Hi Folks,

For the first time since owning this Dell Vostro 400, I've gotten a blue screen crash and it was while playing a video game. I've played maybe 200 games on this pc, which is prob 3 years old, many of them large file games, and have never had a crash.

Here's the info I received: (btw, Windows XP, Nvidia 8800GT, quad core processor)

driver IRQL not less or equal - stop error blue screen
further down the blue screen:
Rtk Hd Aud . sys

I looked up what I could but it's all greek to me. I am NOT technically inclined when it comes to computers. Evidently this is a realtek semiconductor sound card driver. I went to device manager and expanded all the (+) subcategories but could not tell what is what. One webpage (maybe it was microsoft) talked about disabling or uninstalling the faulting device. I've no idea how to do any of this, and terrified to uninstall something major and ruin the pc any more than might have occurred. I've also never done a system restore before, nor do I know about repairing, upgrading, downloading or correcting this driver problem.

What on earth do I do?

I was playing "Keepsake" - installed from 3 CD's and not a dowloaded game, and had been playing for 5 or 6 hours. After rebooting, I have not opened the game again until I find out what happened.

I've played all the recent games, Black Mirrors, Dark Fall, LHOD, Wittard, etc.etc. and never had a moment's problem since owning this computer. I see hundreds of BFG posts about folks that can't play games. Their systems are not up to it or they need graphics driver updates. Only once did I ever have a slow game/wonky cursor (phantom of the opera) and a driver update fixed that. I never had problems with any other BF's games, or any Large File Adventure games.


Why did this happen? Is it strictly my computer or something to do with the Keepsake game? What do I do now?

===============
Edit to add:
I've since doing some googling and learned of crashes and patches. But I still am not sure if the crashes that occurred were a blue screen crash.
I'm also unsure whether this patch 1.6 applies to my TAC version or only the EU version.
Thanks for reading.

Unless you can copy the exact wording of the message, there's very little to go on.
"driver IRQL not less or equal" can be hardware or software related.

See if the error repeats if you continue playing the game. Maybe it's just a one-time error.
If you get the error again, try to copy down the exact wording.

Thank you, Jenny100. I didn't realize that I needed more details than that. Never having seen that before, I just assumed it was something specific.

In the meantime, I searched and found a patch you referenced about a year ago from the search function here, and luckily my Norton caught a trojan horse and blocked it. (darned young kids and their pranks!) The installer said that the patch installed okay. However, I read elsewhere that it didn't do much for some people, and to possibly limit the time spent playing the game.

I also reduced audio acceleration to Basic level. I still don't understand what that is and just exactly what it does, but I was able to start the game and play for a while. Being spooked, I saved every 5 min. and shut the game down after a little while. I managed to get past the kitchen and cauldron, where it crashed, and have managed to turn Zak into a cat.

I'm hoping this was just a known crash issue with the game, and I hope and pray it doesn't happen again. Scared the yoo hoo out of me! I'll copy the wording down, if it happens again, as per your request.

Thank you.

HI LC.
Not to frighten you or anything, but be sure and turn your audio acceleration back up when you play other games.

Cathy