Hi

I have recently just bought a new PC
AMD Athlon 2000
Windows XP
GeForce 4 MX 440SE 64MB
............

30seconds into a game that I play often it freezes with a sound loop.. It just started doing it about 2 week ago.. I have updated all my drivers, used older version of the driver, disabled sound driver to see if it was that.. Does anyone else know a solution..
Also I heard the Test Driver worked for a lot of people. I'm new at this stuff.. Where do i unzip the files to. and once I ran the setup it ask for a reboot, but it still the same, do i have to update using the hardware device thing..

Any help is appreciated. Thank you

fixed my problem. put in 2 new sticks of memory and i am smokin again

DOES ANYONE KNOW A FIX,

COULD IT BE MY FAN ?? OR JUST SOME CONFLICT BETWEEN NVIDIA AND AMD PROCESSORS ... HELPPPPPPPPP :'(

i have a gainward geforce 4 ti 4200 64 mb card and a 1.7 p4 compaq 5300US model. i had windows xp installed and for the first couple months worked out ok. then all of the sudden the crashes started happening and the freezing up. i figured that it must be windows xp or something corrupt. so i reformatted and installed windows 2000 pro. it still freezes and this is reallly p**sing me off. can anyone give me any suggestions as to what to do. in the earlier posts i see that some people went into their bios and clocked their graphics card down a bit. how would i do that? i go in my bios and i don't see that. i have a compaq . keep that in mind. anyone with a compaq or one that used compaq know what to do? PLEASE HELP ASAP!!!!!

Peter,

Does it freeze just on games or other apps as well?

On the surface, yours definitely is some kind of hardware problem. If you didn't add any new hardware or make any changes to the BIOS and this started happening after a couple of months of it working properly, then something went bad. Here are some possible things that it could be, not necessarily in this order. It really depends on when it is freezing. Is it random? Is it only when you play games? Does it do it when it is idle? IE, is there any kind of pattern to the problem?

1) The video graphics card fan is no longer functioning, so the card is overheating.
2) The processor fan is no longer functioning, so the processor is overheating.
3) A RAM module could be bad.
4) Video graphics card could be bad.
5) Any piece of hardware could be bad.

It would help if you could give me more info.

Compaq's BIOS doesn't have all the fancy features you see a lot of people talking about here. Most major brand name manufacturers don't allow you to tweak the BIOS very much at all, so you aren't going to find most of the settings listed here in your BIOS.

Todd

Todd,

It freezes mostly during games.

i've checked the video graphics card fan by touching it, hahah, and it was working. mmmm i'm pretty sure the processor fan is working because its so LOUD. so i know it has to be working. maybe my new ram that i addded was defective but after i took it out the same exact things were happening. i've already RMA'd my graphics card 3 times by Gainward. so i doubt the graphics card is bad. as i have tried the card in my friends comptuer and it ran SMOOTHLY for some reason. -_-. i have the latest detonator driver for my geforce 4 ti 4200 64mb.

Yes, I accidentally stuck my finger in my processor's fan the other day while checking to see how hot the heat sink was. Cut a nice gash in my finger tip and hurt like crazy. Took me a while to get it to stop bleeding. At 6000 RPM, generally not a good idea to get fingers involved.

Did you try taking out the original RAM and putting just the new RAM chips in? Your old RAM could be bad.

If your card ran fine in someone else's PC, then it's most likely not the card.

Do you have any kind of temperature monitoring program like motherboard monitor? What OS are you running? Since you are running Windows 2000, check your system log in the event viewer to see if there are any error messages. If so, let me know what the event ID and the text of the message is and I'll research it for you.

You could also look at your device manager and see if there are any conflicts.

You could still have a processor problem, or even a motherboard problem. Problem is, troubleshooting things like this can be a painstaking process. Best thing to do is process of elimination. I've even gone down to bare basics, like hard drive, floppy, and video card in only. Took everything else out and tried. Added things back one at a time until it started doing it again. Yes, it's a drag playing a game without your sound card, but if it helps you narrow the problem down, what the heck? Also, some games will only run of CD drive, so if you do this, use a game that doesn't require the CD to run. Then, just add one thing back at a time (playing the same game each time) until it does it again. When it does it, voila, you found the piece causing the problem. However, if you find that the game still won't work even with just the basics, you know you've got an issue with either mobo, RAM, or processor. Since it worked fine for you at one time and still didn't work right even after you reinstalled everything, I doubt it is a software issue. Have you tried putting someone else's video card in or an old one you have lying around?

Did you know that this topic is tied with the HELP!!! ASUS A7N266-VM topic?

This post could very well surpass FSB or CPU Freq, what is better to Overclock? topic.

Jay

hi i have my geforce 4, 8 months a never its hapenned, when i play 2d games the video card works fine but qhen i put 3d games the screen appears bloked or sometimes appears dots in the screen.

please me .

Well guys, this problem never seems to end. Another victim added to the count.

I have the solution:
my ATI 9100 is coming...

yea ive been having problems too. i didnt know what it was till i read this post. im running windows xp pro with a g4 mx440 with 128MB and direct x9.0. My computer shuts down every now and then when i play 3d games. Ive been getting a lot of errors also. Although i dont think this other problem is related to this case, i cant burn fast, but i dont know what other thing could cause it. both of my drives freeze lots of times. and i cant burn above 16 or 12x.

Dave

i tried to solve it but nothing.
if anyone know something about my problem please give me a hand

Luis

Luis,

The only time I've ever seen this happen is when the video card is going bad, the card has been overclocked too much, or it is overheating due to the fan not running.

Todd

UGH. Though I'm a busy gamer and programmer, I deal with hardware stuff as little as possible, so forgive me if I have any blind spots here.

Here's the short story. Soyo mobo, GeForce 4 Ti 4200 w/ 128 MB of RAM... thing ran fine for the first six months, then something went odd... it will run FINE during games... but it constantly freezes, flashes the screen, and redraws w/ video errors when I'm trying to do anything in Windows!

Here's the long story. Last summer, built myself a new computer. Specs...
Mobo: Soyo P4S Dragon Ultra
Processor: Pentium 4, 2.0 Ghz
Video card:
DirectX: 9b
OS: Win XP Pro
Sound Card: Sound Blaster Live! 5.1 Gamer

This mother, which was nearly top-of-the-line a year ago and should still be very solid right now, ran fine until January, at which time I seemed to have some sort of motherboard error regarding the hard drives. I worked around that error, but after that, Windows would run for about 2 minutes, then freeze totally. I finally disabled the video card in the system manager, and it ran. I updated the video card drivers, and now, instead of freezing the entire system, it suddenly pauses, then the screen goes black, then it comes back... fully-functional, but with some corrupted graphics. And this happens about every 90 seconds on average! Lots of fun!

To use Windows I have to go into hardware and choose "disable" on the vidcard, which drastically cuts down on its capabilities... and if I want to play games, I have to enable it, reboot, and pray Windows doesn't crash on my way to start the game... and then, like I said, it runs the game flawlessly.

Here's a kicker: I put the card in another system and it ran perfectly. Of course, it was a fresh XP install, and didn't have updated DirectX...?

I've never heard of an error like this. I THINK I updated the chipset drivers, but I guess I should try that again... I'll be trying various things all day today, including all the solutions mentioned on this thread... but my problem seems to be different from anything from anything on this thread (as this is definitely NOT a problem in games... it's just a problem everywhere BUT games). Any help would be appreciated.

Sorry, left out a line there: the
Vidcard is GeForce 4 Ti 4200 w/ 128 MB of RAM

I had 2 geforce4 (MSI and GAINWARD)

Same problem here with any win, directx, everything. I tried everything you can imagine.

Now I'm with a ATI 9100, no more problem! GEFORCE NEVER MORE!

Carlos,

I agree with you. Even though my GEForce card is working right now, I will never buy another video card with the NVidia chip due to the 3 month long process it took me to figure out the problem. From now on, it is ATI for me.

I never put the video card in overcloking and also the fan of the video card works fine but when i touch the card is hot, i dont understand why the card works fine in windows or 2d games.

please give some kind of solution

LUIS

Luis,

Most cards where the fan is working properly shouldn't be too very hot, only warm. If it is too hot to touch or almost too hot to touch, you have a problem.

Yes, typically a video card works fine in Windows or 2D apps. 3D apps however require much more processing power and cause the processor to work much harder.

Here's something you can try. Open your case. Take a desk fan that can really blow some air and point it directly into the case, particularly toward the video card. Then, try your 3D apps and see what happens. You may still have a problem but it could help to narrow it down for you. My computer is in a room that averages 80 degrees Farenheit during the summer time. My PC was having some occassional lockups an slowdowns. When I tried aiming a fan directly into it, my processor cooled down 12 degrees Farenheit and my slowdowns and lockups were gone.

Oh, and I had already tried adding numerous other fans to my case. I have 7 or 8 fans in my case and one of those expensive processor fans. PC fan technology is "immature" if you ask me. The primary reason for this is they try to make them as quiet as possible. Screw that, I'd rather have a cool PC, not a quiet one that bombs because of 80 degree temperatures. The way I see it, my PC ought to run when the air temp is as much as 95 Farenheit. Fan makers and PC manufacturers just don't get it.