GW crashes after an hour

Hey all. I'm new to the game: been playing two weeks.

Guild wars crashes after an hour. once in a while it will last as long as two hours. Up until that point, the game runs smoothly and often with a frame rate in excess of 60 fps. The game runs at a faster frame rate than Morrowind (though that runs for much longer times)!

Sometimes the crash is accompanied by white ares on the screen: areas start being redrawn in white instead of the proper colors/textures.

The crash itself is a freeze. There is no dialog or warning or window of any sort.

The usual searches have revealed nothing.

Windows ME, AMD64 running at a speed of 2.2, 512 meg ram, around 3.5 gig free on the hd, ATI Radeon 8500 with 128 meg.

I would especially like to hear from those with similar hardware. Thanks in advance.

I'm guessing its because your computer only has 512 megs of ram. And i've not heard of many people running Windows ME anymore, which i never was a fan of. As for the white areas, my computer does taht occasionally, too, right before it crashes, usually popping up wit ha RTE, which only happens occasionally. Basically, i'm guessing it's because your computer can't handle it...does your fan run after a while?

i started to have problems with my gw (graphics wise) when my graphics card was over heating, hows your gfx card ?

I'll admit, I'm amazed you got Windows ME to run stable for as long as one hour while running a recent game

Since you mentioned parts of the scene start losing textures I'd say your video card is running out of memory for some reason, or its drivers are messing up their internal state. It could be some bug in ATI's video drivers - I doubt they bother with bugtesting their stuff for Windows ME anymore, and I've seen ATI drivers leak memory in the past. Have you tried different ATI driver versions?

Your video card is damaged, overheating, or both. Make sure your PC is free of dust buildup; make sure the GPU fan is spinning at full speed; make sure other cables and cards are out of the way to ensure maximum airflow to the video card. If the video card is dust free with a properly functioning fan and good airflow, and you're still having artifacting problems, replace the video card.

OK, thanks for the replies so far.

lordpwn: it's just a matter of tweaking and some attention to detail. I can run other stuff for hours & hours. I've crashed more in 2000 than in ME. XP I have never tried, so I can say nothing about it (I can guess that, just for being newer, it is more stable than 2000 was).

anyway ...

I've been in a dialog with the tech support for guildwars. So far they have recommended a thorough uninstall of the existing ATI drivers and an install of the newest (2005) drivers. This I have done. I got the following command line from another forum: "guildwars -dx8 -noshaders". This reduces the graphics a bit and I guess makes it easier for the card. I ran the game for one hour and 40 minutes with no corruption and no crash. This could just be luck: more runs will have to be done to verify that this has in fact fixed it.

This next maybe should be in another thread (ie, topic drift). A possible windfall might allow me to purchase a new video card. Perhaps the BFG Tech (nvideo) geforce 8500 GT w/ 256 meg. The price is right and it is newer than my radeon 8500. Does this card work well with Guild wars?

As for expanding the ram beyond 512 meg, that I expect would be a nightmare (matching it to my motherboard, etc.) and I would prefer to avoid it.