Why does my $4500 machine suck??

[aam]

All you smart guys out there who have been at this computer stuff longer than me, please tell me why the $4500 system i bought a year and a half ago, wont stay up and running for
more than a day without a crash of one form or another.

My configuration is as follows:

Dual PPro 166 OCed to 200 (i have a case fan for cooling)
Tyan Titan Dual Ppro Mobo
Matrox Mill. II 8meg
Adaptec 2940 UW SCSI cont.
Seagate Cheetah HD
Plextor Ultraplex
Ext. Zip drive
Old Mat****a SCSI cdrom
Zoltrix Modem
SB AWE 64 gold sound

I am running Win NT 4.0 w' SP4.
My main usages are for: music and multimedia, midi, sound forge, cakewalk, photoshop, premiere, internet, email, wordprocessing.

I get blue screens fairly often when doing sound stuff...i attribute this to bad sound card drivers mostly, and im gonna replace my card soon. I also get random freezes, where the whole system locks, including mouse and keyboard. This happens sometimes, when doing processor intensive things like quake, but other times when processor usage would seemingly be low. Could this be a problem with overclocking, or simply a problem between the two processors and the OS? I also get slews of Dr. Watson errors...esp. with netscape.

Im not a programmer, but perhaps you code guys could help answer my basic question...we know that Microsoft products suck, but why do they suck? Why do they crash so much? Why
do i get blue screens? Why does a 4500 dollar box full of high end, name brand parts screw up so often??? Im pissed, and im thinking about a low end SGI or some other highpower
Unix box for my next computer.

Thanx in advance!
aam

[Bleeding Edge]

Do you use Event Viewer trace down your problem?

Do you know that SP4 must be reinstalled everytime NT gets something off of the original disc.

Personally I wouldn't put up with the crashes. I'd take off all the offending software, all the problematic hardware and get Event Viewer to report all Blue. Then reassess the situation.

First off, don't OC the thing. Secondly get rid of the old SCSI CD-Rom. Make do with the Plextor.

About Zip drives. NT doesn't like when the Zip is disconnected then reconnected.

It also will have problems with PCI 2.1 compliant MB boards and cards (2940UW).

Most everything has a fix or workaround.
You have to take the time to find out about it somewhere. NT is not for the light hearted. SP4 alone addresses over 700 issues!

It may be better for you to get Win98 until Win2000 comes along. Win98 is for perfect for your use.

You can re-use most of your hardware and spend several hundred dollars or more (considering you spent several thousand anyhow) for a new motherboard, CPU, PC100 ram and since you use cakewalk, might as well include the Sound Blaster Live -A lot less hissing there.


But I will say this about NT. If you can get it working without any weirdness showing up in Event Viewer, it will stay that way -Rock solid!

I went thru the different flavors of Dos and Windows, the Mac, and Win95's incarnations and Win98.

NT is the best of them all.

I use Win98 because it suits my usages the best. Besides running highend applications, I like running those intensive 3D games -Wow! I need the ease of hardware compatability that Win98 offers.

There's self help for NT at this link:
http://www.jsiinc.com/reghack.htm

[aam]

Thanks for the advice, but let me say, Im not a complete novice.
Event viewer shows nothing. The only time i get a red dot is when i get a blue screen.
Ive looked up my blue screens, and all ive found is that KMODE_EXCEPTION_NOT_HANDLED occurs with a faulty driver, and since i am almost always doing audio things (winamp usually) when i get blue screens, i am assuming this is a sound driver. Also, i paid for dual processors, reverting to 98 (which i hate) would defeat the purpose of having duals.

Now, im just curious, why would an older (1994) scsi cdrom be deleterious to the system?

Finally, i agree that NT is leaps and bounds ahead of Win9x, but i am still disappointed that it has so many major flaws.
Thanks for you advice. I will more research in the areas that you suggest.

[kwai]

ms. heh heh.

[Bleeding Edge]

This links are -Kmode- related.

For PhotoShop:

http://www.adobe.com/supportservice/custsupport/SOLUTIONS/60aa.htm

For Quark:

http://www.quark.com/tech/NT4issue.html

For Netscape crashes (you might have to do a little more digging there, maybe)

http://help.netscape.com/search?NS-search-page=results&NS-collection=Client&NS-query=NT

Note: I don't mean to be crass but it goes without saying about Win98 and multiple processors.

Since you stated how problematic your system is, I thought it wiser to go with a minimal hardware configuration until the problems are sorted out. Seems sensible.