POSSIBLE BSOD Portcls fix for Creative X-fi's--NEEDS TESTING.

Try the following and please report back:
If you have a creative labs X-fi (not an xtremeaudio), any PCI or PCI-E version,

Click on start menu->Run->Regedit
go to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE/SYSTEM/Currentcontrolset/Control/Creative Tech

Go to Driver folder.
Then look for the PCI&VEN_1102&DEV_XXXX folder that should be there. Then click on the folder.

Add a new STRING and name it DisableXRAM, and set it to a string value of 1.
If you have more than one PCI&VEN in there, do it for the other folder.

Then restart the computer and test for any BSOD's while running the game or alt tabbing with the game running.

Please report back to see if this improves, fixes, or doesn't fix the issue.

Seems to work, I tried all the other things before, without success...(new drivers, beta drivers, third-party drivers, etc.).

One less "--nosound" user here.

Still no real fix...but I can live with it...xD

I hope the "DisableXRAM" does not interfere with anything else...

DisableXRAM was a fix from when Unreal Tournament 3 used to crash on x-fi cards that had extra features for xram (and UT3 was an xfi branded game, go figure), way back when it took Epic and Creative ages to find out what was going on back in the day. Then creative made a beta x-fi driver which as a new "workaround", allowed you to disable xram so the game would stop crashing.

You still get full accelerated 3D sound, just some features of the x-fi which relied on xram were not used.

I got the idea when reading another person's post who felt that this was openAL and buffer related. Then I remembered that Xram fix from 2008...


Nothing is broken by it. And if memory serves, you don't even have to reboot the computer if you want to remove the variable.

This appears to be working for me as well. No BSODs while I played after making the registry edit.

Whoa ! If this is the fix, then a big thank you to you sir !!!
I'm going to tell this to my brother who was BSOD'ing because of his Creative Sound Card and had to resort to '-nosound' :P

You guys should try to ask the devs to sticky this.

Just definitely be lucky that Creative never removed the ability to disable xram after the UT3 beta driver (eventually a new non beta driver release stopped Unreal tournament 3 from crashing with Xram, but they kept the ability to disable xram ever since, which I think is undocumented).

Good to know there's a fix to this problem. Will do the above steps once I get back home from work.

Great i'll try this tonight and report back.

I quite frequently got BSOD becouse of my creative X-fi card.

Since I tried this fix, I havent experienced any BSOD's at all for atleast 24h.

I will report back if I feal that my opinion has changed regarding the creative X-fi related BSOD's, but for now, everything seems to be working just fine.

Thanks for the quick and easy fix Falkentyne!