Please Help! Lockin up!

When I start up GW, it plays fine. No glitching, no lag, smooth graphics- and suddenly BZZZzzzt- freezes.

During this frozen time, the sound still plays, the mouse works, the keyboard is 'disabled' (testing it with capslock only works ever minute or so) and the screen flickers. Control-Alt-Del won't work. Neither Alt-Tab. Nor Alt-F4. Nor Escape key.

Only one a few rare occassions did it 'snap' out of its syndrome of evil.

I have an inspiron 1520 with an Nvideo Geforce 8600 card. I don't have any overheat issues (trust me, I wouldn't be able to play crisis for 4 hours if I did). No other game has this problem, period.

ALL DRIVERS ARE UP TO DATE AND CLEANED. DIRECT X9 IS UPDATED. ( I use XP )

Is there a programing conflict or some messed up, unnoticeable feature that I have enabled?

I need your help, guys. Big time.

I really like this game, but I can't enjoy it- if I CAN'T play it. =(

NOTE: Please explain if you want me to turn a feature on or off, use a procedure, ect..

So this is a laptop..?

Anyway when you have Guild Wars on hit CTRL+ ALT + Delete and open the task manager, then go to the Gw.exe process.

Now right click that, and you will see the ''Set Affinity'' option, click on that and uncheck all CPU's except for just one, this enables Guild Wars to run on only one core of your processor, generally only used for trouble shooting purposes, but may help you.

I had to only use one core when I used windows XP too, now I'm on Vista and it's fine.

Also I'm assuming that since you have an 8600 then you have a dual core+ Processor, so this should work.

The reason why it happens seems to be unknown..kinda..or just not fully understood. Guild Wars just sometimes messes up on Dual Core processors, so I figured since you updated everything then this may be why, because when people have problems running on two+ cores they usually get crashes or full system lock-ups. This also explains why you may only have the problem with Guild Wars and no other games.

Excellent reply!

I just wish there was a program to auto-detect such problems in programs and calibrate the processors to that.

I read recently and I'm using 'ForceCore' as a test. If I get any problems I will set yours up (sounds easier).

Thank you for the info. VERY good help.

Hope this works! =D

ForceCore actually does the exact same thing that I mentioned, except automatically instead of manually like my method, I was just too lazy to use ForceCore, but you can try both methods to be double sure, I guess.

I think they do have ''Optimizers'' out there that supposedly optimize your dual core to work properly if it doesn't, but I don't know how to acquire such things, nor do I know if it will fix your problem.

Hope that setting the affinity to only one core helps though, that is about all I can think of at this very moment.