As mentioned in a previous post, I decide (for stability and throughput reasons) to change my main system from a “newish” AMD Sempron 2800+  to an old Intel P4 2.6Ghz.

I swap the motherboards, run the XP repair install, and the intel system is up and running (mostly).

I do the usual search for drivers, and I get the ethernet going, but the onboard sound doesn’t work… and the PC freezes at some point.

Being the eternal optimist, I reboot and give the system another chance.

But the lockups keep happening.

I try using linux, but still no sound… the drivers are setup correctly, as the system goes through the motions of playing, with equalisers pulsing, showing what the sound would “look” like… just nothing coming out of the green plug.

And the system cannot run for more than 2 hours without a lockup… looks like a trip back to [censored] for a replacement.

So I look at temporarily reinstating the sempron system.

I put the AMD mobo back, do a repair install, but after the initial copy of files, and the necessary reboot into a GUI install to complete the XP installation, I get a glimpse of a blue screen of death (BSOD), and the system restarts (where the process repeats).

Pressing F8, and choosing “disable automatic restart on system failure”, lets me get a good look at the BSOD:

STOP: 0x0000007E (0xC0000005,0xBA278750,0xBA4C7430,0xBA4C712C)

A search finds a few tentative solutions.

I try the chkdsk /f c: … but it doesn’t help

The strange thing is that linux and bartPE work just fine, so there isn’t a hardware problem.

I eventually get an answer that works:

http://www.techspot.com/vb/topic21621-2.html

In particular, the solution by alisvolat on the 25/04/2007 is exactly what I need… from bartPE, I rename  c:winsystem32driversintelppm.sys

And the repair install can finally complete.

I used to be a strong supporter of AMD, but lately, I’ve really started to like the stability of Intel.

I have seen so many AMD systems with impossible to fix “peculiarities”, that I now prefer intel.