Internal error

[Trevor Newell]

edited from support email

Thanks for your reply.
We tried re-installing all the available versions of DirectRT and none of them worked; hoverer, we found a possible suspect - we recently installed new display cards, in order to set the screen's refresh rate to exactly 100 MHz. When we uninstalled the new card's driver, DirectRT worked again.

We really need to be able to set that refresh rate and need an urgent solution. In case it matters, the cards are Shafir's HD 4350 256MB, and the processor of the cards is ATI's.

[Trevor Newell]

What monitors are you using with this refresh rate? Do you know if other users have faced similar problems with this card? It's quite peculiar that uninstalling the card's drivers allows for DirectRT to work.

Is it possible to simply set the refresh rate without installing the drivers? I'll continue looking for a solution - let me know what you find.

[Trevor Newell]

edited from support email

We use CRT monitors (do you need to know the exact type?), and we faced the same problem in two labs this week - in one lab 3 out of 6 computers stopped running Direct RT, and in the other lab only one computer did, right after we changed it's display card. Changing back the display card didn't help, but uninstalling the card driver did. The card doesn't work without the driver, and the previous display card didn't enable to set the refresh rate to 100 - that's why we got the new cards.

Any advice?

[Trevor Newell]

Have you tried checking to see if you can replicate this?

For example, if you put the old card back and also remove the driver from one of the *other* non-working machines, are you able to prevent the shutdown there as well? I'm not suggesting this as a solution (as you need the 100 refresh) but it would be great to know if this driver is a necessary condition for the crash. That would speed up our troubleshooting tremendously. Also, Shirly wrote a while back (see attached) but the message went to our spam account (can't see why). She noted that a system restore fixed one of the machines:

"another computer that used to run direct RT began showing the same error, but recovered when we used window's "system restore" function for the last date directRT worked on thet computer (29/10/2009)."

So I have to ask now--is that machine still working? If so, does it have the new video card and driver? Or is this the one that was reverted to the old card? If it is the NEW card and driver, I would love to see the dxdiag.txt file from that machine to compare it with a dxdiag.txt file from an identical machine that is continuing to crash. Finding a difference in those two files could be very helpful. If it is using the OLD video card, then I think that points back to a hardware issue.

[Trevor Newell]

[edited from support email]

After great efforts, which included, among other operations, consultation with Dell's technical support, formatting the computer and other reconfigurations - it finally worked.
Thanks again for your help!!

Reformatting the machine seems to have fixed the problem - DirectX may have been causing the error.