Background Download?

While playing last night I was getting a pretty good fps for me (40-60). I had lowered graphics settings to Medium or low and resolution was 1024x768.

I began having problems with freezing. And ultimately the machine rebooted. I did notice however that while checking the fps, at the bottom of the box it said "background download 577 kb." Was this download happening on my computer or the ANet server? I don't know what it means as my computer should not have been downloading anything. And could that download have been the cause of my crash?

The same thing happened three nights ago....after the crash I played for 3 hours with no problems AT ALL!!??

I had been having graphical problems a couple of weeks ago. Those have been fixed by reinstalling some vid card software, win updates, and drivers.

I was going on 2 weeks with no problems which makes me think that my machine may not be to blame although it is pretty old, it performs fine the rest of the time.

That download is normal. It's how anet passes most of the updates to you, reduces the time needed to download part of the updates and instal them. Even though your machine seems to perform fine, i would check for dust inside it and if there's a lot of it, which is very likely if you never cleaned the inside of your computer, remove it with a pressur can. Never use a vaccum cleaner to dust the inside of your computer.

Thanks for the suggestion...I did that a couple of weeks ago.

Wow...played for three hours last night and NO problems.

I went two weeks with no problems, then I have a couple of freezes and reboots this week.

Am I silly in thinking that if my machine was at fault, then I would have problems EVERY time I play? Or am I freaking out over something that is just part of life.

Do you perform routine system maintenance on your PC? This includes defrag, spyware / anti-virus sweeps, security port scans, etc...

To prevent background downloads in the future: add -image as a command line on a new shortcut called Guild Wars Update, it will DL everything, thus preventing you from having to DL in game.