My video card is an MSI video card. Im my country(Belize) blackouts happen ever couple months or so. Anyways a little while after i put this baby in (Geforce 4 MX440SE) the lights went out and when i managed to rebooted the computer this video card was showing vertical lines across the screen. I had this thing for months playing with it in and out the computer till i finally for 2 months now have it working smoothly.
It liked to freeze in games, go to standby forcing reboot, black screen with cursor in corner when installing driver, and when it the freezed in games you would see it like flickering on a part or the screen in purple. I eventually got it to work by doing this,
I bought a pci slot fan blower and placed it right below my video card and another fan on top of it over the section where the GPU(graphics processing unit) would be on that side.
Then after a series of reinstalling and uninstalling nvidia drivers 52.16 and 53.03 and it started up in the post screen and windows XP with no lines i installed the drivers ( went correctly this time) and i then before restarting I used rivatuner at that very moment and slowed down my memory by 1 or 2 mhz in the driver-level overclocking section, which i assume made it more stable. ( from the fact that when you overclock memory, artifacts(spots of the screen) or vertical lines are produced).

So what you can do to fix your card is by slowing down the memory using rivatuner in the driver-level overclocking area, by 1-2mhz ,BUT i recommend you place those fans around it because heat will degrade performance and may also contribute to the problem.

Hope this can help you dude, and to think i am 16 and finally got this s**t to work.

You need a power bar surge protector. Your videocard is probably damaged du to the black out.

hey heres a nother update, switching my graphics aperture size to 256 mb stoped the crashing for a day, but then it kept doing it, so i switched it to 128 mb and after a whole morning session of playing video games, it crashed again on me....i've given up, i'm just getting another card.

This ain't a fix, just information and opinion. I dual-boot 2000 Pro and XP Pro. I have a NVidia GeForce 4 MX 440 with all dll and sys files version 6.14.10.5303 (all Microsoft signed). DirectX V9.0b. On ECS Motherboard K7VZA BIOS updated to V3.7. Service pack upgraded to VIA V4.51. The AGP slot is only 4x and I set the BIOS slot to 64Mb. I used Riva Tuner V1.0.0.1 to set the Core Clock to 274.5 and the Memory clock to 405.0. (These are what it says on the box they should be. The default settings were well below them.) I have an AMD Athlon XP2400+. No overclocking is done. With XP the only time it crashes out is when playing games, with no fixed time limit, could be 20 mins, could be 6 hrs. With 2000 it doesn't give me any problems. OK, it's not the fastest system in the world - but it works. On both setups I can leave it unattended ripping DVDs with MovieJack, and writing SVCDs is no problem. I can work for hours with Photoshop using 250Mb TIFF files, playing around with filters etc, again no problems. I used the same system with 98SE installed (gone now - replaced with XP Pro) to capture video from TV, edit out commercial breaks, and burn to SVCD. (Ain't got a DVD burner yet), again with no problems.
Now my opinion is that it's the game companies that are at fault. They had games on the shelf needing DX9 the instant it was introduced. How could they possible have bug-fixed them? (Do they still use beta-testers? If so, do they use their own machines, or are they all clones with the same setups provided by the company?) Similarly, the card manufacturers, NVidia, I am sure, were selling 'DX9-compatible' cards before DX9 was available. So you have a situation where games companies are selling games based on cards, based on systems which do not yet exist. The result being that we, the consumer/user get stitched up with equipment that doesn't deliver. On top of all this I've just checked out of few of my later games and they are said to be compatible with 98, Me, 2000 and XP. 2000 and XP are NT variants and block all the hardware, how can they be expected to work satisfactarily on both systems? Ridiculous!!!!

ARRGGH *rips out hair* Okay, I have an Xtasy GeForce4 Ti4600, an AMD 2800 on an A7N9X motherboard. For ages, I've been running W2K with no problem on any games, etc, contrary to what XP fans keep croaking at me about. I have a gig of ram. Plenty of free disk space. Etc, etc, etc. My power supply is a 400W one.

Okay, my problem is this: after reinstalling my OS (for other reasons) I am now unable to run ANY newer games with reasonable graphics including Medieval: Total War and Command & Conquer: Generals. also the latest version of 3dMark will not run properly on my machine. Now in all of these cases what happens is the graphics basically run VERY slowly, at something like less than a frame a second.. like a frame every 5-10 seconds, and it skips frames (obviously), and you can often see black spaces where some kind of polygon texture should be.

The thing is older games that apparently use directx (Escape from Monkey Island) run fine. So I'm guessing it's a newer directX thing. Also, none of the games freeze during video clips before the game and the 3dMark loading screen runs fine, it's just the actual directx animation bits of the games that flub up.

I already have tried:

Running DXDIAG (Everything is FINE it says)
Re-installing my graphics drivers
Re-installing DirectX 9.0
Rolling back to DirectX 8.1
Re-installing my OS
Switching to a different OS (Microsoft XP).

.... I'm at my wits end. Has anyone experienced similar problems? Does anyone have any idea what I should do?

some people need to specify what board they have as Certain Games state GF 4 MX is not supported.

A great solution to your GeForce Prob's.

Just trash the card and get the ATI

Guys n Gals

I dont know if this will help you but thought I would post to let others know just in case it works for you (I know how frustrating it is), but I have basically been experiencing the same problems which have been mentioned in this thread (games crashing to desktop). After months of researching and downloading latest patches, updates for both the game and my PC to no avail, I could not believe the solution that I found to my problem.

I was trying to run Age of Mythology on a P4 2.8ghz Geforce 4MX 400 64mb DDR Ram on Win XP using Direct X9.0b, whenever I ran the game it would crash to the desktop and the eventwvr would show an error that I could not make sense of (cant remember the error but it has been previously mentioned in this thread). Something on the line of " The source code of this event is [ ] and event ID is [ ] and something to do with AUXSOURCE=" Sorry i cant give you the full error message but it is on my computer at home and im at work now.

Even though I had a Legitamate copy of Age of Mythology which I purchased, I downloaded a NOCD crack and installed this and this solved all my problems. I couldn't believe it could be this simple. After months and months of trying all these different technical fixes by changing bios, changing hardware, changing RAM slots etc etc etc Basically all there was,....... was a conflict with my CDROM drive and the 'Original' copy of AOM.

I hope this can help your problem

I am 14 yrs old and i dunno what i have... I know i have a
*Geforce 4
*directx9.0
*windows XP
*VIA

My comp freezes up on any 3d game, how can i find out what my problem is, what i have in my computer, and how to fix it. I would appreciate any help

If someone hasn't already, I can confirm that this problem occurs even with the nForce2 chipset. I (like everybody else here) have tried everything.
GeForce4 Ti4200
AMD Thunderbird 1.2 ghz
ASUS A7N8X nForce2
Win XP SP2

I had a similar prpblem with my ATI 9700 Pro with my nForce2 chipset.

Problem Solved though. I just re-instlled and formatted everything, then it worked great.

my computer specs are:
AMD Athlon XP 1.33
direct x 9.0b
nivida geforce 4 125mb ddr
650mb ddr ram
os is win xp professional

i got this problem playing rome:total war
the game is jerky and lagging quite badly.the sound will appear before i see the image. i dun think it's the specs of my com but rather the problem of the graphics card and the direct x. how to i rectify this problem?

my computer specs are:
AMD Athlon XP 1.33
direct x 9.0b
nivida geforce 4 125mb ddr
650mb ddr ram
os is win xp professional

i got this problem playing rome:total war
the game is jerky and lagging quite badly.the sound will appear before i see the image. i dun think it's the specs of my com but rather the problem of the graphics card and the direct x. how to i rectify this problem?

my computer specs are:
AMD Athlon XP 1.33
direct x 9.0b
nivida geforce 4 125mb ddr
650mb ddr ram
os is win xp professional

i got this problem playing rome:total war
the game is jerky and lagging quite badly.the sound will appear before i see the image. i dun think it's the specs of my com but rather the problem of the graphics card and the direct x. how to i rectify this problem?

i got the following spec: AMD Athlon 1.33GHz
650 DDR ram
nivida geforce 4
win xp pro and direct x 9.0b
whenever i play rome total war the sound effect will always come before the image and the game lags a lot
seems that the frame rate is not enough
is it because of my system specs or the graphics card problem?
pls help

Your problem doesn't seem to be related, this topic concerns GeForce total freezes with winXP and directX. If your game is laggy, your system probably needs an upgrade.

I agree, you need an upgrade. Eather get a newer AMD chip, or a videocard, or both.

The Sempron 3100+ socket 754 is very cheap, and is an amazing gaming chip.

I have been trying to install the new DirectX 9.0c because all the new games requires it including The Sims 2. But it seems everytime i tried installing it, it says the files downloaded have been succesfully installed. But when i checkked the dxdiag.exe it still shows directX9.0b. Ive downloaded the latest directX9.0c hundreds of time...Someone please help me..Why can't i install directX9.0c from DirectX9.0b?...It always says The files have been succesfully installed. yet i shows versiuon9.0b and i cant run my games..


Operating System: Windows XP Professional (5.1, Build 2600) Service Pack 2, v.2096 (2600.xpsp_sp2_rc1.040311-2315)
Language: English (Regional Setting: English)
System Manufacturer: VIA Technologies, Inc.
System Model: P4X400-8235
BIOS: Phoenix - AwardBIOS v6.00PG
Processor: Intel(R) Celeron(R) CPU 2.40GHz
Memory: 1024MB RAM
Page File: 206MB used, 2255MB available

DirectX Version: DirectX 9.0b (4.09.0000.0903)
DX Setup Parameters: Not found
DxDiag Version: 5.03.2600.2096 32bit Unicode

------------
DxDiag Notes
------------
DirectX Files Tab: The file qasf.dll is an old version, which could cause problems. You should reinstall DirectX to get the latest version.
Display Tab 1: No problems found.
Sound Tab 1: No problems found.
Sound Tab 2: No problems found.
Music Tab: No problems found.
Input Tab: No problems found.
Network Tab: No problems found.

I wouldn't be installing Direct X 9.0c more than once, or your system will run very slow or won't be as responsive as it was. First of all, you said that you have Windows XP Pro SP-2 right, well, this comes with Direct X 9.0c. And if your system still reads 9.0b, don't worry, it's 9.0c you have. It's just not showing it for some reason.

Direct X 10 is coming out in a few months I hear, so wait till that version.
P.S. When you install Direct X on your system, you should always choose to upgrade files which only need upgrading with the newer Direct X's.

So does this mean that i cant play any games now and wait for that version 10 of directX?..hmpp...sigh...Why is this happening...no other solutions?