Author Topic: Crash City (Read 609 times)

Sakai · « **on:** April 13, 2003, 09:18:31 PM »

Well, now that sound is working, how do I deal with the contsant crashing I never used ot have but now have?

downloaded newest directx

New drivers for the Video card (disabled the AGP fastwriting)

Blah, blah, blah.

This machine worked flawlessly for months, all of a sudden "BOOM!"

Constant crashes to desktop, sometimes the machine crashes so hard I have to reset it or it is restarting itself.

Any ideas?

Sakai/BobMean

Running Direct X 9.0
AOpen AK77-333 Board
Turtle Beach Santa Cruz
512 Memory
AMD Chip (Athlon XP 2100+)
PNY GeForce4 Ti4600 Video Card

Shane · « **Reply #1 on:** April 13, 2003, 09:50:41 PM »

try the simple things first.

reduce sound acceleration.

reinstall the vid drivers.

reinstall dx then the vid drivers.

FOGOLD · « **Reply #2 on:** April 14, 2003, 02:40:56 AM »

Don't get me going on hard crashes. I have been everywhere except bin the machine. Mine must be a screwed orthbridge or something because Nothing fixes it.

Sakai · « **Reply #3 on:** April 14, 2003, 07:32:57 AM »

Quote

Originally posted by Shane
try the simple things first.

reduce sound acceleration.

reinstall the vid drivers.

reinstall dx then the vid drivers.

Done and done.

Thanks for replying though.

Sakai

Shane · « **Reply #4 on:** April 14, 2003, 07:45:42 AM »

Quote

Originally posted by Sakai
Done and done.

Thanks for replying though.

Sakai

what was changed that might have contributed to this sudden crashing?

you running a virus scanner while u play?

Sakai · « **Reply #5 on:** April 14, 2003, 08:09:18 AM »

Quote

Originally posted by Shane
what was changed that might have contributed to this sudden crashing?

you running a virus scanner while u play?

I cannot think of a thing that has changed. It worked flawlessly, I had to reinstall AH and it has not worked since. When it worked, I never disabled the Norton. Now I disable it and it still crashes.

Sakai

acetnt · « **Reply #6 on:** April 14, 2003, 01:13:39 PM »

Hello Sakai,

This may not be even close to your solution but was the reason for my recent crash problems. I upgraded my bios among other many other things and started experience frame slow down i.e. frame rate would drop to zero and even random reboots. I undid all my upgrades until finally I got to the bios. Seems that in the new bios I enabled the 4X AGP. Even though my video card is 4x, this seems to have been the cause. I uninstalled the bios and now play the game perfectly.

This being my case, perhaps you could try 2X AGP and use the "safe"/ default" bios setting of your motherboard. Just make sure you write down what you were changing so you can undo.

On another explanation - check your cpu temp in bios after a crash - see if it is normal.

qts · « **Reply #7 on:** April 16, 2003, 03:14:16 PM »

Yes - I had exactly the same problem when enabling AGP 4X on my ABit VP6

Dingbat · « **Reply #8 on:** April 16, 2003, 03:21:19 PM »

Get rid of that AMD crap...

Did you use any thermal goop on your processor between the heatsink and the chip? No, then goto Artic Silver even if you did and used cheap stuff (not meant to be an insult) it may have dried out. I also am not a fan of PNY, had a friend go through 3 PNY vid cards in 8 months all ti4600... He switched to MSI last time and had no problems since.

Heat, maybe
Video Card Heat, possibly
Power Supply, possible, check the voltages in your BIOS or Monitoring program, make sure there is not less than .2 drop...

Hope this helps

Sakai · « **Reply #9 on:** April 16, 2003, 03:26:19 PM »

Quote

Originally posted by Dingbat

Get rid of that AMD crap...

Did you use any thermal goop on your processor between the heatsink and the chip? No, then goto Artic Silver even if you did and used cheap stuff (not meant to be an insult) it may have dried out. I also am not a fan of PNY, had a friend go through 3 PNY vid cards in 8 months all ti4600... He switched to MSI last time and had no problems since.

Heat, maybe
Video Card Heat, possibly
Power Supply, possible, check the voltages in your BIOS or Monitoring program, make sure there is not less than .2 drop...

Hope this helps

The machine has worked for the better part of a year now flawlessly with a wide range of programs. It only started recently with AH and then, as I trouble shot my way I started seeing more screwups in other proggies.

Finally, I found that there is a driver not put out by PNY or NVidia, but by microsoft for NVidia because (big surprise) they screwed the pooch on their end.

Since downloading that no problems but haven't been on with load of folks at night, usually the Crash City problems greatest then.

Thanks for the notes, will save.

I am going to clean the cat fur out and check the temp.

Sakai

Dingbat · « **Reply #10 on:** April 16, 2003, 03:42:08 PM »

Quote

Originally posted by Sakai
Finally, I found that there is a driver not put out by PNY or NVidia, but by microsoft for NVidia because (big surprise) they screwed the pooch on their end.

That's probably just the WHQL Driver... But if that fixed it, excellent.

Sakai · « **Reply #11 on:** April 16, 2003, 03:53:26 PM »

Quote

Originally posted by Dingbat
That's probably just the WHQL Driver... But if that fixed it, excellent.

I had already updated every other I could find. We will see what happens at night when the crashes seemed to be more common.

Sakai · « **Reply #12 on:** April 16, 2003, 07:48:46 PM »

Quote

Originally posted by Dingbat
That's probably just the WHQL Driver... But if that fixed it, excellent.

Aaaaaack did not work, still doing it.

Sakai

barfo · « **Reply #13 on:** April 17, 2003, 04:50:49 PM »

In your description, I didn't see anything that said what activity causes the crash. Does that mean that you can load Aces High then walk away and it will eventually crash? If it doesn't crash there then does it crash only after you are logged in? That would indicate something that only occurs when, perhaps there's network activity going on...or activity on the screen or sounds. Does it crash in offline mode? If it doesn't crash in offline mode then that would narrow it down to possible issues with the NIC card...???

(you don't have to answer all these questions in the forum...you can ask yourself these)

If it crashes all the time randomly with nothing in common, even if the computer is sitting there idle then I would suspect a thermal or other hardware problem (such as power supply). If random lockups are happening while you're not using the PC, regardless of the applications you're using, then try this: Run the computer in Safe mode for a long enough time to determine if the crash happens. If it doesn't happen in safe mode then that pretty much rules out a problem with the CPUs overheating. (you see I once had a CPU overheat prob and it locked up no matter what I was doing, even idle). If the crash doesn't happen while in safe mode then that seems to show that the crash is related to one of your devices. Try to use an alternate hardware profile. (i.e., Control-Panel|System|Hardware|Hardware Profiles), and disable various things, such as the audio or network NIC driver and experiment with different settings. See what happens when you run Aces High with no sound driver installed. See what happens with no NIC driver. Of course you can't substitute out the DirectX drivers, nor can you run AH in safe mode. But this might get you started on narrowing down what component is needed in order for the problem to happen.

Hope I didn't patronize too much, I have no idea what your expeience level is.

I know how frustrating intermittents are so it might take some time to narrow it down but try disabling stuff and wait to see what happens. If you have Windows XP you can use the system-restore facility to save your current system before you mess around with it.

Oh one more thing, then I'll get going...

I had a recent problem with Windows 2000 where I had to reinstall DirectX and somehow I messed up my system so badly that I could not uninstall DirectX or clean it out . I had to reinstall the system to fix it. Hope yours isn't that dire.

Good luck,

Barfo

Sakai · « **Reply #14 on:** April 17, 2003, 08:52:23 PM »

Quote

Originally posted by barfo
Hope I didn't patronize too much, I have no idea what your expeience level is.
Good luck,

Barfo

Not at all, you are immensely helpful and I appreciate it, my troubleshooting ability rates right up there with my ability to leap from here to mars.

It crashes only when playing games--offline and online. I reloaded the newest driver from NVidia after loading the Microsoft driver. I had a funky system thing which it said recovered from all by itself (no description).

It crashes it seems when ever I am doing much in a game. If I am gently climibing and no one is around I don't seem to crash . This has happened mostly since I got my sound card rolling but I seem to recall it occurring before just maybe not as much.

I will check this sytuff out, might have a question or two for you.

Thanks so much for taakig the time, I really appreciate it.

Sakai