Perhaps an IRQ conflict? I got one recently and it was simply the case of dropping the card in and installing the drivers. No fuss, no muss. Also using 95 OSR2, similar build.

Do you run an SS7 board with VIA chipset? Have had freezes myself with this configuration. Went with an ALI Aladdin based board then and everything worked fine.

Out of curiosity, what Matrox card are you using? I have a Matrox G200 8MB SDRAM PCI card and it's been a bit crap on my similarly specced machine - for some reason, WinRAR would hard lock when compressing, and 3DMark would drop to the desktop and freeze without being able to complete benchmarks. This was on 95 OSR2.1 with the latest 6.82 drivers. Using an ATi Rage Pro (All-in-Wonder) 8MB PCI card now. Both cards perform similarly even though I think in theory the G200 should be a good deal faster.

So I've spent the last couple days just trying different things. I moved the card to a different slot, no go. Thought I was on to something when I was looking at my table of PCI IRQ/DMA assignments in bios and IRQ 10 was set to ISA and not PCI but that didn't help. Still freezes during the driver install. I'm just going to try and install the Sound Blaster Live CT4780 I have for the time being. I have other projects for the future that I can try that Vortex 1 on...

pc-sound-legacy wrote on 2020-10-09, 20:11:

Do you run an SS7 board with VIA chipset? Have had freezes myself with this configuration. Went with an ALI Aladdin based board then and everything worked fine.

It's just a regular Socket 7 baby AT board with an Intel 430TX chipset. I really wanted to use my slot 1 Pentium II baby AT board but I can't seem to find it at the moment.

RichB93 wrote on 2020-10-09, 21:38:

Out of curiosity, what Matrox card are you using? I have a Matrox G200 8MB SDRAM PCI card and it's been a bit crap on my similarly specced machine - for some reason, WinRAR would hard lock when compressing, and 3DMark would drop to the desktop and freeze without being able to complete benchmarks. This was on 95 OSR2.1 with the latest 6.82 drivers. Using an ATi Rage Pro (All-in-Wonder) 8MB PCI card now. Both cards perform similarly even though I think in theory the G200 should be a good deal faster.

It's a Matrox Millenium PCI card, also a G200 I believe. It's 4mb but has the additional ram module to make it 8mb if that helps. I used to know for sure but it's been so long since I've even looked at the parts that I'm a little fuzzy on the exact specs at the moment.

Thanks for all the suggestions and whatnot! Will report back if anything changes.

UPDATE:

Installed the CT4780 in the system, installed some drivers, and then when I went back to update them with the drivers from Creative's website it froze during the install phase! So I'm thinking, "Ok then, it's gotta be a hardware issue. Must be something like the RAM or maybe even the hard drive."

Long story short, I replaced the RAM with a spare I had lying around and changed out the hard drive(which also meant I could take out the Promise DriveMax that I was using to break a capacity limit that may or may not have been the case if there was just an issue with the drive itself) and when I installed just the drivers from Creative's website it worked!

I guess the next plan of attack is a larger hard drive(the one I used for testing is an old 2GB IDE laptop hard drive with a cable adapter). Gonna go with something other than a regular old IDE drive, not sure what though. Then I'll probably try using that Aureal card again that started this whole thing...

Worth downloading an older MemTest (I use mt410.exe) to test RAM on a machine - you can boot to DOS with no drivers etc and use it to do a mem test quickly.