Hello. I recently installed the Kodak DVC323 USB digital camera and accompanying software (Pictureworks Live) on my Dell PII 300 computer (W95 OSR2). The camera works - it will take still pictures fine, but with the included PictureWorks Live software, it will not record. I can "see" my live video onscreen, but as soon as I try to record I get a "PWLive" error box with detail statements like these 2 most common ones:

1) PWLIVE caused an invalid page fault in module AVIFIL32.DLL at 0237:7f322e4f. Registers: EAX=00000000 CS=0237 EIP=7f322e4f EFLGS=00010246 EBX=014328bc SS=023f ESP=008bf1f0 EBP=008bf2d4 ECX=008bf208 DS=023f ESI=008bf340 FS=1247 EDX=00000000 ES=023f EDI=008bf254 GS=124e Bytes at CS:EIP: 8b 18 ff 53 14 5f 5e 5b 8b e5 5d c2 0c 00 ff 74 Stack dump: 00000000 014328bc 008bf208 014328bc 01a6b2e0 0143282c 73646976 30323449 00000000 00000000 00000000 000003e8 00002ee0 00000000 00000000 00000000

2) PWLIVE caused an invalid page fault in module KERNEL32.DLL at 0237:bff99dbd. Registers: EAX=c0015ee8 CS=0237 EIP=bff99dbd EFLGS=00210212 EBX=02d8fe28 SS=023f ESP=02c8ff08 EBP=02c901a4 ECX=00000000 DS=023f ESI=00000000 FS=1277 EDX=bff766c1 ES=023f EDI=bff78110 GS=0000 Bytes at CS:EIP: 53 8b 15 8c 19 fc bf 56 89 4d e4 57 89 4d dc 89 Stack dump:

Trying other software on the Kodak CD, such as MGI Videowave, I get a mmsystem 296 error when I start the program. If I OK the error box the program will then run.What's strange is that if I start recording with Videowave it does not hang up, but when I stop recording it will not playback what I recorded, nor give me an option to save. BUT, if I go to the directory where the software downloads files, there are the avi files there that I have made. I can play these with my audio and video, BUT if I email one to someone all they get is audio from the avi - no video!

I must have some conflicts here somewhere. I'm considering reformatting to get rid of a year's work of junk leftover after I've downloaded & deleted a lot of software, but I'd rather avoid that. Has anyone had a similar problem? A solution? Will reformatting even solve the problems?

Thanks, Terry

-- Terry McComb (packrat@mindspring.com), January 04, 1999

Answers

Reformatting isn't so much the issue, as it is getting back to a * clean* install of Win95 or '98. We're perpetually installing and deinstalling software around here, and our original Win95 system got to the point that it couldn't even shut itself down! From talking to other tester-type folks, you have to pretty much plan on wiping your Windoze boot drive periodically, to keep it running reliably.

What we've done around here is bought two excellent programs from PowerQuest: Partition Magic, and Drive Image. Partition Magic lets us partition the hard drive on our main Win98 system, and then choose which partition to boot off of. This way, we can have a "test" partition that we can do anything we want to, and not worry about trashing our actual "work" partition. The other half of this dynamic duo is Drive Image, which lets us save complete "images" of a partition in compressed format on another drive or drive partition. We keep a "clean" copy of Win98 as an image (actually, we keep several different versions, with different things installed), and then just restore the image to an empty partition before testing the next set of software. This works like a charm! It cost us a few bucks to get the programs and hardware (an extra, roomy hard drive, to store the drive images on), but it's paid off hugely in time and hassle saved.

-- Dave Etchells (web@imaging-resource.com), January 08, 1999.