Can anyone make sense of this.?

[Skipper007]

After trying for some time to get Windows 98SE to stop crashing in many of my games, I decided to try running Windows XP on it. Here are my hardware specs:
Athlon 1200
256MB PC 2100
MSI K7 Master
Leadtek Geforce 2 Pro 64MB
Sound Blaster Live Value
2 40 GB 7200 RPM hard drives or 1 40 and one 6GB 5400RPM drive, depending on how I'm running it
Lite on 24X burner and cheap CD-ROM
SMC network card and Aopen 56K modem

I normally run all my applications from one 40GB drive and store data on the other 40, but since I only had a few gigs on the second 40, I ghosted the 40 to the 6 and used the now free 40 to install XP.
I got XP running and installed the VIA 4 in 1s, AMD AGP and Nvidia Detonator V30.82s. I left the network driver alone, and also the sound driver. It picked up the modem as a generic 56K, so I installed the Aopen drivers, but they had no effect.
First test was Jedi Knight 2. I was able to run it in high quality mode, which would cause crashes in Windows 98. I also tried 3D Mark, which is when I ran into trouble. Twice it got through the car chase. And both times it would load Dragothic and simply go blank. After that I tried just running scene 3, and it froze after a few seconds of that too.
I wanted to check my Direct 3D stuff, so I tried Renegade and No One Lives Forever. Renegade worked fine the second time I tried it, but the first time I tried to click one menu and it went to windows. No One Lives Forever had the same problem in the same spot in the same level that it had under 98SE - it simply froze. But this time the audio just started looping instead of cutting everything except the music.

I decided to try some different drivers. I downloaded and installed an older XP driver, V 28. something, and it had the same problem in 3D mark with scene 2 - didn't try scene 3. I was going to try downloading some older VIA drivers from 3D guru, but Explorer froze. After rebooting, I got a message saying that the my Geforce 2 driver had failed a draw operation.

SO is it bad drivers? Bad hardware? Does anyone know how to test components such as video cards?

Anyways, here's my current course of action.
1. Run more XP stability tests, to see if it had other problems.
2. Run SANDRA - I believe it has a couple burn in tests.
3. Try running the video card in my K6-2 450 - it has a ALI motherboard and not VIA, plus it's ASUS, so it should work. If it has problems here, it's probably the video card. Besides, it will give me a good idea of how that system will perform with a Geforce 2 level card.

 

[phsstpok]

There was a DirectX XP patch. It's a replacement for a dll file. I think it was supposed to be included in the XP Service Pack 1 but some people are having problems with the service pack. I can't seem to find it at the Microsoft site but I know the patch is out there.

There's also a new DirectX 8.1B engine which is supposed to fix some kind of DDraw errors but the engine is only for Windows 9X/ME and a separate version for Win2K. No version for XP.

I'm downloading the DX 8.1B, myself. I'm having crashing problems in the NFS:Hot Pursuit 2 demo using Win98SE. It's the only game/demo I'm having problems with.

With VIA chipsets I find the best results from clean install of Via 4-in-1 meaning, use the uninstall options in the installer then run the installer a second time, clean install of nVidia drivers (detonator destroyer helps in
Win 9X/ME don't think it works in XP), and clean install of directX (DirectX Eradicator - works for all Windows but XP). I do all three, in the order given, whenever I change any one and also when I update the BIOS (because Windows redects system hardware which fouls up the 4-in-1 drivers). You probably can only do clean install of 4-in-1's in XP but it's worth a try the sequence. Works great on old VIA chipset including MVP3+ with my old K6-2.

<b>I type sixty words per minute. Ten are spelled correctly.</b>

 

[Skipper007]

Strange... I tried 3D Mark 2001 today and it worked. Thanks for the help anyway.