freeze up 7

[Whitemtntn]

I am running Windows 2000 Pro at home. Occasionally, the O/S freezes up completely. (No mouse, keyboard, no Ctrl-Alt-Del). I have to power down and start over. This has happened with nothing running in the foreground, as well as during various tasks. I have a cable modem. I have one by one been disabling processes, including Zone Alarm, Norton AntiVirus 2000, Synchronization Manager... Still, the problem. Anyone have any ideas why this happens, or how I can find out what is causing it? Thanks.
- WhiteMtntn

 

[Mordicainen]

Try this!
Control Panel/Display/Effects
And disable the transition effect for menus and tooltips.

(the transition effect made some kind of conflict between my craphic card (tnt2) and my network card)

I have not had any strange crasches after that.

 

[eric247]

Check your memory. Often times memory which is bad or going bad can cause unpredictable system freezes and crashes. (the physical RAM) go to

http://www.simmtester.com/

for freeware with which to test your physical RAM

 

[Guest_imported]

I've got 4 computers in my house for um...well....if you must know it's so me and my friends can play quake 3. The only problems with lockups and freezes or really any problems with Win2k is when their is bad hardware or non-compliant hardware. It's not always easy to diagnose. But i've never seen Win2k have a problem with BSOD's or anything. I used to have one of my machines lockup all the time during network game play because it had a cheap network card......found out through trial and error. Once i replaced it all was good haven't had a problem since. And as far as video cards locking up with overlays and submenus that's all video card drivers. And i;m sure most of the problems are with either bad hardware (80%) and bad drivers (20%). But that's pretty general. Still it's all about hardware in some way though. Ahhh just my thoughts on all of this though......... i hope it helps.

 

[carpeliam]

I've had problems with win2k freezing when the HD is going bad, I think some of my freezes are GeForce3- and CDRW-related. <p>Liam Morley<br><A HREF="mailto:"></A><br>&quot;light the deep, and bring silence to the world.<br>light the world, and bring depth to the silence.&quot;

 

[Guest_imported]

I've got W2k Pro and XP Pro on 2 partitions
Voodoo 3
Creative 128
2 Nics (cable and DSL service)
384MB RAM (1-256 & 2-64's)
A-trend atc 6240v board (5 pci)

My system was locking up constantly with either OS so it had to be hardware. Did the usual card pull, RAM pull and found the issue.

AGP and PCI 1 share an IRQ - best to avoid PCI 1 if you can.
Don't share IRQ's between sound card and NIC's.

Currently, I have the NIC's in 2 & 3 and the sound card in 4. The only IRQ share is one of the NIC's and the USB controller on 10. The video card took 11.

Five hours in and no freeze. Try this angle and see if it improves things.

Hope this helps. Take care.

 

[Renegade800]

I checked the IRQ setting for my computer in the Device Manager, view Resources by type. I had 7 device sharing IRQ 11. If the devices are PCI and PnP, they should be able to share the same IRQ but my Graphic card, wich is AGP, is also on this IRQ. I think it should be on another one.

I've read an article : Complex Configurations and IRQ Information for the AMD Processors. It tells an order to install the device in order to avoid IRQ conflict :

The operating system should be loaded with the graphics card installed (AGP recommended). After that, you should add you component one at a time in the order listed below :
1 - Internal modem (PCI)
2 - Sound Card (PCI or ISA)
3 - Network Card (PCI or ISA)
4 - DVD Devices requiring Dxr3 Decoder Board (PCI)
5 - SCSI Adapter (PCI) (This assumes that the system does not have a SCSI hard drive).
6 - Any others.

The complete article is on the

http://www.amd-com/us-en/Processors/TechnicalResources/

page.

 

[Renegade800]

My problem's solved, what I did is assign the video card a unique IRQ. My computer never hung up since. I did that on monday and it has been running for 2 days now without problem.

Here's the IRQ setting
Note (ACPI has been disabled and replaced by PC Standard, but I've almost lost everything doing so.)
Before :
9 -
10 ACPI
11 Graphic Card
11 Universal USB VIA Controller
11 Universal USA VIA Controller
11 Sound card
11 Adaptec SCSI Controller AIC-7850 PCI
11 MODEM
11 NIC

After :
9 Graphic Card
11 Universal USB VIA Controller
11 Universal USB VIA Controller
11 Modem
12 Sound card
12 NIC

I will reallocate the sound card to IRQ 5 and will eventually reinstall ACPI for the auto-shutdown feature.

I hope this will help others.

 

[ridefast]

Renegade 800 and Sprake - question for you.. I have setups similar to you and have the same problem. My problem is quite consistent with a lot of USB and network activity. At first I thought I had a bad app that created a memory leak (the app would run fine for about an hour then lock up. If I rebooted before the hour, the problem would not come back for another hour. It seems that USB (my Wacom graphics tablet) and the NICs hitting the network are bombing my system. Having the Soundblaster on the same IRQ can only mess things up more.

You say you have changed the IRQs. How do you reallocate the IRQ settings. I have looked everywhere on a way to do this. Do I really have to tear apart the PC and put in one card at a time, or can I use system management to do so manually.

I have 3 devices on IRQ 9 - Realtek 10/100 NIC, Soundblaster Live!, and USB. I am sure based on the info above changing this will remove my bug.

I also have a Viper II Z200 AGP card with recently updated BIOS. I assume this does not use an IRQ, as an IRQ is not listed for it in the resources list, but if it does, how do I check its IRQ?

Thanks

 

[shrike1]

I have had the same problem since installing Win2KPro over Win98SE.
System spec:
Athlon600, TNT2 M64 32Mb, SBLive Value, 256mb Ram, all devices patched to Win2000 drivers.
3 devices all sharing same IRQ9, but no conflicts listed:
USB to PCI Bridge Controller
TNT2 Video Card
SBLive Sound Card
Windows won't let me change the IRQ, neither would BIOS.
Downloaded SP1 & SP2, same problem. Found some misleading info regards an SP3 which doesn't appear to exist.
Managed to solve the problem yesterday; there is an AGP applications patch for Athlon/Duron/etc for Win2000 which is a registry amendment, Microsoft KB ref. 270715, I downloaded this from

http://www.dbsnet.co.za/detonator/

which has a couple of other useful utilities. Once downloaded, double click the new .reg file, restart the computer and this should solve the problem. Tested it for about 4 hours yesterday with no problems, so hopefully this will help.

 

[ridefast]

FIXED !!

It was an application problem. I use Fireworks, Photshop, and Dreamweaver all at once, and I have Zonalarm, popup killer, and a few other background security apps running. Turns out I was running out of memory. I increased my system ram to 256M per machine and increased my pagefile from 192M to 256M. Only one lockup in 24 hours. I looked at my logs.. not much there. I increased the main system memory to 384M and pagefile to match and no lockups. I have been pounding the sys now for almost 2 days.

I know those graphics apps take a lot of memory, but heed the words from others on this thread... memory does solve problems. If you are doing graphics or games USE MORE THAN 128M !! I paid 29.95 for 128M and got a $20 rebate at circuit city!! 9.95 per 12bM !! Dirt cheap indeed.
Running great now....

 

[Guest_imported]

i can officially say that if it isnt the Creative drivers locking up Win2k,,,, it WILL be the nVidia drivers... problems problems problems....

thats the only hardware i have problems with on my system (a nvidia tnt2 m64 - 32mb) and all i can say is i wont be buying another nvidia for a while!

Rae. (r8rae@hotmail.com)

 

[Guest_imported]

OK! I have two different Athlon processors (1200, 1000) two different motherboards (Jetway, ABit) have tried different Soundcards, (Soundblaster 1024 PLatinum, Diamond Audio HX300) different Graphocs cards (Radeon VE, Winfast s320][ (riva TNT2)) and different Harddisks. I have upgraded ALL the drivers. I have upgraded the BIOS on all motherboards. Everything has it's own IRQ. Everything should work, and usually does. Under Windows ME, the machine would periodically reset itself. Under Windows 2000 it suffers from the DREADED HANG. When does this happen? It ONLY seems to happen when you start pushing a lot of bandwidth down the bus. (e.g. Play video and Sound at the same time, or play sound and copy a file over the network). I am only guessing, but I think there is a problem with the KX133 chipset. Any ideas guys?

 

[PipoDeClown]

Install win2000 with no acpi support. Still testing that...

 

[Guest_imported]

Background info:
AMD 1GHz
512 MB RAM
GeForce2 MX
SB PCI128
2 NICs
Via Motherboard Chipset
Win2k

Lockups appear usually while running Halflife (single player and networked), which happens to be the most taxing app I run.

Lockups don't happen without a soundcard! They DO happen when the soundcard is installed but disabled in device manager!

What I've done:
Updated everything (including all drivers, BIOS, AMD registry fix) - no luck

Tried 3 different Sound cards in different PCI slots (creative and non-creative) - no luck

Run with 1 NIC non-ACPI mode, no IRQ conflicts - no luck (although this still works w/o a soundcard in)

Read this posting, done everything suggested here that might apply - no luck

Pulled my hair out, banged my head against the wall - no luck

I hope my tribulations can narrow it down for someone. ANY further suggestions are appreciated!

Thanks

 

[Guest_imported]

To Frozen-Too

This may sound really simple but have you tried to uninstall the game and disable the network? Do the lock up's still happen? Also try each NIC on your modem with no network and see if one of them craps out.

Also, as I posted earlier, I've found that slot 1 and AGP conflict. Well, at least on my board.

Good luck.

 

[Guest_imported]

I had a similar problem with PC lockups after installing Zone Alarm. I uninstalled it and everything worked great. But now I was out on the net without firewall protection so I bought a D-Link external DSL router/firewall DI-704 and it works great as well as providing internet sharing with 4 ports and almost no configuration necessary.

 

[Guest_imported]

Renegade 800 - How did u assign your video card a unique IRQ ?

Did u have to reinstall the OS ? I'm using XP !

 

[Guest_imported]

Check this site ! it probably will solve the problem for most of you i have done it my self on several computers with simular problems and i has worked every time !

http://www.corespeed3d.com/articles/acpioff.php

 

[SpaceCadetZero]

W2K SP2 is locking my internet connection sharing gateway PC up when using Zonealarm Pro V2.6.357 - any hints ?
I have proved that this is the case because when using my other machines via the gateway without ZApro all is OK, but as soon as it is loaded and configured as the ICS machine, the first sign of any internet activity through the machine and it freezes solid on me, no mouse keyboard or anything

There have been articles in the past about ZApro on various help forums like this one, anyone out there able to help me ?

The machine in question is a Dell Poweredge 1300 dual PIII 600 machine with 1GB RAM, 45GB Hdisk, SB 1024 Live sound, ATI RageIIc video. The problem is the same on my other machines, all similar specs.

Hoping someone somewhere knows something I dont

 

[LKAlbert]

I have found this to be true in the past under the following circumstance: I had a modem that someone called by mistake. The computer froze as you describe.

I removed the modem when I installed my cable modem and the problem never again occured (9 months) after occuring several times a week.

Good luck