Crashed to desktop - repairing archive - total reboot.. help :D

Hey guys
for a while now my brother has been having problems with his pc, when he plays guild wars or other games we play, the pc crashes the game to desktop at any random time. you could be playing it for a long time, or just the space of 5 minutes, and it will crash to desktop, or sometimes, if your lucky, give you the added pleasure of it rebooting itself.

Now, when it restarts itself there is no blue screen or anything, it just straight up restarts and begins to load up again.

Things we have done to try to fix this:

Reformated, no luck
replaced the graphics card, no luck
replaced memory sticks and swapped them around, no luck
ran all different types of checks on the pc, but found nothing that when removed, fixed the problem.

Oh, and everytime the game crashes to desktop, guild wars has to repair data archive, which can be quite annoying


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The spec of the pc -

Amd 1.2ghz 1600+ i think
ati radeon 9250 128mb
512 mb corsair 400 128pin. i think
no sound card, as he has no speakers
Unsure on the motherboard, its MTI, thats all i know.

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Any help would be welcome on the situation

Try using the -dx8 switch on the short cut to force guildwars is DirectX 8 mode and see if that helps with the crashes. If it does, it's could be video related.

How do i do that eternal? any help wud be good
thanks for ur reply btw

1)Right-click the Guild Wars icon.
2)Select 'Properties'.
3)Select the 'Shortcut' tab.
4)In the 'Target' field...

Try these switches
"C:\Program Files\Guild Wars\Gw.exe" -dx8 -noshaders

This will force guildwars to use direct x 8 vs 9 and disable using microsoft vertex/pixel shaders. Graphic quality will go down.

This is more troubleshooting by making gw not as hard on the video card and see if it's causing it to reboot. If it works, it may be the Nightfall graphics engine update is taxing/stressing your system.

When you re-formated, did you install and mother board chipset software as well as the video and audio?

thanks for the reply
i have just downloaded all the possible driver/bios updates for the mobo, reinstalled the gfx and sound card drivers
and i have now just added the change to the shortcut on the gw file
ill report back with crashes

Ok - i added the changed u said to add, and the crashes are still as frequent, but there is no longer any repairing data archive after the crashes

I'm having the same problems as oli

its annoying ;/
dno how to fix it
i think its a windows problem

yep iv got the same problem making playing almost impossible, have to attempt the smallest quest many times over untill it finally allows me long enough to complete...going to try the advice above now, wish me luck

...tried...didnt work

Being that it is an Athlon 1600, I would check something else first.

Look inside the case, and check the capacitors on the motherboard. Those are the round things that look like little cans. Are any of the swollen or leaking? If so, then that is your problem, you need a new motherboard.

The Athlon 1600 was most popular around 2001-2003. That was also a time period where a lot of motherboards were shipped with defective capacitors. When they do fail, it can cause anything from total failure, to erratic behavior.

Well the mainboard was bought seperately
so they didnt come together, and they were purchased in 2004, so i dont think that will be my problem, but ill check it out

If it's constantly crashing and repairing the data archive that means something is either missing or corrupted, from my experience. I would recommend simply uninstalling and reinstalling Guild Wars.

There's usually a blue screen that would pop up with an error code, but most xp operating systems have an option selected by default to automatically reboot.

Anyone else think re-installing is the way to go before i do it?

edit- also add that it only seems to happen to me on mainland Elona

i re-installed early today and its ran perfectly ever since (touch wood)

@OP Have you looked at the temperature of the CPU/system? It MAY be overheating, that also causes shutdowns as a "self protective" feature. Id try a can of compressed air too, to clean out any dust inside the case.

my comp restarts itself as well but very rarely (once out of 20 times) i know its probably overheating...

it seems reinstalling should do the trick for you

I'm having similar repairing data archive issues. No my PC doesn't crash when this happens, I just log off Guild Wars and log on the next day and this is what I get, "Repairing Data Archives" with a bar with no percentage of completion. After thats finished I have to re-download every single in game file which getting into one character takes me about on hour, as downloading a chunk of 15,000 files altogether. Does anyone know what I can do to prevent this?

One thing I'm kind of curious about is, are most of you that repeatedly get this message using some sort of system restore feature or other data archiving software to backup everything on your hard drive? I have mine turned off, so I don't get these repairing data archive messages every time something is changed, deleted, moved, etc. But I've noticed that on a lot of new PC's that feature is enabled or else there's a particular software running in the background that constantly backs up, or archives all the files on your system in case of a system failure.