wilkes

Although you say this is a hardware issue, it is very possible that you may simply need to update or install new drivers for your motherboard and other hardware. It also may be beneficial to purchase more ram for your machine.

GoWilkes what have you found? just curious.

I meant to write Redneck .. not Radio .. don't mind me .. it's my first day with a new brain.

You could eliminate the Ram by running MS ram test ... otherwise I'm with Radio,

...swap video cards with a different machine and see what happens.

you probably already know this... but just in case


Forcing Windows to Use the Standard VGA Mode Drivers Without Having to Use Safe Mode When you install an OEM driver, the Windows installer program copies the OEM installation file (Oemsetup.inf) to the %Systemroot%\Inf folder, and then renames the Oemsetup.inf file to Oem#.inf, where # is an incremental number for each OEM driver that is installed. To identify the OEM video-specific Oem#.inf file, you can open each Oem#.inf file in Microsoft Notepad (Notepad.exe), and then compare each one with the original Oemsetup.inf file that is located on the OEM drivers media. After you find a match, move that specific Oem#.inf and Oem#.pnf file to an alternate location, or rename the files to a different file extension. In Device Manager, right-click your video adapter, and then click Uninstall to remove the video adapter. Restart your computer. After you log on, you receive a New Hardware Found dialog box with Video Controller (VGA Compatible) listed as the description and the Found New Hardware Wizard starts. Click Next to start the wizard. Click search for suitable driver, and then click Next. Click to clear all of the search option check boxes, and then click Next. Click disable the device, and then click Finish.
After you finish the preceding steps, you computer is using the Vga.sys generic video driver, and this is the same VGA driver that is used in Safe mode. Note that Video Controller (VGA Compatible) (with a yellow question mark next to it) is displayed under the Other Devices branch in Device Manager.

If the computer becomes stable or shuts down normally while you are using the Microsoft Standard VGA driver, you may need to contact the OEM driver vendor to report the problems you encountered when you used the OEM driver. You may also need to obtain and install a newer driver (if one is available) that resolves these problems.

To use the OEM drivers again, copy or move the Oem#.inf and Oem#.pnf files back into the %Systemroot%\Inf folder, use Device Manager to uninstall the VGA video adapter, and then restart the computer. Windows Plug and Play should locate the OEM video adapter and reinstall the OEM drivers automatically without requiring any user input.

That video card has a history of lock up, but I don't know why it would show up on mp3's

you might try running in vga mode and see if anything changes

I'm hoping that another set of eyes can help me to pinpoint this issue a little better.

I have a PC that I built about 2 years ago. It has a Soyo Dragon Lite mother board, ATI Radeon 9500 128MB AGP video card, Intel Pentium 4 2.8GHz CPU, and 1/2G of RAM.


After a few months, the power supply went out, so I ended up replacing the entire case and installing a new power supply. I'm afraid that I don't remember the size of the power supply.


Lately, the computer freezes up if I play MP3s or anything else with sound, and occasionally it freezes up for no apparent reason. And when I say "frozen up", I mean that the screen literally freezes; mouse doesn't move, clock doesn't work, etc, forcing me to reboot.


I have a temperature gauge on the CPU and mobo, and it never appears to be particularly hot or loaded when it freezes up.


I can think of a dozen hardware reasons for this; bad power supply, bad CPU, bad RAM, bad fan on the video/sound card, bad hard drive, bad heat distribution... the only thing I'm certain about is that it's not software related, since it has frozen up with nothing running.


I hate to just start replacing random things, because at some point, I could have just bought a new PC altogether! Any thoughts on what it specifically might be?