Random in-game freezes...need help

Hey all,

For the better part of the last....6 months, I have had a lot of problems with freezing. I would just be running around in game, then all of a sudden I would stop, sound would repeat over and over and over again. My computer does not experience and strain in this, its only GW. Sometimes if I have it in a smaller windows screen, I can simply close and restart GW. But when its full screen, only thing to do is restart comp.

Ill post up specs for my pc if someone needs it to help out the issue. Everything is updated included directx and drivers. Its a year old pc running a dual core hyperthreaded processor with 2 gigs of ram. Radeon crossfire (although not running crossfire) graphics card with 512gig ddr3 or whatever it is. 256 or 512, cant remember. Ill get more info though but since I am at work, I dont have access to it all.

I have tried reinstalling, and thats about it. Anyone have any thoughts or ideas to help? Its just frusterating to be in a battle sequence and all of a sudden freeze up and take a few mins to get back in.

Any help appreciated, thanks guys.
-Tiki

I had the same problem, and someone said to re download the gw.dat file in your guild wars folder. Be prepared for it to take all night though. I did this a couple weeks ago and the problem went away.

mines locking up too...but it only started recently. It does it alot in GW:EN. but i like GW to much and i have not done anything drastic with my PC so it's i can't see what could be causeing it and it's making me mad because i have to "rebuild data archive" which take about 30 mins.

So basically Wetsparks, re-download gw from guildwars.com right? Dont use the disks?

What I did was I went to the Guild Wars folder, deleted the gw.dat file, and then I ran an image of Guild Wars and let it re download everything. Took about 5 hours going at 100kb/sec. Haven't had any problems since.
I don't know about downloading it from the website, since I didn't do it, but I think that should work.

Ahhhhhh Gotcha

Ill give it a shot and let it dl over night tonight and see how it goes. Thanks for your input and ill be sure to update you as to how it works. Much appreciated.

-Tiki

I've been having similar problems (strange freezes, sometimes able to alt-tab or ctrl-alt-del out of guild wars, but more often having to turn my comp off). Like Ghryphon, I know my computer isn't to blame (in my case because it can play Company of Heroes without difficulty), so I'll try this solution too. In case it doesn't work I've renamed my dat file rather than deleting it (ie to gw.dat.bak), and I'll post here with my results.

I'm gonna have to try this. Although I seem to reformat windows now and again, I have my gw.dat file on my server at work that gets distributed to the machines, rather than installing all of the discs... and THEN downloading everything from scratch. Thing is, GW played fine for the longest time without error until there were updates in the sounds and effects in GW.

I tried...

And to no avail, it did not work. I still freeze up and are forced to restart GW.

Anyone else wanna take a crack at it? Thanks for the support / help so far, its much appreciated.

Also I am not glad others suffer my same problem, but I am a bit relieved that its not just me...lets hope we can find some answers guys!

-Tiki

Well I've read alot of this Freeze up problem,and Ive had the same problem with freeze ups,and what ive noticed is that there is alot of try this try that to no avail.
Overheating-Not!
dust -Not!
more ram - Not!
update drivers - Not!
GW.dat file defrag-Not!
shutdown background prossess-Not!
-dsound/-nosound - Not!
lowering your graphics- Not!
trying to get help from Anet- BIG NOT!!!!

so what's next? so far no one has come up with a real solution to this problem,people with top line systems are having this same problem,so it must not be because you have a low end system,some people play Oblivion which has higher system requirements and run it fine,but they have this freeze up/crash with GuildWars.

ANET NEEDS TO ADDRESS THIS BIG CRASH/FREEZE UP PROBLEM!
TOO MANY PEOPLE ARE HAVING THIS PROBLEM IT MUST BE THE GAME ITSELF.

I have had this problem too. I am playing away and it could be for hours and hours and then BOOM, the game frezes and then sound starts stuttering like a skipping CD. Control+alt+delete doeasn't work or anything. Reboot is the only way. Siometimes it happens within a few hours sometime several times and hour. Thank god for reconnect and reinsert into instance or I would be verily pissed. O ther than this, I have had the game randomly minimise on it's own and once it spontainiously just closed; no warning or dialog. I never had this problem until a couple moths ago. I hope a fix comes around soon.

IF you feel you've tried everything that you can to fix the problem, and want Anet to take a look at it, you need to submit a trouble ticket with them to make them 'officially' aware of the problem. The more people that report this as an issue, the better.

Also, it helps greatly to note any particular times/instances where this freeze-up occurs.

I found that I was having in game lag and freezing too.

What I did was reinstall the client... helped a little.
Enabled triple buffering in your video cards 3D settings.
Downloaded and ran Contig to defrag the GW.dat file... WinXP's defrag missed it.
Moved my video card to its own rail on the power supply. It was sucking life from my HDD.
Reduced my graphics bit rate to 16bit. Minimal graphics change, but I still run everything at max in game.

All of these things together havce reduced my lag and eliminated 90% of my problems. I now run 60FPS in our guild hall (Frozen Isle). It use to be mid 20's

Most of these fixes can be found in the stickies at the top of this section.

YMMV!

i'm getting this too... and its definately not my computer, since:

It only happens in certain areas (while playing on Gyala Hatchery, its happened in the same area... 3 times)

My computer performance was DOUBLED a few weeks ago, with noticable performance increase

i've sent a ticket, but... nothing yet :\

Whats ironic about this statement is that after sending a troubleticket they asked me to go to the forums for my issue...that public forums are monitored by employees and that is where real fixes and changes come in.

Mind boggling....I don't agree with the reactive approach.

I'm getting this problem also, and it seems that most people with the problem have one thing in common: dual-core cpus. In another thread, the poster said setting affinity helps...I'm gonna try it out and see how that goes.

Aye, I didn't have this problem until I put together my dual-core. Interesting.

Yep, setting the affinty to run on a single core seems to work, well it does for me and a few others anyway. However, why the hell the muppets at ANet support refuse to admit there's some sort of dual-core problem is beyond me.

I've had more than a few tickets closed for no reason other than I pointed out to them that this problem is with their game/coding and not the myriad of peoples computers. It's great when official support for a game you paid for treat you like shit.

A guildie with the same issue told me that he solved it by installing the AMD Dual-Core Optimizer from the AMD web site. I'll try it out and report back my findings. (If I remember to.)

This might seem like a stupid suggestion, but Vertical Sync used to cause horrible video crashes for me, usually going so far as to restart my PC. I thought it was my video card dying, but all was perfectly fine with it and all other games worked fine. Because it was obviously a video-related crash (scrambled images sometimes), I tried disabling Vertical Sync just as a wild guess and haven't crashed since. Give that a try maybe?