Black Screen of Death

Painbringer

Painbringer

Furnace Stoker

Join Date: Jun 2006

Minnesota

Black Widows of Death

W/Mo

I have been having a little issue with GW. I will be playing the game fine with a little lag, and all of a sudden every thing goes black and I get a monitor signal of “No Signal” The computer is on and you here the hard drive is running / fan ETC… But I can not do anything. I have to basically flip the power source off and back on to reboot the computer. No errors messages after reboot, and if you look at the components and drives the all seem good? When I log back on to GW it lets me reconnect to last location I was at. I run a basic default setting no bells and whistles for graphics just an on board ATI Graphics. This has happened 3 times in the last 2 weeks? Should I be worried or is this a game issue? I have never had it happen in anything but GW. But I really only play GW so I probably don’t push the graphics/memory doing other things. Any advice or test you can think of I can do? (Please speak in layman terms because I am sure I will be confused if you don’t)

Thanks in advance

Flightmare

Flightmare

Lion's Arch Merchant

Join Date: Nov 2006

NL

Infinite Omega Negatives

N/

Look like an error in your graphics chip. First thing you can do is try to update it. Second thing you can do is try killing as many processes as possible to loosen processor pressure (ctrl+alt+delete and go to the tab processes). Kill as many processes as possible (throw them into a searching engine to check what they do and wether they can be killed or not) including explorer.exe, then just start up the game using "new task"

Best thing you can do is to post your specs so we can see if anything other is going wrong.

You got this only once or multiple times?
Processor overheating?

lakatz

lakatz

Wilds Pathfinder

Join Date: Jun 2006

There is an experiment going on in connection with the "latency issues" everyone has been having for the past two weeks in the "To people with huge lag spikes" thread. Could disconnects trigger your "No Signal" messages? Just a thought.

Relnor

Relnor

Lion's Arch Merchant

Join Date: Feb 2006

W/

Wild guess: is your computer an HP?

Alas Poor Yorick

Frost Gate Guardian

Join Date: Mar 2007

I get the same problem but it only lasts a second or two and then the screen comes back.

Is your monitor an LCD, by any chance, and do you know if it has some kind of color correction program running?

My problem seems to be linked to the ColorVision Spyder 2 program which configures the color of the monitor to be more accurate. When I disable the profile, I don't seem to experience the problem. All I can figure out is there is some kind of conflict between GW and the LCD color correction program. Maybe something similar is happening with you?

Painbringer

Painbringer

Furnace Stoker

Join Date: Jun 2006

Minnesota

Black Widows of Death

W/Mo

My system is an E-machine w/ built in ATI graphics 128 / AMD 2.5 / 872 Ram left over. I do have a cheaper LCD Monitor. Last night I had a total freeze up but the display kept the picture. I do not have anything except Norton Antivirus running, and a logictec programmable keyboard. Which has never been an issue before. My Connections have been horrible lately Orange to red mostly and even when it is green it seems bad.

How do you check for updates and do an update on an inboard graphic chip?

I come form the state of mind if it isn’t broke do not touch it.

Thanks,

Pain

Quaker

Quaker

Hell's Protector

Join Date: Aug 2005

Canada

Brothers Disgruntled

Sometimes the 'black screen' thing is a driver issue with particular graphics card/LCD combinations. It can also be caused by utilities such as the ColorVision one mentioned above. Those problems are not related to GW.
On the other hand, the GW freezing thing seems to happen to a lot of people. It happened to me a lot before I got my new video card. I haven't played GW enough lately to know if it's completely gone though.