At 07:22 PM 03/19/2000 , Jay Merritt wrote:
>I have the following home built system, which has been running flawlessly for
>3 months now (*after I went through 2 weeks of problems doing the initial
>setup). However, I received a peculiar message yesterday on boot up. The
>system is as follows:
>--1. Abit BE6 II M/B (latest Bios),
>--2. Crucial 128MB ram/133/ecc,
>--3. Pent III 600B (133 Fsb),
>--4. 3DFx Voodoo 3 3500 TV AGP 16 MB,
>--5. Win 98 SE,
>--6. Sound Blaster Live Platinum,
>--7. Desktop Theater 5.1 Speaker System,
>--8. Western Digital 20.5 Gig 7200 rpm Ultra 66 HD,
>--9. Hitachi 19" SuperScan 753 Monitor,
>--10. MS Intellimouse mouse,
>--11. PC Power & Cooling Tower Case w/275 Watt Power Supply,
>--12. Linksys Combo II Ethernet,
>--13. Actisys IrDa IR210L Infrared Adapter,
>--14. Pioneer 6x/40x DVD,
>--15. HP 9100i CD R/RW,
>--16. LS 120 Floppy,
>--17. Eagle TR3 Exabyte Tape B/U (Old).
> The message I got (Blue Screen) was as follows: "No spare Stack Pages. It
>may be necessary to increase the settings of 'MinSps' in SYSTEM.INI to
>prevent possible stack faults. There are currently 6Sps allocated."
> I checked my SYSTEM.INI and find no reference to the above message.
>Should I add a MinSps line to my SYSTEM.INI and if so what would the
>appropriate string format look like?
> The only other problem I have is with using Creative SB16 Emulation, which
>will cause the system not to boot, unless I remove the sound card, install
>Creative Sound Blaster 16 Plug and Play, reinstall sound card and use it like
>that. I have moved the sound card to every slot on the MOBO, and the problem
>persists. This "fix" leaves a ' ! ' in Device Manager. This is the fix
>Creative tech support told me to use since they had others with a similar
>problem and had been successful with this, assuming you don't play games in
>MS DOS mode. I have a thing about perfection and this solution does not sit
>well, however the system seems to be fine otherwise. Any help or comments are
>greatly appreciated.
>Thanks in advance,
Both symptoms you report point to a bad driver. You can download a fairly
new driver from Soundblaster at:
http://www.clok.creaf.com/registereddownload/download2.asp
From your description, this problem is probably created by running your
sound card with the SB16 drivers instead of the proper drivers. You must
install the proper driver for the card or replace the card with a compatible
card.
The spare stack pages fault is created when a driver requests more than
the normal 4kilobytes of space allocated for a device driver by Windows9x
and you can increase this in the System.ini by adding this line under the
[386Enh] heading:
MinSPs=4
You can increase this amount by increments of 4, (ie: 8, 12, 16).
This is the actual quote from Microsoft's Knowledge base:
========================================================
Stack overflow conditions are indicative of errors in the device driver.
Device drivers are allocated 4 kilobytes (one page) of space to be
used as a stack. If the device driver uses more than 4 kilobytes of
memory, a stack overflow condition occurs.
Windows 95 sets aside a number of extra memory pages (spare stack
pages) to be used temporarily to prevent a system "crash" due to a stack
overflow condition. When the stack overflow condition has passed,
Windows 95 reclaims the temporary page. The default number of spare
stack pages is 2.
If Windows 95 detects that it has run out of spare stack pages, the
warning message stated above is displayed. Windows 95 continues to
operate normally unless a device driver encounters a stack overflow
condition when there are no free spare stack pages.
===========================================================
Bob Wright
The NOSPIN Group
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