Driver causes.. issues.

Hello,

I have an ageing..

Athlon 1GHz
384MB RAM
20GB HD
32MB GeForce 2 MX

..with Windows XP on it. For about the last couple of years, my PC had a habit of crashing whenever I tried to install anything from my DVD drive, or move anything big-ish from it to my HD; and also when I try to burn anything larger than 4MB. Lately it's become a 100% certainty. As an idea I removed the old Samsung drive and replaced it with a new AOpen one. Aside from now playing DVDRs properly, there is no difference. I've tried reinstalling XP - for this and a few other reasons - but to no avail.

According to the Windows Error Report thing it says it is a problem relating to a driver, however I don't know how to find out what driver it is since everything seems to work fine at other times - I've tried reinstalling the drivers for my DVD drive. In the Device Manager, it says that I have a dodgy driver for a PCI Simple Communications Controller driver - which I think means modem/network card right? Well I have three of these: one 56k which Device Manager says is fine; one Ethernet card which DM says is fine, and my Wireless card which DM says is working fine. What can it be? It says it's at "PCI bus 0, device 7, function 6" but I don't know enough about computers to know where that is. Could it be this driver that's causing my woes?! And what the hell is it for??

I'm going to get a new computer in a couple of months anyways, but in the mean time it would be great if I could install anything, for example this game I just bought!

Thanks for your help

Bennett.

 

How much free space do you have?

Is the drive defragged and do you have DMA enabled?

XP has the event viewer in Control Panel, then Administrative Tools, and also System Information in Start, All Programs, Accessories, System Tools which may give you some clues.

Can you install them in Safe Mode?

 

No, I haven't defragged since about November..

I'll try it when I get home. Also what is DMA? And I have no idea about how to get in in safe mode. But I'll try all these things.

Thanks a lot for your help though, I've posted on a few forums and after a few days this is the only reply so far!

*edit* I have about 3 GBs free space. My iPod neccessitates I keep all the music from it on the computer. I think I'll get a new HD soon, it makes sense, since my iPod is twice as large as my pc! It also means I'll actually be able to put more music on my iPod! Seconds thoughts - I'll buy one now.

 

3 GB's isn't much.

A hard drive needs room to move files around, especially during defrag and for virtual memory.

Also, when you install it, try to have the minimum hardware so there is less chance of anything going wrong and have updated drivers ready.

There should be no errors in Device Manager.

Before you install, go into the Bios and any ports you don't use like Parallel etc then disable, otherwise they will just use up valuable resources.

Good luck and if you get stuck, post back in the software section.