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Waiting For The Crash

[update]I forgot to mention this is on Windows XP x64.[/update] 

I'm still experiencing some random hangs on my rebuilt machine every couple of hours or so and have finally decided to get off my lazy rear end and track down why it's happening.  I'm 90% sure it's related to my sound card driver, but of course cannot be positive.  So I've configured my machine to generate crash dumps, have downloaded all of the necessary diagnostic tools (WinDbg, symbol files, etc) for looking at said crash dumps...

And the damn machine hasn't crashed in 24 hours.

This is the first consecutive 24 hours I've experienced since I rebuilt the thing a week ago.  Not that I want it to crash, but now that I'm prepared to get to the root of it, everything is behaving as expected.

I've found the same paradigm to be true when debugging production applications...they only misbehave when you aren't looking (you should of course have tracing/logging built into your applications, but that's beside the point).  As soon as you threaten them with a debugger they shape up and behave normally.

*sigh*


Posted Jan 09 2007, 05:36 PM by Jayson Knight

4 Comments

Wyatt Preul wrote re: Waiting For The Crash
on 01-10-2007 8:22 AM

You might want to double-check that everything is seated properly.  Perhaps something had a loose connection and was causing the crash.

Ken wrote re: Waiting For The Crash
on 01-10-2007 12:12 PM

If your sound card is a Creative one, throw it out!  My experience with Creatives drivers has been a nightmare, especially on Vista.

Nick wrote re: Waiting For The Crash
on 01-10-2007 1:07 PM

I've just brought a creative sound card (exturnal) for my machine so I can get descent sound, and 4.1 surround when creative release the vista drivers for everything in Feb.

My vista install was hanging like made last week when I moved down here, either dust on the MB (there was a lot of it) was shorting something out or the new sound card was playing silly buggers with the USB IRQ's.

A format of vista reduced the ammount of freezes, but didn't solve the problem, took the case off and blew the dust off the MB, and I haven't restarted vista in about 4 days now.  Back to normal

Jayson Knight wrote re: Waiting For The Crash
on 01-10-2007 2:06 PM

Wyatt, good call...I recently moved and haven't checked any of that. Ken and Nick, this is on XP x64 (which I forgot to mention in my post...I've updated it to reflect that). And yeah, that seems to be the issue w/ Creative...they actually make some nice products (I *love* my Audigy 2 NX), but their drivers are absolute shiite.

Since it's external, I doubt there's an IRQ issue...I looked and nothing seems to be conflicting. Regardless I did get it to crash again finally, and of all things devenv.exe caused the crash. I'll make a post soon basically asking for some more help w/ reading these dumps :-).

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