Hi Leute,
vielleicht bringt dies hier Licht ins Dunkel...
As so often, the truth lies in simplicity.
The answer to MY infinite loop/d3d crash bug is:
DO NOT INSTALL WIN2000 SERVICE PACK 3 !!!
Now a lot of you will probably think - whoa, here it goes again, MS-bashing etc...
Not so. I work as a lead tester in a German game publishing company and I\'ve installed
lots of sp3\'s in the last months. All work. Except...
I\'ve got several machines at home, two of which I wanted to upgrade about ten days ago.
Both of them have the same Kt133A chipset board but besides of that are completely different in build.
I slipped an Athlon1000 in one of them and an Athlon XP 2000+ in the other.
I also bought a new drive and two new Nvidia ti4200 cards. (One MSI one Pixelview)
After reinstalling win2000 on both systems, trouble started.
I\'ll spare you all the detail and technicalities as you probably have gone through them as well,
if you are reading this. Of course I use all the newest drivers, upped my bios etc. etc. etc.
Still: every time I played MadOnion 3DMark2001se or Battlefield... Wham - BSoD, CTD or simple reboots.
I tried out Win2000 and XP - Same thing.
After fiddling around for days whithout any solution, I started reading the posts... Man, did I get scared.
Then yesterday, I sat down and repeated every step simultaneously on two machines.
I installed Win2000, directX 8.1b, then the current Via onboard sound drivers, and finally
Nvidias newest (40) gfx driver. (I tried out the older versions as well... all work)
I purposely left out the SP\'s and the 4in1\'s. And what should I tell you? It worked.
Then I installed SP3 on one machine and SP2 on the other...
Result: The PC with SP2 worked fine (even after I installed the newest 4in1) but the PC with
SP3 gave up on me! No matter what 4in1 or other driver I tried to over install, same thing...
I reformatted, installed SP2 and... No crashes, no nothing.
(Although I still cringe every time my monitor changes it\'s setting... ;o)
Summary: I assume MS tried to fix the crash-bugs but destabilized certain systems, by doing so.
I\'m sure this does not solve all your IL/crash problems, but before some of you give up or sell
their systems you may want to give it a try...
Good luck.
Nick P. aka. the Archon
