Random Freezing in Games

[bossdodgers]

Since installing SP1 I am having problems with games freezing after random length of times. I have tried all the Nvidia drivers and am currently on the WHQL 40.72's. These are the only drivers that "recover" after a couple of seconds from the hang. The music carries on playing in the background so it is not the infinite loop problem. All the other drivers I have tried just freeze and I have to reset to get out of the game. I have had this problem for about 6 weeks now and cannot find the cure.

I have reformatted the hard drive and re-installed Windows XP
without the service pack and the problem goes away, however, as soon as SP1 goes on the problem returns.

I have checked all my Sys32 files and registry and there are no conflictions anywhere.

It is not a heating problem as I have checked the temperature and I dont want to have to get rid of SP1 by reformatting as it is necessary for future updates.

The freeze can happen anywhere between five minutes and an hour.

I have also tried disabling the audigy but it makes no difference.

I have also noticed that when the games freeze for a couple of seconds, the sound carries on normal and so does the game itself while it is frozen, as in the game will be a couple of seconds further on as if it hasnt even froze which is a bit strange. Its as if the game hasnt frozen but it just freezes on the screen for a couple of seconds.

Maybe this could be of help for a possible solution!

It has got to be Driver and SP1 related because as i said before, some drivers freeze totally and i have to restart the comp and the 40+ drivers unfreeze after a couple of seconds.


ANy one got any ideas?

My specs

AMD Athlon 1.4 DDR (Pc2100)
512 DDR RAM
GeForce 3 Ti500
Creative Audigy
Windows XP with SP1

 

[bossdodgers]

I have just tried another 2 sets of drivers and the games freeze without recovering as previous so i am back to the 40.72s again as they are the only drivers that recover after a couple of seconds.

There must be something about these drivers that allows it to recover.

 

[BonyTony]

I read your post on gurus site,i presume your doing the forum hunts?,i will keep looking for a similar problem to yours and if i find anything similar i will post it.

 

[bossdodgers]

Thanks BonyTony I'm not having much luck.

 

[Gus K]

I have a somewhat similiar problem, I too run XP with an Audigy. My game of choice is UT, and without SP1 it would hang, sometimes hard (sound looping, disk spinning), and sometimes it would pop out to the desktop with an error box. I use a Geforce2, and have also tried various drivers, windows 98 compatibility etc. It would sometimes happen twice in a row, but then I could play without problems for hours. It just happens as you say, and no tinkering seems to help, although I've tried various solutions posted at other forums.

I switched over to OpenGl, hoping it would help (certainly made the game look better), no luck. But for me, after installing SP1 the problem is about 99.9% cured, running in OpenGl.

I only had this problem with UT. Serious Sam (Opengl) and 1942 (D3D) have always worked fine.

I know this post is of no real help, but you are far from alone in this. In perusing various forums there must be thousands of similiar posts/problems with NVIDIA cards and XP. It kind of irks me that NVIDia can't seem to get things straight with their almost daily release of new drivers.

One thing you might try ( if you can, in the BIOS or dip switches on your mobo), raise the AGP voltage a notch. The new NVIDIA cards do need some juice. And most manufacturers recommend the card to be on it's own IRQ.

My next card will be an ATI.