Getting BSOD, Maybe I Went a Tweak Too Far?? Hellllp!!!

Hey everyone,

I have a somewhat underpowered system and can't afford a better one for a while, so I ran several demo tweak/optimize programs last night. Two were general purpose, I think two were referred to as "boosters", one was a RAM cleaner, one was a registry compressor. I also ran something from SciMark that supposedly can possibly overclock your hard drive (I know, I know----Thtupid!!). It's called SciMark Standard Edition Drives. It says it "forces the hard drive to run on the operating system level."

That one has me worried, but when I ran it, all it seemed to do was analyze the drive and give a performance report. Some of the general tings I tried were creating two extra paging files and creating a RAM drive (both of which I've since disabled), and there were various tweaks automatically run to speed up Windows. I ran Tweak XP Pro, Ashampoo, Dr. Salman's, WinBooster, among others.

I have a Dimension 2400, P4 2.2, Win XP Home SP1, 512 MB RAM, 80 gig Maxtor 7200, integrated graphics, M-Audio Audiophile 24/96 Soundcard.

Everything seemed fine and Windows was much faster, but today I've had a couple serious consistent problems. Foremost, Tascam Gigastudio 3, a software based sample player for musicians, MIDI keyboard controlled through the M-Audio card, has been giving "Unkown System Error" messages when trying to load certain (but not all) intrument sample files for playback. When playing, some of the MIDI note triggers drop out so those notes don't play (never happened before).

Worst of all, I'm getting the Blue Screen of Death coming up after trying to run Gigastudio for a while. Two errors came up with that that I can remember: "PAGING ERROR IN UNPAGED AREA" and "PROCESS HAS LOCKED PAGES".

I've since read that these are usually kernal level driver errors. The M-Audio card does use a new kernal level MIDI driver for Giga Studio 3, but until I ran the system tweaks, I had absolutely no problems with it. Could the tweaks have corrupted the driver?

The other major problem has been when either playing on Reason (sequencing and software synthesizer program), or playing back Reason sequences, there are consistent pops and distortion that never occured before, every time. The soundcard settings are all the same as before.

Could reinstalling the soundcard driver be all I need to do? If that is the problem, why is Gigastudio having problems loading instruments?

Could I have messed up the hard drive with the Sci Mark tweak? Could trying to reinstall a common hard drive driver from Windows solve that problem? How is that done?

Thanks in advance to anyone that can help!!

Dave

 

Actually, to be precise, the error was "PAGING FAULT IN NON-PAGED AREA"

 

A word of advice.

Most of those programs promise the world, but deliver nothing more than headaches.

XP is pretty good at managing resources compared to earlier operating systems and should generally be left alone, apart from minor tweaks and personalisations.

If these programs are of any merit they should have some sort of rollback or restore feature?

Failing that, have you tried System Restore, uninstalling the suspect programs, and/or Driver Rollback?

After reading all the modifications you have done, I'm of the opinion that a format and reinstall is probably the best and more than likely the only course of action.