Something strange is afoot...

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11 Dec 2004
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This PC of mine is really going mad. I had a thread here a week or so ago where no one managed to help, but there seems to be more things going wrong now than even then. Here's a nice little list:

1) Some writing that should be blue in Firefox is coming out brown, and some others colours are affected to. Interestingly, the Windows login/startup bit is affected in the same way. Tried resetting the colour scheme, but no dice.

2) Call of Duty 4...grr. It crashes a lot. Just now, I glimpsed an error saying 'Out of virtual memory' or something similar just before the PC restarted in the middle of a multiplayer game (and I was having a good night at it). It also crashes a lot while loading a new map, and whenever I load the map Crossfire, or the fourth SP mission, but I think these last three are program faults rather than Windows faults - tech support so far have ignored my message. The virtual memory is set to between 2 and 4Gb, and I have 2Gb of physical RAM.

3) Wireless internet. It's unpredictable enough at the best of times (in fact, I really need to sort this...I'll probably post a more detailed thing in another forum in a few days) but recently, it's all over the place moreso than usual. Upon a restart after one of these crashes, often it will not connect at all. A proper power-off restart can usually cure this, but it's annoying having to do that all the time.

4) Sound. A lot of the time when I take the PC off standby, I get a message saying 'A device has been unplugged' from my Realtek HD monitoring thingy. A device has not been unplugged, and plugging things in has no effect. Basically, I get no sound until I restart (or put back on standby) the PC, and then it comes up with a 'A cable has been connected!' message, even when I've done nothing, and I suddenly get sound back. As you can imagine, this happens at the most inconvenient moments.

5) Sometimes opening Windows Media Player causes the sceen to go black. It doesn't turn off (the monitor would go on standby if it did), but just displays black until I restart it.

6) Winamp sometimes doesn't open, and sends my PC into a complete lock which only a restart can fix.


Are any of these connected, and are any of these indicative of further problems? I don't want to have to format this PC, I don't have the time, and it takes forever to install and update everything. Everything is running latest drivers, is patched, and virus scans etc show up nothing more serious than the odd tracking cookie. I don't know what's happening, but it's driving me up the wall. :o


Thanks in advance
tTz
 
Really? I've never heard of it. How come it was never a problem before a month or so ago? Probably that's when I changed to the new drivers, though I didn't notice it until a while after (and then only because it was my own website, and I knew it shouldn't be brown, it should be blue). I assume it's a problem only with the current set of drivers, and not the older ones? It's not enough of a problem for me to want to change them or anything, 'tis just curious. :)

Hehe, 1 down, 5 to go...:p
 
6) is most likely related to 4). I don't know how to sort out 4) though which doesn't make me that helpful sorry fella. Have you got e.g. the right drivers for the sound card and made sure that Winamp is correctly linked to it?
 
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Sound drivers are installed, but I seem to recall a slight problem with that that's left me with an 'Audio Device on High Definition Bus' registering as unknown and uninstalled in the Device Manager - I've never managed to make it go away. The thing is, the Realtek HD appears as installed - should it have two entries in Device Manager?

I need to update Winamp anyway, so I'll check on reinstalling that it's not configured wierdly.





It's mentioned in this thread.
Sorry I can't help with the others :P


Thanks! Pity the fix mentioned (Cleartype) really bugs me by making everything all blurry, but it's nice to know it's not just me. :)
 
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