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

 

[veda]

I've had the same problem recently too. Most of the time I would freeze while doing a lot of internet browsing. I tried replacing almost every piece of my computer, then someone in another forum made a suggestion:

If you have a logitech mouse, update the drivers.

I did, and knock on wood so far it worked! I feel so silly that it was something so simple, I never thought about the mouse!

 

[mikedonthemike]

77ventura's solution looks a lot like the link to amdmb.com's forum I posted.

Definitely something I recommend you read especially if you have an AMD chip and VIA chipset and a GeForce card!

http://www.amdmb.com/vb/showthread.php?s=&threadid=30626&perpage=15&pagenumber=1

 

[siteman]

Hi,

I have had the Win2K freeze problem and found a "solution". In BIOS, set the AGP to 2x insead of 4x.
On my system (AMD TB 1100, GeeForce 2GTS, ASUS A7V) everything is now stable.

 

[TeknoGuru]

Hello ALL!
I just have a suggestion or two to make as to why Win2k Pro locks up, being that I too have experienced this problem. It is a problem in WinXP Pro, too, and I am not sure with the Home Edition of XP.
First, I must point you to the ACPI feature of newer motherboards. If left to itself, the ACPI feature in Win2k Pro, and XP Pro will throw your PCI devices onto IRQ 9, and this includes your AGP, PCI Slots, USB, and Onboard Sound. Why Micro"crash" did not recognize this and fix it immediately (and to this day it is not fixed!) is beyond understanding. Microcrash had this suggestion to offer : In Win2k and XP Pro you must press F5 during the install when you first boot from the CD, with a Black Screen with something like "Checking your system configuration" in the upper left of the screem will be seen. This is when you hit the F5 key. What will this do? It will give you the choice of what type of machine you are installing, like an ACPI system, UniProcessor or MultiProcessor System, and so on. CHOOSE the "Standard PC" selection and continue with the install. I have yet to have a lock up when doing this during my initial install. I found this info on Micro"crashes" website doing a search for ACPI and Win2k. I have noticed on XP Pro that I could go to the Device Manager and go to the "Computer" entry and if it said something with ACPI in it, I could open the properties up on it, go to the drivers tab, and choose re-install, which would allow me to select the location instead of the automatic selection. I then would choose the Display list selection and then, if the Standard PC was not listed in the "Show Compatible Hardware" box, I would choose show all hardware. After the change was made, and I re-booted teh machine, it would re-install all the devices which was thrown onto IRQ 9. Try it on Win2k, to see if it works before you dump your drive to re-install!
Secondly, Those of us with VIA chipsets and DDR ram must by now have realized a serious problem with the BSOD or just blackouts or lockups when playing a game. This is caused by a RAM setting in your BIOS. I turned down my RAM settings, NOT in the DDR section, for it is best to leave those set to auto, BUT rather in the SDRAM settings. I also found that I HAD to change my system performance from "Turbo" to "Normal." After these changes, I am running without any problems! Of all things...Even Windows Me runs great now! I have a 1.4GHz 266FSB Athlon on an ASUS A7M266 MB with 266MB of DDR RAM and a GeForce 2 MX 400 64MB graphics card. It does not matter if you have a Radeon or an Nvidia card, these settings are what helped me. I found this info out at

http://www.viaarena.com

in their "Staying out of the loop" article. I hope this helps you all out of the lockups.

TeknoGuru

 

[thinice]

Dell Dimension 4100
x86 Intel 864 Mhz
W2k Prof, SP 2

Have had a similar freeze up, notably when accessing streaming video. Went through a lot: chipset, drivers, switching from adsl (boo) to cable modem (yay) <- which btw *did* help with music videos, though they were viewed with wm player.

But, streaming video (e.g. a lecture) still resulted in total freeze (with realplayer).

Fix? Within Realplayer: View -> Preferences -> Performance
uncheck Use optimized video display.

Unbelievable. It may be the video card afterall, but I am happy it is working.

 

[mikedonthemike]

Well y'all, I have troubleshot everything on my machine and visited a lot of other forums on the next looking for help. After several months of troubleshooting, rebuilding my machine(hardware and software(APCI or not)), testing using different brands of RAM, I was finally able consistently prove that that my machine crashes at a FSB of 133. From there, my hardware provider finally took my machine back and replaced the motherboard as a start. Got my machine back today after a couple day of testing in their lab, and so far so good!

Remember to read that forum i mentioned earlier. Especially if you have an ASUS A7Vxxxx or a VIA Chipset.

Good luck to you all.
mike

 

[Guest_imported]

speaking of silly fixes, I had win 2000 pro locking up on me after I installed new (cheap) memory, took it out, no problems any more. learned my lesson

 

[grygst76]

I'm not sure this would be helpful to everyone but Bus mastering is the number one problem I have dealt with in win2k sometimes disabling busmastering works wonders with a system. if you have a 3com card that is notorious for freezing a system or irq steering via busmastering one fix would be disabling busmastering on for example ths sound card of soundblaster live or pci128 or simple enough remove it and switch it to a diferrent pci slot the one that does not busmaster. I had to do that with my soundblaster and pci video cards because they conflicted with the ide busmastering. What a nightmare!!

 

[Zorkman]

Following up from Diana9999's November 19th post:

I too have a Dell Dimension 4300 that crashes once
a day or so. I'm running Windows Me. The system
crashes at random times, sometimes I'm at the
computer, sometimes not.

I have nothing special on the system, and I've disabled
power management since they always seem to cause
these type of random crashes.

Oh, and I've got a Creative SB Live! Value

 

[Guest_imported]

In most freeze up cases in windows 2000 its 35% that the motherboard bios needs to be updated or flashed. But i'm warning you, Flashing the motherboard bios is NOT an easy task to handle. If you messup during the flash process by a crash, power shortage, etc. your motherboard will be comepetely useless! My windows 2000 system was crashing also so i thought it was a software problem so i formatted and instaled a new copy of windows XP. To my suprise the crashes and hangs still happen! I found out in the Windows XP error logs that the ACPI bios couldn't read or write to a couple sectors. So i went to my motherboard manufacturer site and downloaded a flash utility and new bios update. Well i took the risk and flashed my bios and reset the CMOS by changing jumpers. Then you MUST format your C drive and install a new copy of the OS. After i did this, I didn't get any more errors or crashes anymore. Hope this helps