[radiogeek]

All right. This is frustrating beyond words now.

Whenever I have any number of applications open (1, 2, 6 billion...) and try to go to desktop (either by minimizing or WindowsKey+D), Windows 2000 will sometimes freeze for 15 or 20 seconds!

Normally I could ignore this, but this is a computer ON THE AIR at a radio station. It has audio playing. So, when the computer freezes, the audio just drops out. You can imagine what a headache this can be. When the freeze is over, it majestically resumes.

During the freeze, the hard drive lights are not active, and the mouse still moves. However, no keys work (but are queued and dispursed when the freeze is over. In other words, if I hit the Windows key during the freeze, the start menu will appear when it's over).

I have checked IRQs...there are no conflicts. Everything has its own. This will happen when *just* one application taking up only 4,000Kb of memory is open, so I do not believe it to be a resource problem (it has 256 megs of ram on a 1700 XP processor).

Anyone have any ideas?

Thanks for your help and consideration.

Wes

:upset:

 

[Guest]

Hello radiogeek and welcome to Tech Support Forums..........

How long has this been doing this?

I would try more ram..................

 

[radiogeek]

This has been a problem since day one.

I respectfully disagree...my computer at home has the same amount of RAM, but slower hard drives and a slower CPU. We are running the same software, by the way. I can tax the computer heavily, and have NEVER seen the computer hang while going to the desktop.

Any other ideas? Perhaps DMA on the IDE controllers for the HDs?

 

[Guest]

Could you list the hardware in you machine?

It sounds like the CPU may not be flushing the cache properly.

Is the machine at home exactly like this one?

 

[TheTechIsIn]

Welcome to the board,

Is there any errors or warnings in the Event Log

Control Panel > Administrative Tools > Event Log
in either the Application or System Tabs

 

[radiogeek]

TheTechIsIn:
Only one event notification, and it was from about 10 minutes ago...well after the "burp" we had today.

SPEEDO:
Here is the URL to this system's comprehensive information (generated by SiSoftware Sandra just a moment ago):

http://www.radioupdate.com/pub/system.html

It has crap I've never even heard of...which is usually a good thing.

Hope this helps...I sincerely appreciate your help

-bt

 

[DJ Specs]

Hey! A fellow radio person! Let me welcome you to our Forum, I hope we can solve your problem.

 

[radiogeek]

Could this be an issue with PCI latency?

I ran a "tune up" in Sandra, and it b**ch slapped me left and right for incorrect PCI latency settings.

It says they are set waaaaay too high which could cause these symptoms.

How do I change these?

Also, this board has AGP video built in, and I have it set to assign an IRQ to it in the BIOS, but low and behold it does not do so, so my video "card" sits without and IRQ, and I have no idea how to remedy this, either.

Excuse my run on sentences.

 

[radiogeek]

I just had another little incident and noticed one more important thing:

CTRL + ALT + DELETE

does not work during this system hang.

Does anyone have any ideas on what could be going on here? It just burned me on the air again.

:upset:

 

[Horseflesh]

Just curious, is this computer on a network of any kind, even a peer to peer? I have seen Win2K computers freeze while trying to authenticate to resources on a server. Does the mouse still work during the freeze (meaning, can you move it)? All screensavers disabled, as well as Power Management disabled (BIOS and OS)? If it is on a network and that is not critical to playing your music, try disconnecting the network cable and even disabling the network card and let it run.