Avast WEBforum
Consumer Products => Avast Free Antivirus / Premium Security (legacy Pro Antivirus, Internet Security, Premier) => Topic started by: zool on June 23, 2007, 02:14:56 PM
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Hello all,
Just like to submit some findings for the attention of forum Mods/Devs (and you techies)
Test Systems:-
Vista64 Ultimate
2GB RAM / AMD X2 6000+
VIA K8T890 Northbridge (on both systems)
VIA VT8251 (System1) // VIA VT8237R (System2)
GeForce 8800GTX
Soundblaster X-Fi Extreme-Gamer
X2 500GB Disks in RAID-0
Scenario:-
Clean Vista64 install, Sound Drivers, Graphics Drivers, Avast4.7 installed, K-lite Codec pack, K-lite 64-bit Codec Pack (NOTE, No VIA Chipset drivers installed, explain later)
Both Systems Blue Screen at ANY given time. The most frequent Blue Screens appear when using Windows Media Player to watch videos and listen to MP3's.
The error is always the same IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL
STOP: 0x0000000A (Param1 changes, Param2=0x000000000000000C, Param3=0x0000000000000001, Param4 changes).
The graphics/sound drivers have been gradually upgraded since March but problem persists. The VIA (IDE/SATA) drivers cause Audio/Video stutter in Vista. The latest VIA drivers fix the stutter but this is achieved by removing the "Enable write caching" and "Enable advanced performance" options (which worked if you disabled the options in the previous driver so it's a cheeky "fix" on VIA's part). Also they are a real pain to remove.
Microsoft website reports these errors are usually associated buggy drivers and possibly software such as Anti-Virus. Therefore I removed Avast and continued to monitor. No BSOD. Then Ran WMP continous for 48hrs using MP3 and after tested Videos. No BSOD.
It appears that Avast was the cause and it may be related to the 2 Southbridge chips and stock drivers (listed above). I didn't test using the latest VIA drivers because of the probems mentioned above.
Therefore I'm gonna have to quite using Avast. It's a shame because I really liked this product.
PS: Using Mcafee for a week. No BSOD ... yet
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I somehow don't think chipset drivers and avast! could conflict... avast! is not that low-level.
Do you still have the minidumps corresponding to the bluescreens? (in Windows\Minidump folder)
They might tell us what was going on there...
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Hi Igor,
Unfortunately the Blue screens never created any dumps. Initially I kept the pagefile away from the boot partition (for performance) but even after I moved it to the boot partition it still never dumped.
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Unfortunately the Blue screens never created any dumps.
Control Panel > System > Advanced > Initialization & restoring Settings > Choose the dump options (removing the autorestart in case of failure). Sorry, I'm translating to English the Windows version of mine.
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zool, what about \windows\memory.dmp file? Does it exist?
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Control Panel > System > Advanced > Initialization & restoring Settings > Choose the dump options (removing the autorestart in case of failure). Sorry, I'm translating to English the Windows version of mine.
Tech, I already have this setting ... but thx
zool, what about \windows\memory.dmp file? Does it exist?
PK, Nope doesn't exist. For some unknown reason it never dumped and created the memory.dmp file that a BSOD normally would.
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I guess you have Vista RTM version, right?
Without a crash dump, it's hard to say where is the problem.
I found several reasons why memory.dmp is not created:
• The Memory.dmp file already exists and the option Overwrite Any Existing File (found in Control Panel System) is not selected. It is a good idea to leave this box checked and to move or copy the current Memory.dmp file.
• The paging file on the boot drive is not large enough. To use the "Write Debugging Information To" feature to obtain a complete memory dump file, the paging file on the boot drive must be at least as large as physical memory + 1 MB. When you create a kernel memory dump file, the file is usually around one-third the size of the physical memory on the system. Of course, this quantity will vary, depending on your circumstances.
• The paging file is not on the %systemroot% partition. When the STOP error occurs, the system crash dump is written out to the pagefile on the root of the %systemroot% drive.
• There is not room for the Memory.dmp file in the path specified in Control Panel for writing the memory dump.
• It is possible that the SCSI controller is bad or the system crash is caused by a bad SCSI controller board.
• If you specify a non-existent path, a dump file will not be written. For example, if you specify the path as C:\Dumpfiles\Memory.dmp and no C:\Dumpfiles folder exists, a dump file will not be written.
Unfortunally, you've already written, you moved pagefile to your boot volume and still nothing... ahhh...