I'm changing the title of this thread to try and gather some information. It seems like my new Dell 8500 that's running Windows 8 64 bit will work fine as long as I never try to install anything that requires a new driver. It's a bit erratic as to when it happens, but no matter what I end up getting an irql_not_less_or_equal blue screen and the only way to boot after that is to "refresh" to the machine's initial state. I've installed Live so many times now, Komplete at least twice, I can't tell you how frustrated I am. I did put a new video card in it, but the problem started happening before that. I put a firewire card in too, but it didn't need a driver and there was a time it worked perfectly with my two MOTU 828s and Novation Remote SL 25. Anyone else having success with Windows 8?
Last edited by zerocrossing on Tue Jan 29, 2013 7:54 am; edited 1 time in total

bump...

I've narrowed it down to a specific event. It becomes corrupted when Windows auto updates with a recent "critical update." WTF? I guess my day will be spent trying to talk to Dell support.

Hope it gets sorted. I've never had to deal with Dell's customer support, but for what it's worth I've got a 7-year-old Dell laptop that's been through the mill (gigged, had booze poured in it, briefly became home to some ants, etc) and it's still going strong.

Your mileage may vary, of course.

edit: I've gone through 3 offcial Dell chargers in that time mind

The tale continues. I was able to restore it to a previous restore point. All was well. As usual, I turned off Windows Defender and installed eset smart security. Usually it's been great but this time it did some weird crap with my permissions and all of the sudden everything on my machine was locked. I couldn't even look at my C:/ drive! Of course Windows tried to install that critical update again and in my attempt this morning to boot into safe mode (which doesn't seem to be an option when you f8/f12 start it... )

Anyway... I fumbled around in an attempt to restore or "refresh" my machine but now Windows doesn't recognize my password any more. WTF? I'm sure it was correct. Could I have gotten hit with a virus of some sort? It's not like I've done anything on this machine other than install software from discs or from sites like u-he and using NI's Service center. The closest thing to "surfing" was me opening up gmail to dig up old passwords and serial numbers.

Sigh. Anyway, the only thing I was actually able to do at the end of this all was do a complete "reset." It's blanking the drive right now and seems to be going very, very slow... but going. My real question is why is this windows "critical update" hosing my machine?

Being assimilated into their unpaid beta-testing is no fun.
Did the reset work? If there is one more peep of trouble, I
would send it back. There are 1% who get fatally flawed gear,
which should be dumpstered, or donated to a repair school.
Good luck! Hopefully, you're cleared for the next 99 purchases

Thanks. My problems continue... I think it comes down to a driver problem... maybe with iLok. I just had Live, my MOTU 828s, and Novation Remote 25 SL working fine and got the infamous IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL error right after I tried restarting after installing the iLok driver. I'm so exhausted. I'm ready to give up.

Sylenth doesnt work in windows 8.....

I would recommend running a memory diagnostic test, full instructions......

http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/715-memory-diagnostics- tool.html

or (even better) use Memtest86+

http://www.memtest.org/

Good luck.

Eureka! It took a long time but I figured it out. It's a weird one so this will probably help no one but me, but it's one of my MOTU 828s. It's never gotten a firmware update (I got it used and it just worked...) and it was an older firmware version and I finally figured it out that when I booted the 828 with the newer firmware first, everything works like a charm. If I booted the older version first, bluescreen. If it happened to be on during boot Windows 8 isn't smart enough to just dump the driver and move on and I've been "refreshing" my machine for absolutely no reason.

As more people use matching pairs of soundcards, to get more i/o,
knowing such details of firmware and other uniformities,
may save someones bacon, and sanity. Some popular cards get
re-released with reduced chip counts, and may need tinkering with.
Cheers

Wise words. I never even thought it could be an issue as I've been successfully using these two firewire interfaces together for a long time in Vista 64. It was only after extensive trouble shooting (it blew about half a day) did I discover that this odd combo of turning them on in the wrong sequence could cause an issue. MOTU has been awesome in terms of service. They're sending me a free firmware chip upgrade just to see if this was the issue.