Game Crashing

For the past couple of days I have been unable to last more than 10 minutes in GW without my computer completely crashing. I've run a virus/spyware check, nothing comes up. I'll be in game, and all of a sudden the game freezes and there is a weird sound coming from the soundtrack. It skips and squeals a little bit. My computer is pretty old but it's been running GW fine for the past 2 and a half years. Specs:

AMD Athlon XP 3200+ 2.19GHz
512 MB of Ram
Windows XP SP2
NVIDIA GeForce4 MX 440 with AGP8X

This just started happening on Monday night. Any advice?

First things first
GW dat could have become corrupted, you could back up the dat file and reinstall.

other ideas

Looking at your specs I would say you are well capable of playing GW.
Your one weak spot is the memory.

If as you say its been working fine till now here are some things to check on.

First have you installed anything recently that's taking up memory ?
Look on the right side of your task bar anything there is running all the time.

Depending on your level of expertise you could run msconfig and see if there is anything strange in the startup taking up resources.
There are websites that list startup items, what they do and if they need to be there.

Other than that it seems you either have a very bad internet connection at the moment, something has made windows really unstable or a hardware failure.
I would go for one of the last three if you also get crashes outside of GW.

Thanks gremlin. I haven't gotten any crashes outside of GW. I haven't installed anything except Ad Aware (which I installed after experiencing the problem just to check and see if my firewalls spyware scanner missed anything). My connection is fine, I can still play games over XBOX Live. I will try your suggestions and post back. Thanks for the advice.

This problem is often associated with dual-core processors. I had this problem too, but about 2 weeks ago I started using a little app called ForceCore (google it), and it hasn't locked up since I told it to only run in one core. However, an Athlon XP isn't a dual-core processor - are you sure it's not an Athlon 64 X2?

You really should get more RAM....

Is the computer overclocked?

Just at a guess I would say memory - 512 is the minimum for nightfall and I sort of think GWEN added more stress and it is always possible that some windows or program update in the background has eaten up a little bit more RAM than it used to. So probably cheapest and quickest thing to try would be to add more memory and see if it works.

I tried shutting down some unnecessary stuff in msconfig, but its still happening. Tonight I managed to get in just over 10 minutes.

@Quaker, I'm sure and no it's not overclocked.

@Mork from Ork, I agree that more RAM wouldn't hurt but again, it's been working perfectly fine up until a couple of days ago.

I am going to try a fresh install and see if that helps.

Additional thoughts

Have you recently updated sound or video drivers ?

Since you say there is a sound glitch before the crash try playing with sound off in the game and see if it still crashes.

I haven't updated any drivers recently. Last time I did that was about 4-5 months ago and had been playing fine. I will still try with sound off.

I deleted my dat file, and started new, but it's still happening. This is really weird, I have no idea what is going on.



Ahhh crap. As it seems it's not just GW, can't playmusic in Winamp either, but for some reason movies play fine. Ah well, I must have picked something up somewhere, I need to get this sorted. Thanks for the assistance guys.

hmmm put the game on a different cpu if you have any. try reinstalling it run a virus scan on it. seems like you may have something wrong with ur hardware.....

I do love problem solving "sry I know its a pain for you"

With winamp failing to run I am now thinking codecs, when I downloaded the divx player recently it had an effect on my directx

I was wondering if something needed to play moviefiles in GW has been altered.
ie instead of windows media player being the default its now something else.

If no one comes up with an idea here try visiting "annoyances.org" and looking for similar problems in their pages.
Usually someone else has had a similar problem, I use it for windows problem solving rather than games problem solving.

Good luck and if you fix it put us out of our misery with the answer, it may help someone else.

I isolated the issue to my sound card. I went into the device manager and saw that the drivers for it were not installed. I reinstalled the drivers from the installation cd and now it seems to be working without issue, i.e. I was able to stay in GW for around 20 minutes this time and can also play music again. I don't know how it related to GW freezing on me constantly and I still don't know how the drivers came to be missing in the first place. Just to make sure it is resolved though I am going to afk in GW for a while.

Yeah, sound cards can cause a problem too, cause lets say Guild Wars wants to make a sound, but theres a conflict or driver error, it can cause it to crash.(Example?) - In fact my old sound card caused my computer to lock so I removed it completely.

I agree, my old Pc had the same problem, Ram stress is odd and shows up more noticably in things we use most often - like guild wars. Eventually my old pc started to crash on msn, and firefox too.

Hopefully you've resolved the issues with those drivers now though, Do watch that ram :P