CTD Blues

[rpm]

I've had problems with vox lockup's using vox the first time, after that game runs fine. Now, I started getting booted. I've had 4 CTD's in the last 24 hours, all under different conditions. I'm running crappy SoundMax onboard sound and only 256 ram, so it's probably the root of my trouble, but it's always worked fine in the past.

Anyone else having this? Skuzzy, I'll e-mail you my full dxdiag.

 Operating System: Windows XP Home Edition (5.1, Build 2600) Service Pack 1 (2600.xpsp1.020828-1920)
           Language: English (Regional Setting: English)
System Manufacturer: Dell Computer Corporation
       System Model: Dimension 4600i              
               BIOS: Phoenix ROM BIOS PLUS Version 1.10 A07
          Processor: Intel(R) Pentium(R) 4 CPU 2.66GHz, ~2.6GHz
             Memory: 254MB RAM
          Page File: 133MB used, 493MB available
        Windows Dir: C:\WINDOWS
    DirectX Version: DirectX 9.0c (4.09.0000.0904)
DX Setup Parameters: Not found
     DxDiag Version: 5.03.0001.0904 32bit Unicode

[Clifra Jones]

Originally posted by rpm
I've had problems with vox lockup's using vox the first time, after that game runs fine. Now, I started getting booted. I've had 4 CTD's in the last 24 hours, all under different conditions. I'm running crappy SoundMax onboard sound and only 256 ram, so it's probably the root of my trouble, but it's always worked fine in the past.

Anyone else having this? Skuzzy, I'll e-mail you my full dxdiag.

 Operating System: Windows XP Home Edition (5.1, Build 2600) Service Pack 1 (2600.xpsp1.020828-1920)
           Language: English (Regional Setting: English)
System Manufacturer: Dell Computer Corporation
       System Model: Dimension 4600i              
               BIOS: Phoenix ROM BIOS PLUS Version 1.10 A07
          Processor: Intel(R) Pentium(R) 4 CPU 2.66GHz, ~2.6GHz
             Memory: 254MB RAM
          Page File: 133MB used, 493MB available
        Windows Dir: C:\WINDOWS
    DirectX Version: DirectX 9.0c (4.09.0000.0904)
DX Setup Parameters: Not found
     DxDiag Version: 5.03.0001.0904 32bit Unicode

Yes, "worked fine in the past" is the key to the whole thing. It ain't the past any longer. Memory will help but should not be the cause of your CDTs I highly suspect your sound card. Just about all on-board sound cards are AC97. This spec hands off a lot of processing that used to be handles by the sound chip to the processor. This puts additional load on your processor.

You have a nice processor (faster than mine) but your throttleing it with that low memory, bite the bullet and go buy some RAM. It will help.

Also, another thing that jumps out at me is your paging file, I have found through many years supporting desktops in a corporate environment that setting the min(used) and max on the paging file the same will help in overall system performance. Not sure if this matters in AH as you should not be paging in AH at all but if you need additional virtual memroy your system has to resize the page file a lot. 133mb is way to low for a 256mb system I would crank them both up to 512mb. Higher if you add ram. MS recommends 11mb>system Ram but I usually make it higher than that.