Try going into Control Panel > System > Advanced > Start-up and rocovery > and uncheck automatically reboot. Then try again and see if it gives you a Blue Screen error message.

Lo isaacg
 
I tryed wot u suggested and found that I get a series of 3 errors, i checked these @ the knowledge base and found that there are no solutions for 2 of them, the remaining 1 seems to be a hardware problem :-/
Thx for your help

No Problem! Glad to help! Sorry it's not totally fixed though...
 
[ January 01, 2001: Message edited by: isaacg ]

Here goes a random stab: are you using a 300W power supply? If it's any less, then that could be causing the problems.

I think power supplies usually only cause hard lock and instant reboot problems, where Giblore is getting Bluescreens, which are basically explained now. What was that third one Giblore?

Lo isaacg and GHackmann
 
thx for ur help.
Here are the 3errors i get when my pc crashes - "KMODE_EXCEPTION_NOTHANDLED", "UNEXPECTED_KERNEL_MODE_TRAP", and "DRIVER_IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL"
with the kernal trap error being caused by a hardware error :-/
I doubt its to do with my psu (which is 250amd approved) because it only crashes while im playin an hardware accelerated game and is fine if im working or doing something similar.
Thx
Giblore

lol, reset your bios defaults, I had that same problem and it fixed that. I'm not saying it'll work for you, but it's a shot in the dark

If you have an Athlon and a GeForce, then you probably *do* need a 300W power supply. I'm told you need 165W just to power the processor and the video card, let alone your other components. With 256 MB of RAM especially, 250W might not be enough, even if the PSU is AMD approved. Whether or not this is the problem you're having is another issue, but it's worth trying a 300W power supply to see if that fixes it. The fact that it crashes in 3D-accelerated games is a possible sign of this, since the video card is being pushed harder and draws more power.
 
The KMODE_EXCEPTION_NOT_HANDLED one is pretty generic. It basically means that you've got incompatible or malfunctioning hardware
somewhere in your computer.
 
UNEXPECTED_KERNEL_MODE_TRAP is pretty much the same, except that it leans more towards memory problems. What type of memory are you using? And what are your BIOS settings? Have you tried swapping out memory sticks, or running a diagnostic test on them?
 
The DRIVER_IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL error is loads of fun to debug. It means that a driver is trying to access memory it didn't have permission to access.
I've never seen Detonator drivers do this, but Creative's SB Live! drivers are really fond of throwing these errors. So probably either it's another component, or something's wrong with your hardware, making it issue bad calls.
 
Just out of curiosity, have you tried pulling your sound card? Some sound cards (especially SB Live!s) can cause lots of problems under Win2K because typically the drivers aren't up to snuff. My crashing problems finally went away for good once I replaced my SB Live! with a Santa Cruz. If removing your sound card or cranking the sound card's hardware acceleration down one notch (from Sounds & Multimedia in Control Panel, Audio tab, Advanced under Playback Device, Performance tab) helps, then your sound card's probably the culprit.
 
If that doesn't work, a more-detailed list of components would really help here.

Lo GHackmann
Thx again 4 ur help.
Anyway I use two 128meg pc100 dimms, both of which have been replaced, i've set my bios to bios defaults (thx jdulmage), ive got a copy of norton 2001 and so use win doc, ummmmmmmm.......
oh yeh the sound card, well for starters its a a3d2 card, and so has no decent driver support under win2k
Ill try that sound card thing now tho
If that doesnt work ill back with a fat details of my pc
Thx
Giblore

The sound card's probably it. Aureal Vortex + Athlon + Win2K = crashes. It has to do with the PCI timing or something where Athlon chipsets cause Vortex cards to lock up the system, and Aureal was sued out of business by Creative before they could fix the Win2K drivers.
 
Incidentally, if you need a replacement, I recommend the Turtle Beach Santa Cruz (aka the Videologic SonicFury, depending on what country you live in). It's the only high-end sound card that I've gotten working under Win2K.

Lo GHackmann
Thx once again.
I was wondering if i could just disable the card via windows, or do i have to remove the card from my pc ?
Thx
 
Giblore

You should only need to disable the card . . . but to be doubly sure, you should uninstall the drivers if you can.
 
But pulling the card out of the computer certainly couldn't hurt, either. So just in case it is important, unless you have some aversion to opening up your case and yanking the card, then I'd go ahead and phyiscally remove it just to be sure.

I have a very similar system. Athlon 700 on a AMD 751 chipset mobo, 256 pc100 RAM and a Geforce2 GTS.
 
When I first got win2k in my system (had a voodoo3 then), it started to reboot randomly. Then I upgraded to the GTS, and still had the same problem. When sp1 was realeased, I installed it, and my system messed up so badly that I had to reformat. I did a clean install of win2k, installed the sp1 and new drivers for everything, and now the problem is gone, or at least I haven't had it for about 5 months.
 
Ah, and also, I don't remember when but I used an "reset configuration data" or something like that in my bios.