I have been having sudden crashes for no reason since I took delivery a year ago of my speedy XP Home, 3.0 GHz 800 MHz FSB P4 machine with Pioneer DVR-105 OEM DVD-R and the Pinnacle burning software Pioneer supplied: "DVR-A05 Installation Disc Vers.1.1".
Even in the middle of the night (I don't turn my machine off much) with no programs running it would spontaneously crash to blue screen of death and reboot. About every two days. Sometimes three or four times a night. Sometimes when I'm surfing the web with Internet Explorer.
On reboot, the system would inform me that "Windows has recovered from a serious error--send it to Microsoft" but the feedback only would say, "You have a bad driver." It never told me which driver. Very frustrating.
I bought a Pioneer A07. It came with different software, by Ulead.
I tried to install the new software and it crashed right in the middle of install. A horrible, horrible crash.
On reboot the machine would almost make it to the desktop, then crash. It did this over and over. Finally I unplugged both DVD recorders. It rebooted to the desktop and said, "Windows has recovered from a serious error" except this time, amazingly, it came back and said the problem was a Pinnacle driver called VOBIW.SYS in the System32 folder. It's a driver for the Pinnacle Instant Write UDF packet writing software. I have never used packet writing (it allows you to drop files on a CD like you do a floppy--a capability supplanted these days by thumb drives) so I uninstalled Instant Write and all other Pinnacle software associated with the older A05.
The computer has not crashed once since.
It seems to me a lot of people bought that A05 drive and installed the Pinnacle software.
If you are crashing a lot, first search for VOBIW.SYS. When you find it in the Windows/System32 folder, at least rename the file to VOBIW.SYS.OLD as a test and see if it works.
It took a full year to find that bum driver. Pinnacle says there is an update to it but when I went to the supplied URL the page wouldn't open. I ended up removing all Pinnacle software.
My machine is stable at last.
Even in the middle of the night (I don't turn my machine off much) with no programs running it would spontaneously crash to blue screen of death and reboot. About every two days. Sometimes three or four times a night. Sometimes when I'm surfing the web with Internet Explorer.
On reboot, the system would inform me that "Windows has recovered from a serious error--send it to Microsoft" but the feedback only would say, "You have a bad driver." It never told me which driver. Very frustrating.
I bought a Pioneer A07. It came with different software, by Ulead.
I tried to install the new software and it crashed right in the middle of install. A horrible, horrible crash.
On reboot the machine would almost make it to the desktop, then crash. It did this over and over. Finally I unplugged both DVD recorders. It rebooted to the desktop and said, "Windows has recovered from a serious error" except this time, amazingly, it came back and said the problem was a Pinnacle driver called VOBIW.SYS in the System32 folder. It's a driver for the Pinnacle Instant Write UDF packet writing software. I have never used packet writing (it allows you to drop files on a CD like you do a floppy--a capability supplanted these days by thumb drives) so I uninstalled Instant Write and all other Pinnacle software associated with the older A05.
The computer has not crashed once since.
It seems to me a lot of people bought that A05 drive and installed the Pinnacle software.
If you are crashing a lot, first search for VOBIW.SYS. When you find it in the Windows/System32 folder, at least rename the file to VOBIW.SYS.OLD as a test and see if it works.
It took a full year to find that bum driver. Pinnacle says there is an update to it but when I went to the supplied URL the page wouldn't open. I ended up removing all Pinnacle software.
My machine is stable at last.