Subject:Sonic Foundry Programs Freezing Computer

Posted by: tree

Date:2/22/2002 3:05:35 PM

For some reason which I've yet to determine, when I try to open any of my SF applications (ACID, Sound Forge and Batch Converter) it freezes the computer. It looks like it happens when the application is accessing the X-windows plugins.

System setup
MSI KT266Pro motherboard
AMD Duron 950 cpu
Audigy internal 24/96
Windows 2000 Pro
Other installed apps on the machine
mcAfee.com Virus protect
Most of the Audigy apps
Dreamweaver4
various administrative tools

It was working under W98 with an old AMD K6 chip so of course I had to upgrade.
Help, I've worked on this problem for a week now and have made no headway. I re-installed w2000 3 times and keep coming up with the same problem. All of my other non-Sonic Foundry music apps run fine. programs install ok, its just when I try to run them.. Also, I noticed that the Soundblaster AudigyPro and my graphics card are sharing the same IRQ but both seem to be functioning ok and I have been unable to get the Audigy card to change IRQ numbers. I've tried changing PCI slots but to no avail. Don't know if this is a factor or not.

Subject:RE: Sonic Foundry Programs Freezing Computer

Reply by: dbarry

Date:2/24/2002 8:01:21 PM

Hi,
You *Know* you can't run W2000 on an old 266. But anywhay why did you changeto NT, whoops W2000, because you wanted a slower computer?
The big clue is hardware cannot share the IRQs without a problem. You must change one of them or buy something new. Sorry.
Good Luck,
db

Subject:RE: Sonic Foundry Programs Freezing Computer

Reply by: Rednroll

Date:2/26/2002 5:24:02 PM

Either I'm missing something here, but the system is a 950Mhz processor, the 266 is the MB, which I assume to be the supported bus speed which is pretty damn good also. A 950 is well over double the processing power to run any SF product.

The problem is definitely with the sharing of the IRQ's. Do a search in this forum on "Win2k IRQ". This has been addressed before in this forum, on how to assign the IRQ's in win2k. Sorry I don't know how to do this off the top of my head, I've only used 1 win2k machine and didn't find much advantages over win98 and found it harder to find things like IRQ assignments and turning the "autoplay" function off. I'm hoping Win XP will be my savior. Win2k supposedly does you a favor and assigns all your useful peripherals like sound cards and video cards to the same IRQ, so you can add more useful stuff like printers, joysticks,web cams, and various tele tubby mice and roller balls. I guess they tried to idiot proof it for the masses, but forgot us audio and video engineers who actually use computers for real work. I think you might be able to assign your IRQ's in your bios too, if you can't find how to do it in win2k. I know it's possible, just forgot the steps how.

Good luck,
rednroll

Subject:RE: Sonic Foundry Programs Freezing Computer

Reply by: Iacobus

Date:2/26/2002 7:36:40 PM

Alas, Windows XP does the same thing W2K did; it basically assigns IRQs the way it wants to. Believe there's a way to do it, but it's not a quick-fix.

One thing I've noted off of Microsoft's own Knowledge Base is that the "Plug and Play OS" option in your BIOS should be turned off when using XP.

Check out the article here.

Iacobus

Subject:RE: Sonic Foundry Programs Freezing Computer

Reply by: dansolo

Date:3/4/2002 2:39:05 AM

i can't say much for the freezing problem but win2k handles the IRQ's in a need to use basis. it has control so all requests to use a certain device have to pass through the HAL layer. when you look at the listing in device manager it will show that each has it's own IRQ. but when you look in computer management it will show alot of your devices as using 1 IRQ(usually 11) win2k does this to make the system more stable (it works) follow the advice of the previous post and change the bios. also turn off anything that is attached to the motherboard (onboard sound and video if your not using them) something that sf is trying to access is making the operating system mad and it will protect itself by halting that access, rebooting if necessary. this is usualy from drivers that were intended for win 9x which allowed direct access. try updating all the drivers to the hardware that SF might be trying to access to the latest for win 2k.