Freezes In Vista 64

[martian_aphid]

Hey guys

 

I'm hoping you can help me out or point me in the right direction with a recurring problem.

 

Ever since I've had this rig I've had the occassional freeze which would force me to reboot. Perhaps I was just conscious of the noise it made but I found that it always seemed to be either whilst listening to music or watching a video and the last few miliseconds of audio would just loop whilst everything else would freeze. For this reason I had a feeling it might be audio related.

 

To give you an idea of my audio setup I have an Asus R.O.G. motherboard which came with an audio daughter-card that slides into a dedicated PCI Express x1 slot. It will only work in that specific PCI Express slot and from the reading I've done, although it is still on a seperate card its supposed to still be onboard audio? In to the green front speaker port I basically have a cheap set of 2.1 speakers. The green jack plugs into the bass unit and the bass unit has connections to the left and right speakers.

 

The problem had been rare so I didn't look into it too much. However recently the same freezes are coming back in a more severe form. In all instances it has been whilst using headphone/mic from the FP on my case. The freeze is the same – the same audio loop, but it ends in a BSOD and when it reboots it has wiped all my motherboard settings – I found this out the hard way trying to boot into my OS which was installed with AHCI but with the motherboard reset to IDE! I now have a little list of all the settings I need to make sure are in the BIOS when this problem happens.

 

As far as the front panel audio is concerned, in the BIOS I have it set to HD Audio (instead of AC97) and I'm fairly certain my front panel audio is a HD Audio header (the case is a Thermaltake Armor – older version).

 

At the moment I'm a bit baffled as to where to look for the cause of this problem – front panel problem, motherboard/audio riser problem, driver problem, OS problem? The only common theme is the headphone/mic being in during the latest freezing problems. One time it was during mid speech in LoudTalks, another time it was whilst receiving a call in Skype, before the mic was even in use.

 

TIA - Any help is much appreciated.