Blue-Screens.......

[michaeldow]

Hi guys

Most of the time my pci-e 424 card, and my 2 2408mk2's run fine. But every now and then my system blue-screens and restarts. Not too sure what makes it do it. Sometmes it will do it i i leave the machine idle, then come back a few hours later. Sometimes it overlads and does it. It's not particularly often, and it's not led to me losing any work so far (touch wood). I would like to know however, if anybody else has this problem on windows? Im running XP pro, on a q6600 with 4 gig ram.

Also, i seem to get pops/crackles in my audio when the buffer setting is at 512 a 48000hz and my cpu running above 50-60%. Is this normal? It seems a shame if i will have to raise the latency, because it's quite high enough for playing bass/guitar along with. There's already a slight audible delay, any more would be a bit of a pain! If i didnt need all these ins and outs i'd go back to my m-audio!

[Mark S]

the blue screens as you describe, I'd suggest running a mem test, or check to see that your internal fans aren't dirty and things are getting hot.

as far as the crackles, I'd need to have your hardware specs for that, for starters ram and hard drive configuration, mobo, possible irq conflicts, pci timer setting for the video,...

[michaeldow]

The pc shouldnt be getting hot. Its a cold room (the window wont shut properly) so theres plenty of cold fresh air going around. And the pc is new pretty much, sp no dust in there at all. The fans are on a low speed setting but im sure they dont need to be on medium or higher. Maybe i could try it. Bit noisier though which is why they are al set to low. My motherboard is a p5kr (asus). The ram (i think) is DDR2 800mhz, two sticks of 2 gig each. My hard drive is 250 gig 7200rpm SATAII drive.

Not sure how there could be an IRQ conflict as it's a pci-e card which runs on its own channels right? The other pci card i have installed is my graphics card which is a gforce8500.

THanks

[michaeldow]

oh and how do i do a mem test? And what does it do/solve? thanks again

[Mark S]

oh and how do i do a mem test? And what does it do/solve? thanks again

It's not a matter of if the room is cold it's a matter of if the chip is getting hot. Something like improperly applied heat paste on the cpu could make that happen. Dusty cpu fan, or even video card fan that's too hot and sitting close to the memory,... Clean out the case and see what happens, Run it open for a while

Mem test: Download the Mem Test utility and let it run overnight (you got 4 gigs?, you might let it run longer). See it it returns errors.

http://www.freewarefiles.com/MemTest_program_20030.html

and another thought. I've heard reports from people having similar problems on systems like yours if the power supply is either too small or of poor quality