Jazz2 freezes

[Alberto]

Hi.
I have a weird problem that I'm not able to get with.
When I play JJ2 in full screen the game freezes for a time from time to time, and sometimes after I turn it into windowed mode, the screen flashes.
I decided to check ram yesterday with Windows Memory Diagnostic tool and it failed once, but then I repeated the tests 2 times more and it didn't fail, also I ran another tool called Memtest86 all night long and it did 12 tests and it passed them all, none failed.
So I'm only suspecting of 2 things:
My video card drivers (also my video card is a bit burnt)
and a SiS IDE driver that I installed on this reformat.

Has anybody experienced this?

Thanks

AMD Athlon XP +2200
ASROCK K7S8X R3.0 latest bios 2.60
AOPEN NVIDIA GeForce 4 MX 440 DDR
Sound Blaster Live Digital 5.1
Windows XP Home Edition SP2

[Olsen]

GeForce 4 MX sucks. Although I have no real explanation. :P

[FoxBlitzz]

(also my video card is a bit burnt)

If it's burnt, why wouldn't it act up? ;)

SiS IDE driver

Why do you have a SiS driver for an nVidia card? I know you have drivers from nVidia, but still. I would at least update the nVidia drivers, and uninstall that SiS driver. SiS makes quite possible some of the slowest 3D video cards on the market (Besides built-in Intel crap).

[Alberto]

No no, the SiS driver is for IDE, so it's a HDD driver
and well, the card is a bit burnt, but it works... also, since I don't play much, I don't need another card, but I dunno why I have problems with the game, I have latest NVIDIA drivers 71.89 I think

[Marine1969]

GeForce 4 MX sucks. Although I have no real explanation. :P
The GeForce 4 is pretty good, it may not be as top of the range as the GeForce 6 but it'll run things like Doom 3 and Hal Life 2 no problem.

Link: Content removal.

[Link]

Is there anything running in the background that might cause a conflict or undue processor usage?

[Alberto]

I have disabled most processes (left Windows ones and some others), but now I have seen some things which may be related.
As I said yesterday, I did a RAM test and it failed one test. But then I left it all the night running memory tests and this evening too and there wasn't any error.

But lately I tried to copy a CD with Alcohol 120% and when it finished making an image, the program crashed with an error.
The common errors that say "Send to Microsoft" and "Close"
Also, MSN Messenger 7 crashed on me yesterday after some conversations, and it crashed today when I closed it.

Then I decided to give my computer a boost and I tried Unreal II, I picked a random level and it hang up on the "Stand By" screen (it did this the last week too and also it gave fatal errors on Archeron).

I'm really wondering if this is a problem of the RAM or the videocard, I have 768 MB.
I don't think it's Windows, those errors together seem more like of a hardware failure.

[Alberto]

Now I'm testing with an ATI Radeon 9200 SE, JJ2 doesn't seem to freeze anymore, but MSN Messenger and Unreal II gave error when exiting from them

[Sonyk]

If it happened while you were exiting, I'm more or less certain Windows XP just has a tendency to show errors after closing a program.

[Alberto]

Maybe but, I think it never happened.
Today I uninstalled the SiS IDE driver which I only installed on this reformat and also it didn't come with my motherboard, but I installed it because I use a SiS chipset and it was in the compatibility list, the driver is from 2003, it says it works with XP, but still, it may be not compatible with SP2 I guess.

I was only able to test my computer around an hour or so, because then I had to go, but I left my ocmputer doing another memory test.

I'll see..

[Alberto]

I just got back home and I had the memory test running with Windows Diagnostic Memory and it failed one test again.
So I dunno if this is reason to worry, maybe is my RAM but, is reason to worry that a test fails from time to time?

[Mircea]

This happened to me once;
I borrowed a PC from a fiend. I tried installing Windows XP on it, but it failed (the installer was freezing). I only managed to get Windows 2000 installed. And when I was trying to install a program, 3 of 4 times I got an error message and setup was shutting down. I also installed some games on that computer. Only half worked and those half where closing for no reason when I was in the middle of the game.
I spent some time making settings in BIOS and thinking. I never managed to figure out what was wrong, until I putted the RAM from this computer in mine and... BANG! It crashed.
So, if you have the same problem or something similar, it's surely the RAM's fault. Try to buy new RAM because if the test fails once, there's surely something wrong.

[Alberto]

I already changed RAM, also the module I changed failed always in the same address

[Alberto]

I haven't either checked JJ2 if it freezes or not