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Pc locking up after sound card installed

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by art23 Aug 5, 2001 last reply Sep 6, 2001

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I just finished building a pc and installing 98 on it. All was well until I installed my Sound Blaster Live X-Gamer card. Windows picked it up and at 99% of installing the software for it the pc locked up cold. After rebooting the pc the same thing happened (pc locked up). I shut it off and removed the card and then rebooted to try to resolve whatever problem it was. Upon rebooting, I had no mouse. I went into the control panel and it said that my system was unable to load the vxd file for the mouse and it said to resolve it, run Windows setup again. I also lost my previous video settings that were saved. The only way to solve was to re-install 98. I contacted Creative and he recommended moving the card to another PCI slot and that should correct it. Is this true? I would hate to go through this again. Thanks in advance.

11 replies

by dmiles Aug 5, 2001

There seems to be an IRQ conflict,this can cause the lock up,by moving to another slot,the card would be assigned to another IRQ,that could be shared
So this is what the suggestion implies and this is no guarentee that it will not lock up again,it could be trial and error until you get it installed,on a shared IRQ.
Once installed you can try using the device manager to resolve the ssue

by art23 Aug 5, 2001

I installed the card in another slot (2nd from the bottom), same result after windows loaded the drivers for it. I went into safe mode and manually put the card on IRQ 5. Still the same result. Would IRQ change for each PCI slot?

by rockyolson Aug 5, 2001

Hi just ran into a similar situation, if you have a win modem remove form pc and device manager. Once this is done restart and shut down now install the sound card and after this is up and running install your modem. rocky

by art23 Aug 5, 2001

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by ann777 Aug 6, 2001

Actually, some computer motherboards assign IRQs to a specific slot, some system boards do not. Without knowing the specifics of your motherboard, and without the tech at Creative knowing that, the suggestion to move to a different slot was wortha shot. The fact that the same thing happened, means that your system board does not care which slot a pci card is in. Windows is assigning irq's, or your system bios is.

I recommend that you right-click on "My Computer" --> Properties --> Device manager --> and click on the computer at the top of all your devices. Write down which deveices are being shared with others.

You do not want any resourse intensive devices to use the same irq as any other resource intensive device.

You need to look at changing irq's through your bios, or through windows. Video, sound, and nics do not mix or "share" well. I suspect that your video, sound and mouse may all be using the same irq.

by art23 Aug 8, 2001

I moved the board to another IRQ while in Safe Mode. This process failed to work as well. I even went as far as disabling Com 2 in the BIOS to free up an IRQ for sure and put the card on that IRQ, failed to work as well. I removed the card downloaded the new drivers to run but they failed to update the date of the windows drivers. Problem with pc locking up after reaching the desktop still exists.