7 Lockups, just like Vista, but a discovery

One of my main systems runs an ECS RS400A motherboard, a 3ghz P4, 2gb memory, not a screamer by any stretch, and it uses the non-mainstream ATI Radeon Xpress 200 chipset. It runs like a rock under XP or *nix, but ever since the first Vista betas, it has locked up after the Vista boot for only a few minutes, no matter what video driver it was running. So I decided I didn't have time to fool with Vista and kept the box on XP where it has happily run for years.

Now I'm trying 7, and find a related issue. Under Firefox (same conditions as above), while browsing webpages, 7 will lock up after some random period of time. Today, after the last lockup, rather than just push the button again, I decided to leave the machine on and go to my appointment. Upon returning several hours later, I found the machine alive and responsive, and running fairly well; in fact this message is created under that same boot. So it seems whatever this lockup is will eventually clear itself if you have that kind of time. I'm unsure how much time it takes at this point, but no doubt, it appears that it's not fatally hosed, just temporarily waylaid for some unknown period of time.

Any clues out there?

UPDATE - Ok, while cruising around in Firefox, I decided to x out of firefox, and just as the screen was blending into the desktop, it locked up again, in fact, it left the 'half-blended' Firefox screen displayed with the desktop about 50% visible "behind" it. So I left it sitting to time it; 9 minutes later, it reverted to a 7 "login-blue" options screen where I chose to start task manager; at that point, I was greeted by what looked like 4 or 5 dialog box windows complaining that "IE wasn't the default browser, yada yada"... I certainly wouldn't have started IE up, I was in the middle of a Firefox shutdown. But it did come back, and it was pretty close to exactly 9 minutes after the lockup... and we're back typing now. Whuddyaknow.... not sure if the boss will accept those 9 minute periods of zero productivity though. Kinda sucks.

I fought this issue for months on several diffrent builds. I'm now on RC1 (build 7100), and discovered that a missing driver for my Airlink101 PCI wireless card was causing the lock up.

I loaded the xp sp3 driver (not even vista drivers exist for this card), and low and behold, INSTANT STABILITY!!!


I am VERY HAPPY now!!!

I'm running a P4 3.0Ghrz porcessor on an ECS RS400A MB(on board Radeon Express video), 2 Gb DDR2 Ram; Duel booting w/ xp SP3.

PS. I also did load the ATI beta driver 9.1, no vid issues what so ever!

Wow... someone ELSE with an RS400! Cool. Thanks for the reply. I haven't actually even ventured into trying to load any drivers for the motherboard, as DM seems fairly content that it found 'em reasonably well already... Have you loaded a batch of RS400 drivers on 7? What did you use, Vista stuff?
Guess shame on me for that... I sort of expected that without bangs everywhere, things were at least ok to proceed carefully. Did you ever find that your "lockups" were actually just "off in the weeds for a while" as I have found?

I will say that after loading 7100 on several other machines, it has not failed a single time for any reason whatsoever on those machines; only the RS400 has the problems; I realize it's already an orphan of sorts and someday I'll replace it with an Asus or Intel of some sort but it does just fine for most of my needs.

I'm using teh Vista drivers for most of the devices. Been running stable now or 2 days.


The one thing I did do was flash the BIOS to a slighty new version then what was pre loaded to the MB. the flash went smooth using the ECS flash utility.

the only thing that I did find is in the pawer options section in control pannel, I tried to change to the "balanced plan, which immediately locke the system up. if you stay on high perfomance, no worries!

so far, so good. I'm happy!

Good luck, hope my experience helps you out.

Hmm... well, I haven't flashed the bios; I've always been a little leery of that, though I've done it many times over the years... but having created a few doorstops as well, I don't usually go that way. I'll likely try the vista drivers though. Still spending most of my time in XP or FreeBSD though... but the apparent stability of 7 is certainly a breath of fresh air after Vista.

I have experience a couple of lockups since installing Windows 7, 3 days now. One while viewing a web page in FF 3 another while away from system for a few hours and upon return noted a constant on HDD light, black screen and no response from keyboard or mouse. Hard reset button would not reset either, had to force power off. System rebooted and instead of the standard "Starting Windows" I got "Resuming Windows" system was very flaky so I shut down Windows and started over.
I read about installing MOBO drvrs in Win 7, went to ASUS site and only found Vista 64 bit drvrs (not surprised) and installed those. Did I install appropriate drvrs. Anyone have any suggestions on what I should be looking for to aid in troubleshooting this problem.
From what I've read in this forum Windows 7 is pretty stable and I would not expect those 2 lockups in a couple of days time.