laptop crashes with ATI video card but easy fix

[kip777]

I recently purchased an Asus F3Jp Laptop and Hoster would crash when resizing the display to full screen, if I let the song play through it would be better but eventually crash changing from floating screen to full screen and sometimes doing nothing at all but playing a song
All MS updates (XP Pro) were installed and Hoster version 3.313 used.
Diagnosing the problem it was a conflict with ATI’s drivers. Using Omega drivers for ATI the system works flawlessly, can’t make it crash yet, tried selecting a song while another is playing and hitting stop and the play as fast as possible and changing from floating screen to full. Using 2 letter search words to look for songs with a 10,000 song db while playing and resizing. Not a hiccup, stutter, it was perfect.

Just a note, the 1700 is a new card with no listing in the inf file so it wont find the hardware, you either can add the necessary information or manually install as an 1800 and it will work fine, same driver suite is used for M6 chips and newer I believe was stated in the readme file. I never would have known of this problem if I would have set up this laptop first and installed Hoster after as I normally would but I had other things to do and Hoster’s Admin was quick to reset my registration. Kudos to you guys!!!


I have seen questions on what kind of laptop to buy to run Hoster, lets start off with it is a well written program that doesn’t require a lot of resources and karaoke graphics are 2D at 256 colors (or less) so it wont take much for graphics. S-Video out should be a requirement. Intel’s GMA950 integrated solution won’t play any modern 3D game titles at playable frame rates but will do Hoster and you can watch DVD’s fine. I happen to like games so that is why I went with this laptop. This is the first time I have gone with Intel since the P133’s. It’s been all AMD for me. The core2duo is just too good in benchmarks for me to pass up this time
.
Processor power? Converting GDG’s to KMA, the faster the better.

System ram, 512 MB or more for XP.

Don’t go to Vista, I have beta tested Vista Ultimate and it is a resource hog and every time you wish to do anything you need to answer dialog boxes and type in your administrative password, no support for older cards of any type. It needs the fastest processors and a lot of ram and it still feels sluggish. Give it a couple of years.

Hard drive should be at least 100GB split 20/80 or 25/75 with KMA & music on D:\ drive. If you need to reinstall the OS this is the way to go. The KMA files need to be backed up to another physical drive; you don’t want to rip/convert twice. My 9,736 songs are 46.8 GB.
Long winded but my 2 cents.

Asus F3Jp Laptop link
http://www.asus.com/products.aspx?l1...58&modelmenu=2

Omega Drivers Home Page
http://www.omegadrivers.net/index.php

[bryant]

Originally Posted by kip777

Hard drive should be at least 100GB split 20/80 or 25/75 with KMA & music on D:\ drive. If you need to reinstall the OS this is the way to go. The KMA files need to be backed up to another physical drive; you don’t want to rip/convert twice. My 9,736 songs are 46.8 GB.

What do you mean by this statement, specifically?

[ddouglass]

Originally Posted by bryant

What do you mean by this statement, specifically?

Bryant, You can create partitions on a hard drive dividing it into multiple drive letters. Each part has its own letter so what he is saying is with a 100 GB physical drive he creates a C: drive of 25 GB and a D: drive with 75 GB.

[kip777]

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Bryant , what I am referring to is partitioning the drive so the OS is on the smaller portion and the Karaoke and music files are on the larger partition so if it crashes and the OS needs to be reinstalled you wont have to transfer those files to the drive, it’s just a time saver. If the hard drive was to fail those files need to be available on another hard drive either USB/Firewire removable or a network computer (very slow transfer rate compared to removable) so you haven’t lost your data and don’t have to rip/convert all those discs again.

I really like to be redundant, I’ll have 3 sets of identical file sets, one on the computer I use, one on removable storage and a cloned drive of the computer stored at a different location in case the house burns down or blows up, things get stolen, whatever the case might be.

I’m also a lazy guy so after the computer is setup the way I want it I’ll create an image of my drive so if things do go bad I don’t have to install the OS and all the programs I’ve installed and remove the bloatware from the manufacture and tweak it the way I want it all over again, I don’t have to validate windows or update things, it’s a real time saver, a one step process instead of days.

[bryant]

I see, thanx. That's pretty much how I do it. Have two backup drives for music and kma files and a cloned drive.

One might say "We are organized out of laziness!".