I work in the IT industry and this has got me stumped. If anyone remembers my previous posts, I started getting nv4_disp.dll blue screens at random when playing SOME games. After much uninstalling, reinstalling of drivers I finally gave up and tried a windows repair. Sadly this seemed to make things worse, as my internet connection no longer functioned.

So next I formatted and reinstalled XP and everything seemed to be ok (hand't actually tried any games at this point). Then the most perculiar things started to happen. Whenever I boot the system and log onto windows running ANYTHING, and I mean even winRAR here, takes at least ten minutes to respond. Further more, If i click on 'my computer' i get that annoying searchlight for about ten minutes. After this ten minute 'wake up' period, everything seems to speed up a tad.

This has now become an urgent problem because I just started playing galaxies again, paid for a year subscription up front and it keeps randomly crashing! (again)

I've checked everything I can think of, (ran ad-aware, spybot and anti-virus) and I know its not the hardware, because it's always worked fine before. All the cables are in correctly and I'm at the end of my tether!

Please help!

AMD Athlon XP 1.8GHz
512MB RAM
120GB HDD SATA
12GB HDD IDE
GeForce 4 Ti4600 128MB
Nvidia nforce2 chipset w/ soundstorm
Pioneer DVD/RW
ABIT NF-7S Rev 2 Motherboard

Hi,

Have you tried changing the RAM?

Joshua,
Windows XP Topics: Basics | Customize | General | Hardware | Help and Support

Greetings marky81,
Before you go totally nuts. It seems to be a video card/driver issue with Win XP and certain games. Check these out as you are not alone.

http://forums.relicnews.com/archive/index.php/t-4568.html

http://www.softwaretipsandtricks.com/forum/archive/index.php/t-94.html

http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=325730&sd=RMVP

Best of luck,
John

AVG Spybot S&D Spyware Doctor Spyware Blaster Ad-Aware SE CWShredder CCleaner Hijackthis ZoneAlarm
[IMG]http://www.danasoft.com/sig/Ultra_Classic.jpg[/IMG]

You're using a firewall, aren't you?

If you've got the security level set to 100%, reset it at "Medium."

And if I'm wrong, well, break that tether and smash the computer against the wall and at least you'll be back in touch with the true savage in your soul.

I get all the news I need on the weather report,
...Hey, I got nothing to do today, but smile.

Thanks for all your replies,

I am using a firwall yeah, but I've had this problem before I started using one anyway. I use ZoneAlarm and set it medium just in case though.

I haven't tried changing the RAM, mainly because I have nothing to change it too! :-)

John, thanks for the links but I've seen the Mircosoft one before and it didn't help, and the other links don't actually have a solution!

I'm convinced it has to be more than just the display drivers, if only because of the odd behaviour at startup.

AMD Athlon XP 1.8GHz
512MB RAM
120GB HDD SATA
12GB HDD IDE
GeForce 4 Ti4600 128MB
Nvidia nforce2 chipset w/ soundstorm
Pioneer DVD/RW
ABIT NF-7S Rev 2 Motherboard

>After much uninstalling, reinstalling of drivers I finally gave up and tried a windows repair.

Are you at liberty to do a fresh reinstall?

And what have you been observing from your readings of the Event Log?

Beauty of the high sierra,
and she's looking out for you.

I am not a gamer, but began having similar problems a few months ago, and they got worse and the freezes and delays got more frequent. I was convinced it was software, but finally, I changed out the ram and it went away completely. I bought new ram, reformatted and never had the problem since and the ram is generally returnable from most decent vendors besides, which I did.
I mean really there are only a few possibilities one being virus or spyware that escapes format (i.e. boot sector), or hardware and this is the first time I have ever had decent ram corrupt after a year an 1/2. Fortunately I had 2 machines, same motherboard, and same ram, so when I finally realized it had to be that, it was easy to prove. But today ram is cheap. I just bought 1 gig of Corsair 3200 ram at Newegg for $79 delivered...what do you have to lose?

"Are you at liberty to do a fresh reinstall?"

I alraedy did that if you look a little further in my post ;-)

Rich, what you say is interesting. I may have to pull the old 'switcheroo' with some RAM at work and see if that makes any difference...

AMD Athlon XP 1.8GHz
512MB RAM
120GB HDD SATA
12GB HDD IDE
GeForce 4 Ti4600 128MB
Nvidia nforce2 chipset w/ soundstorm
Pioneer DVD/RW
ABIT NF-7S Rev 2 Motherboard

Greetings marky81,
You are using ZoneAlarm...what version are you using? There were some issues with ZA Firewalls and XP.
This may sound like a newbie question and not intended to offend, but you did turn off the Windows XP Firewall right?
ultra_classic

AVG Spybot S&D Spyware Doctor Spyware Blaster Ad-Aware SE CWShredder CCleaner Hijackthis ZoneAlarm
[IMG]http://www.danasoft.com/sig/Ultra_Classic.jpg[/IMG]

Hi just a bit of info.

When you format use the line C:\ format/u
This is the MOD format which removes everything ultimately. and reboot the bios as well.

If you already know sorry

Thanks for all the info guys! I'd rather avoid reinstalling from scratch again if I can, but I'll bare it in mind as a last resort. I've got rid of Zone Alarm completely now, I'm trying to go back to basics and see if I can identify the problem.

I've started getting random blue screen crashes and resets in just plain windows now, so im thinking its a memory problem.

Also if i boot in safe mode I can get to my computer instantly, so it must be something on boot thats screwing it up....

AMD Athlon XP 1.8GHz
512MB RAM
120GB HDD SATA
12GB HDD IDE
GeForce 4 Ti4600 128MB
Nvidia nforce2 chipset w/ soundstorm
Pioneer DVD/RW
ABIT NF-7S Rev 2 Motherboard

Marky81,
Check out this post I made on my forum
(feel free to join us too)
called "It's the Ram Sam"
http://www.kickenhardware.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=230
this chronicles the whole ram horror show of March of this year....

Good god! That might be it! I did a BOIS flash update not that long ago. Maybe I should try putting them in different slots...

AMD Athlon XP 1.8GHz
512MB RAM
120GB HDD SATA
12GB HDD IDE
GeForce 4 Ti4600 128MB
Nvidia nforce2 chipset w/ soundstorm
Pioneer DVD/RW
ABIT NF-7S Rev 2 Motherboard

ok swapped the slots, and while it now says 'DDR dual RAM enabled' at system start, I still get the random errors. Have just uninstalled the chipset drivers and am downloading the version from the motherboards website (rather than the ones from the Nvidia site) to see if that makes any difference. While I don't have them installed, it hasn't crashed yet. I wonder if I've discovered the root of the problem.

AMD Athlon XP 1.8GHz
512MB RAM
120GB HDD SATA
12GB HDD IDE
GeForce 4 Ti4600 128MB
Nvidia nforce2 chipset w/ soundstorm
Pioneer DVD/RW
ABIT NF-7S Rev 2 Motherboard

Problem solved! And no way in a million years could I have determined it without your help (and some guesswork).

Its actually the nforce2 memory bus controller driver. The reason it was hard to spot is that Nvidia do a 'unified' driver for the chipset, and this is just one of the drivers within that. True, I now have a great honking question mark in the middle of my device manager list, but my computer is crash free.

So let that be a lesson to me and anyone else, if its crashing with NV4_disp.dll errors, it may not just be a case of 'bad display drivers'!

Thanks again people! i'm off to play some galaxies and kill some tusken raiders.

Laters!

AMD Athlon XP 1.8GHz
512MB RAM
120GB HDD SATA
12GB HDD IDE
GeForce 4 Ti4600 128MB
Nvidia nforce2 chipset w/ soundstorm
Pioneer DVD/RW
ABIT NF-7S Rev 2 Motherboard

Great news and thanks for telling us!!!!
Funny, we never used to leave Windows motherboard drivers...always put in the mfgr motherboard drivers.