I have discovered an extremely annoying problem with my main PC. It seems that audio crashes it.

I first noticed this when playing Warlords Battlecry II, once in a while when playing the game it would completely hard crash the system, no Alt-Tab, no Ctrl-Alt-Del, nothing short of a hard reset/power off would get me out. I assumed this was just a game glitch, or at least an incompatibility with that game under Win2k.

Lately, The Sims 2 has started doing the same thing to me. Randomly for no apparent reason, it just totally freezes the entire system. Still, I figured it was coincedence - I've never found anything else that can completely crash this machine, and Win2k is not reknowned for being the Gamer's Best Friend of operating systems.

But after recently relocating and reinstalling my system, I couldn't seem to get my Logitech Z-680 sound system working. I could get audio output through my headphones, but not through the 5.1 setup. In the process of trying to work out what the hell was wrong with them, I discovered something interesting - the system also completely hard crashes occasionally when I run the Creative AudioHQ speaker test. Exact same thing - no task manager, no Get Out Of Jail Free card, no love. Just a reset button or nothing.

Now I'm starting to think it's actually my sound card, or something related to it (PCI slot, drivers, DirectX, etc?) causing the crashes rather than the games. After all, I rarely play a lot of music or watch movies on my PC these days, so the audio card only sees serious use when I'm gaming - and that's when it always crashes!

My system here is an Athlon XP 2400+, with 512Mb generic RAM, and a Sound Blaster Live! Digital Entertainment 5.1 (SE) card, running Windows 2000 Pro SP4.

Can anybody help me out here with working out why my audio card seems to be crashing my system, and what I can do to prevent this? It's driving me quite literally mad. =/

Any and all advice - even guesstimates! - would be appreciated at this point!

Thanks in advance.

Hmm, try the card in a different PCI slot. Is this 1x512? Or 2x256? If 2x254 try 1x256. Sometime memory can cause this problem. Try taking out the card and play your games. Does it crash? I'd personally try the memory. Memory causes tons of problems....

Ahh yep, it was a fried PCI slot. I moved the SBLive card to the next slot over, and nothing's crashed once since. Thanks for your help, for some reason I didn't even think of that! =/

Cheers.