A7N8X Deluxe audio crash in WinXP

  • Thread starter Thread starter Scott
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Scott

I have a rev 1.xx Asus A7N8X deluxe motherboard which I have
configured to use the on board audio. I've used version 3.62 and 3.66
of the audio drivers. If I open SoundStorm/Nvidia Control Panel
(v3.66) and go to the "Speaker Setup" page and press "Test Tone" I
hear the beginning of the the woman's voice saying "left channel" and
Windows XP crashes and reboots with a system error. Microsoft claims
the crash is related to a driver. This doesn't happen all the time
but I'm having frequent crashes in other games that my kids play that
look similar.

Other details
Asus A7N8X deluxe 1007 bios
Asus V8240 graphics card
Windows XP Pro

I have tried versions 3.62 and 3.66 audio drivers plus some older
version 2.x drivers with the same results.

Any ideas on where my problem might be. Anyone having similar issues?
 
Scott said:
I have a rev 1.xx Asus A7N8X deluxe motherboard which I have
configured to use the on board audio. I've used version 3.62 and 3.66
of the audio drivers. If I open SoundStorm/Nvidia Control Panel
(v3.66) and go to the "Speaker Setup" page and press "Test Tone" I
hear the beginning of the the woman's voice saying "left channel" and
Windows XP crashes and reboots with a system error. Microsoft claims
the crash is related to a driver. This doesn't happen all the time
but I'm having frequent crashes in other games that my kids play that
look similar.

Other details
Asus A7N8X deluxe 1007 bios
Asus V8240 graphics card
Windows XP Pro

I have tried versions 3.62 and 3.66 audio drivers plus some older
version 2.x drivers with the same results.

Any ideas on where my problem might be. Anyone having similar issues?
Click to expand...

Go into device manager, select view hidden devices and confirm that all
three nVidia sound devices have the same driver version (preferably the
latest, 3.66). If they do not, extract the drivers to a directory and
update the driver, pointing it to the directory the new drivers are in.

Also, what is the Computer Type set to? ("ACPI Uniprocessor PC", "Advanced
Config... (ACPI)" etc)

Ben
 
Thanks Ben,

I have verified that all 3drivers are all version 366 and my system is
ACPI Uniprocessor PC.

-Scott
 
Scott said:
Thanks Ben,

I have verified that all 3drivers are all version 366 and my system is
ACPI Uniprocessor PC.
Click to expand...

Thats pretty odd then. Some people have experienced sound issues (usually
crackling/static/interference) with APIC enabled, so changing to Advanced
Config... (ACPI) might help, but I doubt it. It's a pain to do as well,
'cos you need to do a repair install of windows after changing the mode in
order for it to work properly.

It does sound like a driver issue to me... but thats 'cos it sounds like a
hardware type problem (most of which are caused by bad drivers, not bad
hardware).

Ben
 
I do notice "crackly" audio sometimes. Its good to know I could fix that by
changing the ACPI configuration -- but for now I'd like just to get the
audio not to crash XP.

Is there any easy way to see what is causing the crash (i.e. a tool read the
..dmp files that XP creates?)

-Scott
 
Scott said:
I do notice "crackly" audio sometimes. Its good to know I could fix that
by changing the ACPI configuration -- but for now I'd like just to get the
audio not to crash XP.
Click to expand...

It's not guaranteed to work, but some people have had success disableing
APIC, some enabling it.
Is there any easy way to see what is causing the crash (i.e. a tool read
the .dmp files that XP creates?)
Click to expand...


You should be able to check the system log, but I'm not sure how much info
is there. Quite oftewn you'll see an anpplication thats appears to be
cuasing the error, when in fact that application is calling a dll, which
calls another dll thats accesses the driver that causes the crash. So it's
not always all that easy to find out the root cause.

Ben
 
It's not guaranteed to work, but some people have had success disableing
APIC, some enabling it.
Click to expand...

Note:
It's usual that you have to do a repair install if you disable APIC in
the BIOS in XP
However I doubt the problem is APIC as it allows more IRQ sharing.
I'd suggest removing the card.Clearing all it's software from the Add
Remove Programs list.ckeaning the registry,
http://www.geocities.com/sheppola/freeprog.html
RegscrubXP(freeware).
and then re-inserting the card.
also make sure the latest mother board drivers are installed and look
for updated drivers for the sound card/chip.
HTH :)






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Well I finally gave up and reinstalled Windows XP and that has fixed
the issue. Painful to go through but in the end probably less time than
trying to figure out what was actually going wrong. Strange thing is
that I can't see anything that looks obviously different after the
reinstall.

The audio crackles and pops are gone too. This problem showed
up a few months ago when I loaded some older 2.xx drivers off
the Nvidia site. I'm wondered if loading the newer drivers over these
somehow doesn't fix the problem (but a clean sweep does remove
the offending files?)

-Scott
 
May not necessarily have been caused by offending files. Bits leftover
in the registry will do it too and are much harder to weed out. The
method you used was probably the best for your situation.
 
Shep© said:
Note:
It's usual that you have to do a repair install if you disable APIC in
the BIOS in XP
Indeed.

However I doubt the problem is APIC as it allows more IRQ sharing.
Click to expand...

Well APIC in itself seems a good idea, unfortunately it's not always easy to
get the software right... it doesn't work properly in Linux yet (well, the
general concensus is that it's best to disable it with this board), so I
have no reason to believe MS have it perfect.

Ben
 
Well APIC in itself seems a good idea, unfortunately it's not always easy to
get the software right... it doesn't work properly in Linux yet (well, the
general concensus is that it's best to disable it with this board), so I
have no reason to believe MS have it perfect.

Ben
Click to expand...

PCI IRQ Bus Master sharing was also a good idea.Unfortunately I can't
blame MS for hardware makers(especially NIC and Video card makers) who
are too lazy to code for it correctly :/



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Shep© said:
PCI IRQ Bus Master sharing was also a good idea.Unfortunately I can't
blame MS for hardware makers(especially NIC and Video card makers) who
are too lazy to code for it correctly :/
Click to expand...


Well bus mastering is predominantly a hardware-based feature, I'm not sure
how much bus mastering can be affected by software. IRQ sharing is another
thing... the drivers were atrocious when the feature was new. Pretty much
like the printer/scanner battle when the scanner used a pass-through cable
for sharing the parallel port... I seem to recall Canon drivers being the
worst for longest in that department.

Ben
 
Well bus mastering is predominantly a hardware-based feature, I'm not sure
how much bus mastering can be affected by software. IRQ sharing is another
thing... the drivers were atrocious when the feature was new. Pretty much
like the printer/scanner battle when the scanner used a pass-through cable
for sharing the parallel port... I seem to recall Canon drivers being the
worst for longest in that department.

Ben
Click to expand...

The two are combined.The hardware must fully support it but then so
must the drivers and the operating system.This is where things tend to
fall down.Of course USB made things better for multi-media systems of
today but that needed tuning up by MS etc.




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Shep© said:
The two are combined.
Click to expand...

What, Bus mastering and IRQ sharing?
The hardware must fully support it but then so
must the drivers and the operating system.
Click to expand...

Yeah, I don't disagree, but all the difficulty in bus mastering is basically
in hardware. The software just needs to know where the data is going to be.
This is where things tend to
fall down.Of course USB made things better for multi-media systems of
today but that needed tuning up by MS etc.
Click to expand...

What needed tuning up by MS?

Ben
 
What, Bus mastering and IRQ sharing?
Click to expand...

Yes.The full MS standard for hardware and software is called," ACPI
PCI IRQ Busmaster sharing" and was started to be implemented in Win95b
and then added to as the later O/S were unvailed.Some hardware makers
at the time resented MS for forcing this protocol upon them as they
did with the ACPI component.
Yeah, I don't disagree, but all the difficulty in bus mastering is basically
in hardware. The software just needs to know where the data is going to be.


What needed tuning up by MS?

Ben
Click to expand...

USB needed continual updates/patches through the O/S versions and even
XP needs SP1 for USB 2.00 to work as it was not implemented in the
1st release.Again this was not MS fault merely the progression of
hardware.
This is similar to the bugs in certain versions of windows like the
older fdisk not seeing larger drives in some O/S,
http://members.bellatlantic.net/~mrscary/fdisk.htm
and the 137/32 gig/8 gig/2 gig hard drive BIOS limits of older Mother
boards.
As PCs/hardware progress so do the O/S to keep up with them and vice
versa.
One day PCs may actually become a real computer<grin> ;-)



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Shep© said:
Yes.The full MS standard for hardware and software is called," ACPI
PCI IRQ Busmaster sharing" and was started to be implemented in Win95b
and then added to as the later O/S were unvailed.Some hardware makers
at the time resented MS for forcing this protocol upon them as they
did with the ACPI component.
Click to expand...

Well MS had some input on the standard, but I'd hardly call it theirs. You
got a link to the above document, or anything referencing it? I can't find
anything.

http://acpi.info/ has what I would call the ACPI standards on it, but I'm
not sure where IRQ sharing and bus mastering come in, they were around long
before ACPI as far as I know.
USB needed continual updates/patches through the O/S versions and even
XP needs SP1 for USB 2.00 to work as it was not implemented in the
1st release.Again this was not MS fault merely the progression of
hardware.
Click to expand...

Oh, so you mean MS were tuning their USB host controller drivers, not "USB"
itself.

Ben
 
Well MS had some input on the standard, but I'd hardly call it theirs. You
got a link to the above document, or anything referencing it? I can't find
anything.
Click to expand...

You are correct.I didn't mean to imply it was all MS as it's a
combined issue from the hardware to the O/S/drivers including Linux.

http://acpi.info/ has what I would call the ACPI standards on it, but I'm
not sure where IRQ sharing and bus mastering come in, they were around long
before ACPI as far as I know.
Click to expand...

In windows MS combined the whole lot under ACPI AFAIK.
Oh, so you mean MS were tuning their USB host controller drivers, not "USB"
itself.
Click to expand...

Yes.Sorry if it came over different.This of course also goes for
hardware makers' patching their USB drivers etc.




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Shep© said:
In windows MS combined the whole lot under ACPI AFAIK.
Click to expand...

Well ACPI is for configuration, which includes (among other things, such as
power management) resources (IRQs etc) and operation modes such as data
transfer, which would include DMA transfers (a specific form of bus
mastering). Thats not to say that ACPI includes busmastering and IRQ
sharing (perhaps the latter is part of ACPI) it merely describes a mechanism
for configuring it.

Ben
 
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