Have you disabled the anti-virus before playing the games, and other background programs...

b/c when i play the sims, i have to disable my antivirus, or my game would just disappear and go back to my desktop..

but have you correctly uninstalled the drivers before installing the updated drivers???

b/c if you don't uninstall the drivers, and just upgrade to the newer drivers, that can cause some potential problems with your system.

Heres a link to the video card forum that gives a complete instructions to uninstall video card drivers and how to install the new ones...  http://forums.us.dell.com/supportforums/board/message?board.id=dim_video&message.id=54639

Message Edited by buffbison on 01-22-2003 01:28 PM

Have you uninstalled the current drivers for the video card and installed an updated driver?

What all have you installed recently?  hardware/software?

I have the latest nvidia reference drivers.

I installed a 256MB Rambus module to add to the 128MB stick already there.  Both are similar chips from Samsung, ECC. 

There is not much software on the machine.  Win98, MSWorks2000/Word, Quicken...  that's about it.

Message Edited by buffbison on 01-22-2003 01:11 PM

No I had not tried that before.  I had just installed the latest Nvidia drivers directly over top of the old. 

Last night, I uninstalled and reinstalled the new drivers as recommended.  I am still having the same problem.  Any other thoughts?

Thanks!

Nathan

Have you run DirectX Diagnostics?  If not click on start|run| and type dxdiag.  Let the program run and then go through all of the pages and run the tests.  Look for any problem files found.  I have seen DirectX install and claim to update but does not always. Thus you have to rename the problem or beta files and reinstall Directx to get the most up to date version.

Also press Windows key and Pause key at same time and click on the Device Manager tab to see if there are any yellow caution marks showing a hardware conflict.  Then correct as necessary.  Keep in mind that an audio file of multimedia conflict can also lock up a system.

you say the "reinstall" was performed by "small computer shop".

Could it be they installed SBLive retail-version software (downloadable from internet????).

I have about similar machine from same period (XPS T700r with SBLive) and can remember several posts here stating retail-version SBLive-drivers screw up manny Games.

The OEM Dell Drivers must have been delivered with your Dell-PC on seperate CD (Not the resource CD-s).

Mine say's

- Sound Blaster Live Value Digital 1024 Software.

- Dell Part 605GH

- # SBLV-DLOEM-W5-L5

- Version: 4.06.628 (check your installed driver version for multimedia-device "system/device/drivers/detailed-info")

If you have retailversion installed I would advise trying uninstall and reinstall drivers from Dell OEM-CD.

Also look on site of the game-manufacturers for patches for the games that are not running; sometimes failures are related to release-incompletion-issue.

Your problem is likely caused by the installlation of the mixed modules of Rambus. Rambus must be installed in matched pairs, i.e. 128 and 128. Installing mismatched modules will cause system failure.