Blue Screen of Death

[virtualsamana]

I have been getting the blue screen of death occasionally while using tracktion. (PIII 256K ram w/ US-428 sound interface). No other applications are running simultaneously and I only had 8 tracks of audio playing with no effects. Could the lack of memory be the problem?

I am thinking of upgrading to a new laptop soon with more memory and a faster processor. Would this help?

[djsubject]

it sound like it could well be a hardware conflict so a new laptop would defenetly fix this, most hardware problems with tracktion are the sound device! give ASIO4ALL a try & see if that helps you?


Subject

[IIRs]

256K ram

Thats the problem.. unless you meant 'MB'?

You running win98? More RAM can't hurt, but try unticking 'use realtime priority mode' in the audio settings page, if its enabled..

[titanium]

Application software does not cause BSODs. BSODs are caused by a) malfunctioning/misconfigured hardware or b) a malfunctioning/misconfigured device driver. Running 256MB RAM does not cause a BSOD, unless the RAM is defective.

[valley]

unless the RAM is defective.

Totally OT: I spent about two months last year trying to debug some research code a co-worker and myself were working on because every so often the code would cause linux to explode rather angrily.

I went near out of my mind trying to work out where I was screwing up, and eventually gave up and learnt to allow a little extra time for number crunching sessions

By chance a few months later we were running some system diags on my coworker's PC. It turned out that one of the DIMMs was flaky. Out of curiosity I re-ran my code with the buggered DIMM removed, and quite amazingly it ran flawlessly for two days solid.

I was so happy I hit someone.

[djsubject]

I was so happy I hit someone.

[SaviorNeeded]

Is that why they're only giving you water for breakfast?

Tom

[Mr. Tingle]

T2 may not be compatable with win98 (that is if your using win98 and T2).

[virtualsamana]

thanks for the help. Darn. I hope it's not my US-428. I am really enjoying that interface. I am going to go to their website and install the latest drivers. I never have a problem with the BSOD when I use my 428 with Ableton live though so it strikes me as strange that it isn't getting along with tracktion.

I thought it may be because I am using a computer as my school laptop and also a music DAW. That is I am running office, firefox, and rhapsody on it as well as tracktion. That's why I thought it might be a good idea to upgrade to a new laptop.

I am runnging win xp but just checked my ram again and realized it's a paltry 128 MB. Not 256K as IIR pointed out. (Damm, that takes me back to my C64 days. )

[titanium]

XP on 128MB will still not cause BSOD. 128MB is the bare minimum for Office 2003. I bet your system spends a lot of time thrashing the disk (paging) when running Orifice. I bet it's unbelievably slow from all the paging.

[virtualsamana]

Titanium,

Would tracktion be effected by paging even if orifice isn't running?

[titanium]

No. However, Office installs a bunch of additional background stuff like its toolbar, osa.exe (helps office apps start faster), and of course whatever osa.exe loads. Office is a resource hog, even when none of the apps are vivibly running. So it's using RAM that would otherwise be available.

[willowhaus]

However...XP is starved with 128 MB RAM. The minimum stated requirement for XP is 256 MB, which means that you really want 512 MB to be happy. Perhaps all the paging to disk is contributing to the problem? You say you're running a laptop - laptop drives are also pretty slow for audio work.

Methinks you need an upgrade.

[darcyb62]

I use a Tascam Us122... Not quite the same but I'm sure the driver sets are similar enough. I had been running it on an old PIII notebook and desktop. I would have BSODs on both. I was able to resolve the problem on the notebook by finding an upgrading USB driver for the notebook, but my only resolution for the desktop was to upgrade. It seems that the Tascam driver has problems when cpu utilization gets high. Even with my current setup funny things start to happen with sound when I get into the red zone but it hasn't locked.
When trying to work through the issues on my old machines I found the problems increased when I installed SP1 but decreased when SP2 went in.

[titanium]

However...XP is starved with 128 MB RAM. The minimum stated requirement for XP is 256 MB

[url=ttp://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/pro/upgrading/sysreqs.mspx]Not according to Microsoft[/url]--see below. They claim it will even run on 64MB. But I agree 256K is a practical requirement for reasonable performance.

Windows XP Professional System Requirements
Published: August 24, 2001
Here's What You Need to Use Windows XP Professional
• PC with 300 megahertz or higher processor clock speed recommended; 233 MHz minimum required (single or dual processor system);* Intel Pentium/Celeron family, or AMD K6/Athlon/Duron family, or compatible processor recommended
•128 megabytes (MB) of RAM or higher recommended (64 MB minimum supported; may limit performance and some features)
•1.5 gigabytes (GB) of available hard disk space*
•Super VGA (800 x 600) or higher-resolution video adapter and monitor
•CD-ROM or DVD drive
•Keyboard and Microsoft Mouse or compatible pointing device