Shaggis

I used to have a crashing issue running 2 EQ2 clients at the same time, but it appeared to be my sound card drivers (or the way EQ2 was exercising them).

I don't use that PoS Vista but I never trusted the BSOD screen in Windows to accurately assess which driver caused the fail. It may well be your NVidia driver, but I've also seen many occurrences where what was identified as the active driver wasn't the one that actually caused the crash.

You could disable sound in EQ2 and test it out (that always worked for me), but its a major SWAG. Although in your scenario the 2 most impacted drivers would likely be video and sound.

Really I never trusted the EQ2 application enough to run 2 instances on the same machine unless I was brokering or firing up a portbot real quick. Watching a DVD movie at the same time is ballsy.

Illuminator

I'm just using motherboard sound; I use headphones so there was no overwhelming need for anything else. Normally the crash is just a tight deadlock; on a few rare occasions I had Windows limp along just enough to tell me that it was very specifically the nVidia driver.

Even so, the worst-behaved game client and DVD player should never be able to crash the OS. That's ingrained into the design philosophy of any new OS's like XP/Vista/OSX/Linux.

__________________


Bow down before the one you serve. You're going to get what you deserve.

Pinski

If you run too much shit at the same time and overload your IO, you can crash your computer.

__________________
How many times do you hear it? It goes on all day long
Everyone knows everything And no one's ever wrong
Until later...
Who can you believe? It's hard to play it safe
But apart from a few good friends We don't take anything on faith
Until later..

Shaggis

I agree, but the keyword there is should. XP sure doesn't live up to your expectations and from what I've read I highly doubt Vista will.

If you want to find the root cause however, you could start removing variables. Find some way to work around it or wait for "them" to fix it.

And LOL yeah what Pinski said.

Illuminator

The thing is that my 2nd PC runs XP and handles 2 EQ2 clients and DVD playback on a 7800/256 just fine.

__________________


Bow down before the one you serve. You're going to get what you deserve.

Morara

I usually use MPC and the builtin MPEG decoder than WMP's hook into whatever codec it finds.

__________________