Remember those random Vista freezes? One of them struck last night in the middle of work -- in fact, it trashed a document that I was in the middle of working on (thank you, Word Auto-Save), and I had to take a picture of the screen to recover the part of the document that I had been most immediately typing.
So far I'm going with one of a few theories:
- A driver issue. I've upgraded all of the drivers I can in this system to their most recent editions. The one thing that I tried most recently after this last freeze was updating the video driver to ATI's Catalyst-edition drivers (as opposed to the bare drivers I get from Windows Update). I've heard that the Catalyst software is a little more thorough about spec-ing video card settings that might cause instability, so I'll try it.
- A memory issue. All four 512MB DIMMs in this machine are registered ECC, though, and I have memory error correction turned on in BIOS; so I'm not sure how likely this is.
- An interaction with another component. The freezes didn't stop when I pulled out the one other expansion card I have in the system -- a fairly generic Belkin PCI USB 2.0 card -- so if it's something else that's in the system it might take a lot more hunt-and-peck to find it.
Also, I managed to trigger Product Activation during this experimenting -- probably when I yanked out one, then the other set of DIMMs to see if that fixed the instability (it didn't). But I put everything back to the way it was and re-activated. I wonder if there's a way to back up and restore Product Activation in Vista as there was in XP.
Leave a comment