Zugg Software :: View topic - Windows XP, Final Straw!! (more NVidia help)

Posted: Wed Nov 21, 2001 10:44 pm

Less than 24 hours after finally getting Windows XP installed on Chiara's computer, Microsoft Outlook XP has caused Windows XP to *spontaneously REBOOT!!* TWICE!

In the first case, she was just doing a copy/paste. Crash, reboot. REBOOT??? What the h*ll is this? I thought it wasn't possible for an application to bring down the entire operating system! It's NEVER done this on Windows 2000 and I use Outlook as much as Chiara on my system.

Second time, within a couple of hours, she was using the down-arrow key to go through messages in one of her mail folders, and again, the system spontaneously REBOOT!

This is ridiculous. I've wasted THREE DAYS of my valuable time on this. I've spend over $500 in hardware and software upgrades, and I've now got a system LESS RELIABLE than before.

I've said it before and I'll say it again. This was the LAST money that I'm sending to Microsoft. I've had it with their buggy software and horrible licensing practices.

(And before you respond and say I should switch email clients, I require an email client that can be customized with buttons and pulldown boxes that can be tied to my customer database. So, other than Lotus Notes...which I've also tried...I don't know of any other email package that I could use. I'm just screwed).

Newbie Joined: 22 Nov 2001 Posts: 1 Location: USA

I heard a rumor somewhere that when Windows XP/2000 receives some sort of system error, intead of bringing up the blue screen of death like in Win95/98, it instead spontaneously reboots the computer. Thought now would be a good time to ask about it. Anyone know if this is true?
The same rumor also said that Microsoft advertised that they had eliminated the blue screen of death in newer versions of Windows which I guess is true since you never technically see the blue screen since the computer automatically reboots.
So, anyone if any of this is true? I've always wondered about it.

Mallic

Posted: Thu Nov 22, 2001 3:31 am

From what I've seen, it's automatic. We had a problem with some drivers from our Fireserve wireless card, and it would randomly reboot 2000. Kinda strange, kinda weird, but it happened.... Thank goodness for cable modems....

My XP system has been fairly stable, though I wont trust any sensitive stuff to it, I've got all of my code backed up on my local CVS server running Linux. I'd rather stick a needle in my eye than trust WinXP with perserving my code....

Icechild
Coder of Arthanox

Newbie Joined: 22 Nov 2001 Posts: 4

I've had it spontaneously reboot on me too, but I think it's the same things that always caused 2k to blue screen. Namely drivers.

Gravis Gamepad Pro [Gameport] drivers brought down 2k on me every 3rd or 4th game I'd play, even if I never actually used the joystick, and the vid drivers would do it sometimes as well, though that seems to have stopped with 21.83.

Posted: Thu Nov 22, 2001 8:35 pm

I'd just like to say that last night ZMUD crashed my computer and I had to reboot.

*runs for cover from the die hard ZMUD supporters*

Signed,

*cough* Anonymous *cough*

GURU Joined: 23 Dec 2000 Posts: 4834 Location: USA

quote:

I'd just like to say that last night ZMUD crashed my computer and I had to reboot.

*runs for cover from the die hard ZMUD supporters*

Signed,

*cough* Anonymous *cough*

What the heck is a ZMud crash?
::whistling in mock-innocence::

li'l shmoe of Dragon's Gate MUD

Newbie Joined: 20 Aug 2001 Posts: 2

I will ask to excuse me if you already knew this. Did you uncheck the box "Automatically restart" in My Computer|View system information|Startup and recovery ?
Otherwise anything (like a bad sound driver, for example) can "spontaneously" reboot your machine...
Good luck!

Beginner Joined: 24 Oct 2000 Posts: 13

heh, sorry to hear about all your troubles Zugg. Personally, i've sworn for months that I will never, ever buy a copy of Windows XP. I tried a couple of the betas and they were just awful, but worse yet is the new licensing scheme they have going. I run Win2k Pro at home and am staying with it. I've had 2k on all my machines since the day it was released and in that time I've only seen 1 BSD (and that was my stupid fault) my machines have fantastic up time, I rarely feel the need to reboot and almost never actually power cycle the things.

That being said, I just bought a new notebook from Dell that is coming with XP installed... :( guess I'll have to format it right away.

Good luck getting XP working, and remember..there is nothing that fdisk can't fix :)

Posted: Sun Nov 25, 2001 7:06 pm

quote:
I will ask to excuse me if you already knew this. Did you uncheck the box "Automatically restart" in My Computer|View system information|Startup and recovery ?

Thanks for that tip! I'll give that a try and see if it helps. I love these nice obvious settings that Microsoft adds without telling you. They are so easy to find! </sarcasm>

Just checked, and my Win2000 system has the same option, but it is *unchecked* by default. I guess the previous poster was correct...by making "AutoRestart" the default, then you never see the blue screen anymore. Cheesy.

GURU Joined: 28 Sep 2000 Posts: 156 Location: USA

I don't know if I have good luck, you guys have bad luck, or both - but I've never had a problem with Windows XP that I didn't deserve for mucking with things that I shouldn't have.

I have it running on my laptop and my desktop system at work and I find that it runs at least as well as Windows 2000 - in general I think it runs better.

Granted there are some annoyances and strange things that need to be worked out but I'm pretty happy with it.

I do disagree with the new license scheme - but since work is paying for both copies I really don't care much.

Posted: Mon Nov 26, 2001 7:49 pm

Once I got the computer to stop restarting automatically, I finally learned some useful info. All of the crashes were coming from the NVidia drivers for the GeForce2 Ti card.

I've tried a multitude of drivers with no luck. I finally found a tip on DejaNews that helped. If you are using an NVidia card and having stability problems, set the AGP to 1x/2x instead of 4x. Either in BIOS (my BIOS didn't have this setting), or using the GeForce Tweak utility from www.guru3d.com. Worked like a charm here. Computer is now stable.

Apparently this is a bug in the Microsoft PCI-AGP drivers. You can also fix it by changing this driver to the PCI-PCI driver, but then you lose a lot of graphics speed. *ALL* of the NVidia drivers that I tried had this problem. Some people report that very old drivers also work, but are slower.

Looks like we'll have to wait for a Microsoft XP update to address this. Also, it's not at all clear exactly which motherboards and which graphics card have this problem. Some people work fine. Others get frustrated like me.

What is outrageous is to see that reports of this problem extend back *several* months. This should have been fixed in the beta version. NVidia cards are *too* popular for this kind of stupidity. Sounds like classic finger pointing to me...NVidia pointing to the Microsoft PCI-AGP driver, and Microsoft pointing to the video driver. I could care less...someone should fix it.

Hope this helps anyone else with NVidia problems on XP

GURU Joined: 10 Oct 2000 Posts: 609 Location: USA

quote:
Good luck getting XP working, and remember..there is nothing that fdisk can't fix :)

Just to be an a**: fdisk can't fix bad sectors or any physical drive damage.

Mwahaha!

,
Jouster

Implementor/Head Coder of

coolmud.com:6658