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Earlier I have blogged about NHL 08 freezing on XBox 360. I was not able to decide whether to get a new disc or turn in my XBox 360 for service. But now I don’t need to do either of them because I am able to play my NHL 08 without freezing.

Do What You Are Told

I heard that some earlier versions of XBox 360 may cause scratches on discs. I was afraid my NHL 08 disc was scratched too. Also, most of the time when the game freezes, an error message from the system would pop up telling me to clean the disc. I didn’t take this message seriously until a couple days ago. I bought the Memorex OptiFix Pro and it is for cleaning and repairing discs. Its package says it can repair light surface scratches. I have checked my disc and I could see a couple of very light scratches so I thought I should give it a try.

Hockey Again

After following the repairing and cleaning procedures once, I can now play my NHL 08 without it freezing. During this couple days, I have played it for about six hours and so far the problem has not come back. I wish this is the real fix for my problem and if you are one of the unlucky guys, you may want to try cleaning or repairing your disc too.

The Memorex OptiFix Pro includes:

• OptiFix Pro Unit
• Cleaning Solution
• Cleaning Pads
• Repairing Solution
• Repair Pads
• AC Adapter
• Instruction manual

If the LCD screen of your laptop is very dark but you can still barely see what is on the screen, then it is most likely the backlight of your LCD not working. Most laptop LCD has a very thin light tube on the bottom edge of the screen to light it up. If this light tube is not functioning, then your whole screen will become very dark. You should be able to get it fixed within $100 CAD (including labour).

So if suddenly you are not able to see the screen but you can still hear the log on sound effect of Windows, then you should inspect the display carefully and not just blindly think your LCD display is completely broken. Don’t waste your money to get a new display.

Happy New Year everyone! How did you spend your first day of year 2008? During the last couple days of year 2007, I had spent most of my time troubleshooting a computer problem.

The Story

My friend took his computer to my store a month ago for an upgrade. He wanted to play Team Fortress 2 but his on-board video was no good, so I installed an EVGA 7600GT 512MB AGP video card for him. The game launched fine so he brought the computer home right away and I couldn’t do much testing on the system. However, after a few days, he called me about the game kept freezing after 5 to 10 minutes of game time. I told him to try updating the drivers but the problem remains the same. He finally brought his computer back two days ago so I could take a look.

Time to Test

Initially, I thought it was due to problems with some old drivers. So I updated the drivers for the motherboard (ASRock 775VM800) and reinstalled the Forceware driver. The freezing still happened. Then I thought it could be just the game, probably having some bugs. However, when I tried to play Company of Heroes on the computer, it froze too. Then I did the following:

• flashed the BIOS of the motherboard
• updated Windows
• scanned for viruses
• checked the fans to make sure it is not overheating
• changed power supply to make sure there is enough power
• did a clean install of Windows XP to make sure there are no software conflicts
• disabled the on-board sound to make sure it is not due to the outdated sound driver

The Solution

After performing the above steps, the problem still exist. So I thought the problem could be the video card itself. I took the EVGA 7600GT out and replaced it with my old Leadtek Geforce 6800GT. The freezing problem was gone. To further test the 7600GT, I installed it on my old computer that is using the ASUS A7N8X Deluxe motherboard. I ran the same games on it and surprisingly, they ran without any problems. As a result, I could only conclude that the EVGA 7600GT is not compatible with the hardware of this particular system, and most likely it’s the ASRock 775VM800 motherboard.

FYI

For your interest, here is how the system was configured when it had the freezing problem.

• Motherboard: ASRock 775VM800
• CPU: Pentium 4 2.80 GHz
• RAM: 2 x Samsung 512MB PC3200
• Video card: EVGA 7600GT 512MB AGP
• DVD writer is primary IDE
• A 250GB SATA hard drive
• OS: Windows XP Pro SP2

Fortunately, I could still get some rest on my New Year day.