Lockups: A7V-E, Audigy 2 ZS - advice?
 

(This article also posted at www.abxzone.com/forums; nothing that has
solved my problem posted there yet).

Greetings all,

Last night I eagerly installed my brand-new Audigy 2 ZS sound card into
my A7V-E motherboard, only to have my enthusiasm quickly smothered by a
series of lockups on various games (Jedi Academy, Jedi Outcast, and No
One Lives Forever all froze up at various points, requiring a hard reset
to recover, under both WinXP Home & a Win2000 install I've been playing
with -- heck, just installing the drivers in Win2000 completely locked up
that OS and required a boot into safe mode to recover). Even trying the
driver update from Creative's website didn't help. I have been
lockup/crash free for months after I resolved a bad-memory problem so I'm
forced to conclude I've got an issue between the Audigy & the
motherboard. (Or at least, the Audigy & something else in there -- but
everything else plays together nicely..)

Searching the net last night uncovered one comment on a review site about
compatibility problems between the Audigy 2 and the Athlon/VIA
combination, though it didn't go into details. Lucky me, exactly my
setup. Wish I'd seen it before I bought it...

Tonight I'll start going through various troubleshooting steps in earnest
(different PCI slots, fiddle with BIOS to give it its own IRQ, rip out
all drivers & reinstall, etc), but I wanted to ask if anyone else has
this setup working, or has had to work through this? If so, any hints you
can toss my way would be much appreciated. I ordered the card online, and
I'll get hit with a 15% restocking charge if I end up having to ask for a
refund (plus pay to ship it back), so I'd obviously prefer to get it
working and get something for the money I spent. This card replaced a C-
Media 8738 sound card (there's no onboard audio on my MB) which worked no
problems -- but I've always thought its sound was a bit 'tinny' so I
finally decided to upgrade it this year.

(Update: I have tried the card in 3 different slots, no change.
Completely uninstalled drivers & reinstalled each time, no change.
Fiddled with BIOS to preassign IRQs to PCI slots, no change *but* WinXP
did not seem to respect my settings, putting everything back onto IRQ 9
instead.)

More system details:
AMD Athlon 900 MHz
Asus A7V-E, latest BIOS
256 MB PC-133 RAM
ATI Radeon 8500LE 64MB vid.card
80 GB IDE HD (Pri. Master)
Pioneer DVD (Pri. Slave)
Yamaha CRW8424 (Sec. Master)
Linksys 10/100 Ethernet card
Some noname 56K modem that I can't remember the details on (I could
probably yank this out, I haven't used it in months..)

I'm triple-booting WinXP Home, Win2000, and Win98 at present, though I
only set up Win2000 as an exercise in playing with my boot/partition
manager (*plug*BootItNG*endplug*) and will be taking it back off shortly.
I didn't try setting up the Audigy in Win98; I figured if WinXP & Win2000
couldn't handle it, Win98 wouldn't stand a chance.

--
Ian Merrithew - ADM Systems Engineering
ian.merrithew "at" ieee.org