Sampson

This is a very specialized piece of software and your best bet is tech support at Propellerhead. But, if you care to listen to amateurs. It sounds like a latency problem. If you have a bunch of tasks running in the background, software will act differently - it will delay. On really fast computers, it doesn't seem noticeable, but it is there nonetheless. Look at your taskbar on the right corner. The more stuff that is in there, more often than not, you will experience some delays. In Win2k if you hit CTRL-ALT-DEL it will bring up a box. At the bottom of the box is a Task Manager Button. Click on it. It will usually default to a the Processes tab and show you all of the stuff running. A lot of these programs run in the background, some have low priority others high, and you can assign them or even end them (don't until you get familiar with what they are). Click on the Performance tab and you will see a little graph with CPU usage and memory usage. Playing with different programs with this up on the screen can sometimes indicate peak CPU usage, etc., also indicating delays. I am purely guessing. There are probably component pieces within your software package that bring a certain task to the front dropping others in the background in 98, while in 2000, both or several processes are competing for priority at the same time. That competition is causing the delay. Try the tech people at Propellorhead, it is only to their benefit to get the program working for you. Good feedback makes for a good program. Sorry, that this won't fix your problem. You can dual boot Win2k and 98 until it is resolved for you satisfactorly.

Very wise. Being on the cutting edge with the technology you are working with has little enough oxygen.

Everything seems to be leading to your Audigy card. The crackles and pops, skipping, etc., are all known to be SB related. If it is skipping from your Hard drive, your CD drive, your DVD drive, they become irrelevant. What links them is your soundcard. Anyway, when XP first boots up, it reads from the EPROM about your computer setup, and just a whole bunch of stuff including keyboards, floppies, (whatever) and "reconstructs" the Registry and then checks to see if every thing is as it says it is. After bootup your first time, when you reboot, it reconstructs the Registry again, but is probably getting different values or taking the devices in a different order which seems to make your machine more stable. This is relevant, but one problem at a time. If you will bring up your Device Manager, then go to Hardware, then View, then Resources by type, then click on the (+)next to interrupt request (IRQ), this will indicate what devices share the same interrupt. In my system the sound card, the USB, the Video card, and the ethernet card all share the same interrupt. In my case this is 11. What this means is that ACPI is in charge. I installed Windows defaulting to Windows way of doing things. Some, because of Bios issues, Via drivers, or wanting to control their own IRQ's from Bios, hit f5 or F7 when they clean installed and chose to use System Computer and disallow ACPI running. For a lot of people sharing the same interrupt has been no problem. For some it has seemed to be a nightmare. Anyway, if your devices are sharing the same IRQ, moving the soundcard physically ahead of the other cards (usually to a slot closer to the AGP slot) has cleared up the problem. This goes back to your boot up. If a device installs itself (and it often seems random) before another, the system runs fine. But, when one jumps in and grabs "the lion share" of resources before its time, the system crashes for seemingly no reason because another device is in need of those resources. I am not using correct computereze, but I hope this is clear.

Went to Nero's website and found this: If you have got inCD installed, then please check if you have got a computer witha VIA chipset. If this is the case: At the moment inCD does not yet support the Via Chipset.

As I said, there is no knowing why some programs run on one machine and not on another. As to fonts they may or may not be at fault. The one that made my life miserable was an Adobe Font cr_______.pfb. It works with every other program even InCD. Your fonts are found in a hidden folder called fonts under c:\winnt\ in Win2k. I wouldn't go deleting them. You might move some of them to another folder temporarily, run the program, then move them back when they are excluded as being the culprit. Be careful cause some fonts are system fonts for you Desktop, etc. The InCD program as initialized at startup is found in C:\Program files\ahead\InCD\InCD.exe it is invoked from a key in the registry - HKLM/Software/Microsoft/Windows/CurrentVersion/Run. There is a readme file in the InCD folder which reads: "For more information on InCD including trouble shooting, please read help file on the disc or check our web-site at http://www.nero.com" Check first to see if the BsUDF.sys file is correct. It should be in your c:winnt\system32\drivers folder. Win2k driver should say BsUDF.sys 320,481 11/9/2001. If this doesn't help, and the program says it is creating a log file, let it make it, click on Run from the Start button then type drwtsn32 . If you have several logs in DrWatson, scroll down and choose the last one, then click view. Find the arrow next to the assembly code that says fault and copy down the procedure. Sometimes (difficult though) it gives a clue.

I am not exactly sure what you mean. You power down, let the machine remain off for a while. Then, when you power it up, it doesn't come up but hangs, and you have to hit the reset button?

Yes, remember that the video has to sync with the audio. If it were skipping audio wouldn't it have to re-sync with the video?

What slot does your Audigy occupy on your board? I have read that putting it in slot 3 and assigning it to IRQ 5 has cleared up audio skipping problems.

The CD in question - was it burned on your Ricoh?

If the message reads "... has generated errors ... creating log file", click on Run and type: drwtsn32 . This will bring up any logs of programs that have created such a message. Click on any of those listed, presuming you have not cleared them, and it will give you the pid nnumber which is the Pid number in your Task Manager indicating which program did the nasty deed. Then, you will see your computer's info and then a whole bunch of assembly code that will eventually tell you what offending procedure caused the problem. Good luck because while you might be able to read assembly, what it is referring to is so arcane, only the engineer of the offending software might have to debug it to tell you what happened. Just to give you an example, I had a program that gave me that message. The fault was: mov byte ptr [eax+edi],0x0 ds:00000006=??. What this amounted to was that the program had called up a particular font did a checksum on it to see if it was scalable within the programs parameters and when it wasn't, the program had no routine to handle a default, croaked and left the message "...has generated ... creating log..."

I agree. The OEM Model# is also the webpage product entry. You seem to have the 512MB PC2100 DDR SDRAM SPECIAL. In the small print on that page it does not mention the Nforce though its support page designates it as working with the Nforce. On its Asus support page it refers to the ASUS A7N266-E (not C as in your mobo) http://www.mushkin.com/cgi-bin/Mushkin.f...880#asusa7n266e Only the 512MB Hi Perf LEVEL 2 2100 222 actually refers to the Nforce in the small print and wouldn't you know it, it's 61 bucks more.

I believe that the Asus board requires nonECC registered Ram. According to Mushkin there are three different modules of 512 Ram that is rated to work with the 415-D chipset: 512MB Hi Perf LEVEL 2 2100 222 512MB PC2100 DDR SDRAM SPECIAL 512MB High Perf PC2100 Mushkin CL2 Which is yours?

The weakest component of a PC is the power supply. In this area, never skimp. Given that you want to overclock the thing means that you will have to be cooling it big time. More fans. Sometimes lots more fans. Get a 400W to 450W power supply. After you start outfitting this thing with CD's, DVD's, multiple hard disks, a variety of cards, and fans (in the case, over the memory, on the video card, on the processor, etc.), you won't have to worry with with an undersized power supply.

Intel 845d DDR series: the Asus P4B266 and the Aopen AX4Bpro. The Asus gets a lot of recommendations. The Aopen's support is very good though their boards can be flakey. Intel i850 Rambus series: Asus P4TE and Abit TH7II. Asus might not overclock as high but seems to be more stable. Sis 645 series: Asus P4S333 and MSI645. Somewhere in April/May Asus is coming out with a 850E Northwoods B (possibly) 533FSB 1066rdram board. The Rambus series will overclock well and give higher memory bandwidth. Your choice really just depends on what you want to use it for. If you're going to tweak it for everything it is worth and play with it that way get the Abit TH7II. If you want to overclock it and play video games with the least amount of hassle, the Asus boards DDR series or Rambus series seem to have good track records. If you're building it yourself and need tech support pronto Aopen at least answers their phones. Some say Rambus is dead though a number of board makers are coming out with 1066 support. Rumor has it that even SIS is. Some claim that DDR will be an afterthought once DDRII arrives. Good Luck.

Log files, internet files, etc., get scattered everywhere. In defragmenting your disk, you are dependent on the manner of defragmentation by the defragger you are using. Some defrag by name, some by folders, some by date of creation, some by date of last access, some by space. So, depending on how it is defragged can mean your files, after heavy use, look even more fragmented than before. Red Star - you can get a free defragger from O&O. You never have to purchase it, nor is it time limited. I don't work for them but I use their defragger. I bought the package because it will allow you to defrag in multiple ways.

Not sure if this will help. Read about this one but have not used it: http://www.partition-recovery.com/ . It is shareware so I don't know its total functionality. I bought this one: http://www.oosoft.de/english/products/index.html which is the BlueCon v.4 . O&O usually gives you a fully operational program as a free download. Later if you purchase it, they give you the registry key that will unlock "extra" items.

It is. You have first class equipment. It is connected by the book, so you are really down to the technology itself. There can be all kinds of reasons for this flipping, but you've ruled out so many of the common ones. There are software issues in relation to sound and video at this point. Windows is not a real time environment. Problem 1 of frame dropping) On DVD's the sound can be carried down one channel and the video on another. Timing to have them intercept properly is key. If the sound is ready (or "too quick") and the video isn't, frames are dropped from the video to connect to the next "proper" intersection. Problem 2) There is a serious demand on memory and video memory. There is a kind of look ahead process to create the sequential frames to be shown. They create an "overlay". A lot of software now use DirectX functions, one of which is flip(). In other words, frames are cued and flipped to create the motion. If for whatever reason the cue of overlays cannot be processed and flushed from the buffered memory, frames are dropped to permit the overlaying framing process to continue at the expense of frames ready to be viewed. Either timing of the flipping or the memory buffer limitation of the software or hardware can cause this. Result, frames are dropped. ATI and Nvidia apparently handle these things differently. You could try a software package for DVD movies that is theoretically VGA independent. Ravisent is one. There are probably others. In reading your hardware specs with the latest Bios, drivers, etc., with no other conflicts and given the performance of your machine, unless some widget has been overlooked, its the last road I know to travel.

This is Microsoft's "Lab" Address for driver testing: http://www.microsoft.com/hwtest/device/videodecode.asp

There is no telling why these things don't run properly. I had a bad font that kept a particular program from initializing. Killed the font and the program ran perfectly.

Go to your device manager and bring up your hardware and click on view by connection. Look at your IRQ's. XP and 2000 like to assign PCI devices to the same IRQ. Very often your sound card, video card, and ethernet card may share the same IRQ. Generally, this is no problem as there may be no memory conflicts. But, there could be enough "traffic" to slow one down. I've seen seasoned game players assign their video cards to their own IRQ to raise their speed in 3DMark.

You've probably already done it, but it doesn't hurt to ask. Have you looked at how your IRQ's are assigned given that XP and 2000 under ACPI like to string a bunch of PCI devices to the same interrupt. Most of the time, there isn't a problem. Sometimes giving a device its own interrupt resolves it.

This is a patch for your firm ware. Risky, but since it is a zip, you can look at its components - http://digilander.iol.it/firmware2/9060_190_RICOH.ZIP

Most DVD Video's use a copyprotection called CSS which locks the disc and makes it impossible to read data from it. If such a disc is used for testing the drive with DVD Speed, the test will abort with error code 056F03. A solution for this is to unlock the disc by playing the video with a software DVD Video player which will unlock the disc. The disc remains unlocked until it's removed from the drive or until the system is restarted. You can immediately shut down the DVD Video player after you started to play the disc.

I put the same TDK drive in my machine about a week ago. I did not have your problem. My wild guess is a memory conflict (possibly with your video drivers). The InCD application only works with CD-RW cd's. It works with Windows Explorer and allows you to transfer files in UDF format to the CDRom like it was another disk drive. You copy a file from the hard disk to the CDrom just like from one disk to another. It is a cute trick. Any other computer that you wish to read that CD from must have a UDF reader program installed. Nero, on the other hand, burns the file in different formats (ISO being one of them) that other computers can readily read. If your Digital MixMaster is working and Nero is working, InCD is a cute piece of software that installs itself in your taskbar and eats up memory in the background (4776K to be exact) whose functionality you probably won't use that frequently. So, I wouldn't sweat it if it doesn't work. I'm sure you followed the instructions and made it a Master on your Secondary channel and then went to the IDE ATA/ATAPI controllers in the Device Manager and enable DMA for the TDK. I have a Gainward 2MX400 and I think it is using the 21.81 drivers though I wouldn't swear to it. They came from Gainward. If you want to clear up the conflict, I'd look at the video driver issue first. Installing and uninstalling Nvidia drivers are such a pain, I wouldn't blame you for not wanting to go down that path.

Woudl this help? http://www.pcguide.com/ref/hdd/if/ide/modesDMA-c.html