AC'97 Drivers on P4SD-LA causes Windows 7 to randomly freeze

[ptang]

Some of you may have seen a previous post about random freezing cause by my AGP card. Turns out it wasn't the AGP at all (even although it did have a dodgy fan)...

I have an HP OEM (Asus) P4SD-LA Yale motherboard which has the Realtek ALC650 chip for sound. It worked great under XP but since upgrading to Windows 7 it randomly freezes.

I have (after unfairly blaming my AGP card) traced this back to the AC'97 drivers: If I uninstall the device drivers (and prevent from reloading on startup), disable the device in device manager or disable the device in the BIOS then the machine runs perfectly.

As soon as I load the v6305 Win7 drivers (or the A4.06 XP drivers in compatibility mode) then the machine will just freeze at some point - usually within 2 mins of entering the desktop forcing me to power off the machine and reboot into safe-mode to remove the drivers/disable the device again.

I've checked and the chip is using IRQ17 which is only shared with the 82801EB SMBus controller (24D3). All memory addresses and I/O are unique.

So, I know this is an old motherboard and yes, in an ideal world I'd upgrade everything but that's not an option at the moment. Has anyone else managed to get this to work on this MB (or the P4G800-V Asus ATX version using the same chip/BIOS).

If I have to use a PCI soundcard to get round this, then what's recommended for Win7?

Not forgetting that I have two front panel cables for the mic and headphone using HP's plugs - Has anyone managed to splice/recut these for their card?

Thanks!

'tang.

 

[ptang]

Update: Windows update just advised me that there was an important update (v6305) available so I installed it. Windows update installed the driver and re-enabled the device. Sound now works (reboot was not required). The manager app hasn't loaded but probably will after a reboot...

Just rebooted and so far no hangs - fingers crossed. Sounds bizarre but I'd already tried this. Lets hope it stay this way!

 

[ptang]

I spoke too soon. The machine ran clean for about five hours and then randomly hung.

The only thing in the System log at the time of the hang was "The Windows Error Reporting Service service entered the running state" and then silence. Nothing until I forced a power-down and restart 15 minutes later. Is there any additional logging I can enable to watch the driver states?

Uninstalling the AC'97 device from device manager has been stable for over 12 hours. Has anyone seen this before or am I just odd

'tang.

 

[ptang]

So I've managed to keep the machine stable with audio for over 12 hours. The solution seems rather bizarre!

I've enabled the verifier.exe to watch only the RealTek driver (rtkvac.sys) as well as the ATI Radeon driver (atikmdag.sys) just to be on the safe side. So far - no verifier blue screen and the computer runs smoothly. Why would this keep the machine stable??

I will leave it like this for a while and if no problems will then remove the verifier to see if the problems return!