Windows XP Restarts/Mouse Pointer Freezes while playing Audio

Hello All,

I initially had Windows 2000 Advanced Server running on my machine. Everything seemed fine except that whenever i played audio, my machine would crash displaying the dreaded blue screen (with KMODE_Exceptions and kmixer.sys failures). I ran debug tests and also installed the latest patches but this problem persisted.

A few days ago , I decided to format my hard drive and install Windows XP Pro in hope of getting rid of this issue. Now, when i play audio my machine just restarts on random occasions or the mouse pointer freezes and I have to manually restart my machine.

- Could it be a hardware problem ?

- I'm still thinking it's a software issue and a faulty audio driver. Should I install another audio driver. Right now I have Realtek Audio 97 and a MSI nVidia nForce 400 (with an On Board Sound Card).

- Do audio drivers have to be compatible to the Onboard Chipsets or is it possible to install another audio driver for the same machine ?

All I know now is that this is definitely not a Microsoft OS Issue.

I'm tired of playing guessing games. I'd greatly appreciate any advice/suggestions.

Thanks
Russ

 

If you have the PC set to automatically restart after an error, you need to change that so it will crash to a blue screen and let you see details. You also need to set it to create a dump file in the event of a system crash.

Then look Here for the tools and instructions for turning the dump file into something that can be analyzed and post that as a reply in this thread.