I’ve just done a modest rebuild of my 2.66GHz P4 (533MHZ FSB) machine, mainly to replace its Asrock P4VT8+ MB which used a VIA chipset which I suspected to be behind a number of problems I have been having. The new MB is the MSI 875P Neo-FISR (MS6758) which uses the Intel 875P chipset, which I was hoping would be more stable.

I’ve done a clean install of XP Pro, applied all the dozens of updates that Windows Update said were required including SP2, installed all the latest drivers I could find for all the bits and pieces and brought the MB BIOS up to date. Everything seemed to be fine and stable until I came to check out video playback.

It doesn’t seem to matter what file or format or which app I use (WMP, JetAudio, Divx Player) video playback effectively kills the machine. Sound may play out but the video freezes at the first frame. Trying to close the app down gets nowhere – might get an “app has stopped responding” message, but it will not go away and the sound then “freezes”. After a few further mouse clicks, everything freezes and I have to resort to the h/w reset button.

Even then the machine will not reboot – hangs while trying to find the last HD (secondary slave) in POST having correctly found the primary master and secondary master. Only thing to do then is pull the plug and do a cold boot which it does without the slightest problem.

A further twist is that I have a WinTV card – it plays TV fine in overlay mode, but in Primary mode it kills the machine in exactly the same way as the other video apps.

I tried a clean reinstall of the video drivers, but it made no difference. I tried another video card altogether – an ATi 9550, but again, not the slightest difference. Not really sure where to go from here. I’d clear the disk and do another s/w install from the ground up if I thought it would help, but that’s a lot of bother if it doesn’t cure it. So any suggestions on what might be wrong or what I can try to find out will be gratefully received.

The only clue I have is that I tried turning down the hardware acceleration features in the advanced video settings and on the third notch down, the problem went away. This is the point where DirectDraw and Direct3D features are turned off. Naturally I ran the DXDiag tool, but all the tests passed with flying colours.

Difficult to know what might be relevant, but as well as changing the MB, I’ve also added a 3rd HD (160G) along with a Promise ATA66 PCI board which the DVD and DVDRW drives are now hanging off, so that the 3 HDs are on the faster MB IDE interface. Everything else is the same as the old system – 2.66GHz/512K L2 cache/533MHz FSB P4 CPU, 2 x 512M PC3200 RAM, Ati 9800 Pro AGP 8x graphics, old WinTV PCI card, 56K Modem (just a back up in case the ADSL fails), 160G, 80G (+ new 160G) drives. Sound, USB, Gigabit LAN etc. as provided on the MB.

Power Supply.

Try with 1 hard drive and 1 DVD drive, see if you've got the same problem.

I had a problem were my system stopped when I played video files, turned out I had selected the wrong setting on my monitor (boy did I feel stupid at the time).

I can´t remember the names of the settings but try and change yours to something else, from high color to true color or whatever the name is.

Problem solved! Turned out to be the Promise IDE card I had put in. I can only guess it it because it was sharing an interupt with the video card, although quite how that led to the sequence of errors I described is anyone's guess. Put the card into a different PCI slot and it's now fine. It is sharing with the audio now, but so far that doen't seem to be a problem.