Ok, a popular topic this one I know, but Windows 2000 Pro just keeps crashing! I suspect it doesn't like my hardware (hell, I don't greatly like my hardware) but all devices comply with the HCL except for one unknown quantity: the motherboard.
First off, it installed fine, detected and installed all hardware; great, no probs. About 30 minutes into a virgin Win2000 session and BANG!, the computer rebooted. This happened several more times before I disabled the auto-reboot option and was rewarded instead with the BSOD familiar to all.
This yielded the following bugcheck info:
Stop 0x0000000A or IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL blah blah blah....However this was one Stop message amongst others including good old Stop 0x00000050 PAGE_FAULT_IN_NONPAGED_AREA and so on. It also generates errors frequently whilst using Internet Explorer, Event Viewer has reported errors with "Server" and "Perfctrs" amongst others, and all in all things are in a bloody mess.
System specs are as follows:
Pentium II 350
128MB PC100 SDRAM
SiS 6326 AGP Video
SoundBlaster PCI 128
10.2GB Maxtor HDD and....(oh dear) a generic PCChips M747 systemboard with an outdated BIOS that I believe to be the culprit. This came with an onboard SoundPro that quickly died hence the 128. However everything apart from said board is on the Win2000 HCL, and by outdated I mean the board only supports APM, which is currently disabled under Win2000.
Soooo, Windows 2000 is a terrific OS but simply too volatile to use realistically, but I want to nail the culprit. This exact same system configuration presented no trouble at all under the previous Windows 98 installation. Oh, and by the way, this was a clean install onto a freshly formatted disk.
Another curio. Win2000 prompts a lot of disk activity when it boots - it takes about 5 minutes to fully settle down from the desktop. I installed it onto my old Seagate drive and it was nowhere near as active. It also seemed a lot stabler, but I haven't tested this installation to any great extent.
Any ideas about the Stop messages/BIOS/motherboard etc?
Help!