CoF will not load

Hi guys and thanks for your input. I am not sure if this is Hardware or Software.

I have a New Dell Computer with Vista and a decent Video Card. I bought this computer after my computer that is 5 years old finally gave up the ghost.

Everything was fine until one day i was asked to join in a CoF run with my monk. So I went with the team and got the Black Screen of Death. I had to hit Control-Alt-Del to be able to gain control of my computer and ended GW there.

When I logged back in my armor was missing on my monk and when I went to play him the armor reappeared. Humm I thought to myself something is just not right here.

So. I contacted Anet and they said that my Video card was junk and I needed to replace it. I was left scratching my head. Why would a video card that is 5 years old work with GW and this Brand New Dell Tower not work with this very old software?

So I got a different response a day later - after looking at Video cards - from Anet saying that it was not the Video card but my Direct X.

So I down loaded the Direct X new one and still can not play CoF. So I wrote back to Anet and then they said it must be the driver. So I downloaded the latest driver and went to play. When I moved my mouse over my toon in the outpost I almost had a ceasure. The screen was flashing like crazy with some of the landscape going nuts. This is the new driver? WOW. So after 30 minutes I rolled back the driver to the one it was before and the flashing stopped but I can not get to CoF still.

It would appear that Anet is just guessing at my problem. There is no way that I should have to get a new Video Card as my wife has a lap top - bought the same time - with Vista on it but she can get to Cof on that can I can not on mine.

Also if I go to the central transfer station my toon will not even appear. The computer just shuts down and I can not even load GW. This is messed up.

So my Question is: Has anyone else had this problem? Do I have to buy a 500 dollar Video Card to get to 2 areas of the game? Can U pull the video card out of the old (5 year old) computer and use that with my Brand New Super fast computer that has cruddy VISTA? Is the old card compatible with Vista.

I know that the old computer worked fine and was fast enough cause I have the super fast Connection. My ping is 85-75 90% of the time.

Will a new video card solve the problem? For now I just do not platy CoF or go to the CTS. It would be nice to put the Cloth of the Broth.. on some of my heros as I have 2 of them in storage.

Thanks for your help and insight!!

What videocard have you got? And have you try updating the driver?

Well I am not at home right now so I can not tell you the exact video card. Only that the whole computer is less than 2 months old. As I posted above they said that it was the video card and then they said it was not the card but the driver. Again above I sated that I installed the latest driver and that was Worst and almost blinded me so I changed it back - called rolled back in computer lingo -

Thanks for the question though

I'm surprised at ANet's responses to this. Most of the people (who reply) on this forum know that these problems are usually related to a corrupted gw.dat file. The usual solution is to run GW with the -image command line. You'd think ANet would know this by now.

There's a sticky in these forums about using -image, but here's the basics (yet again):

Right click on your GW shortcut on your desktop (or quick launch bar) - select "properties"
The "target" line should say something like"

"C:\Program Files\Guild Wars\gw.exe" - (your path may vary)

Edit the line so that it says:

"C:\Program Files\Guild Wars\gw.exe" -image - note that -image is outside the quotes.

When you run this, it will download all the GW data and fix/replace your gw.dat. This takes a long time - it's 4gigs or so - so you'll want to do it while you sleep/work/school. When it's finished, be sure to remove the "-image" to get GW to run normally again.

You could also try using "-repair" instead of "-image", but I haven't tried that myself.

EDIT - forgot to mention, sometimes these problems just fix themselves - the gw.dat will often repair itself.

Well thanks for that little timbit. (that is a canadian donut) We'll see if this is the cause or not.

i had a computer that used to restart randomly on mishes tried everything, but never got fixed. so i had to play missions on another PC...that sucked lol
anyways sorry about your problem, but i feel your pain

Never trust PlayNC support on technical advice. They attempted to tell me my BIOS settings were unstable, and had me send a full log of the parts of my PC.

After I sent said list to them, they claimed I was using an "exotic" motherboard, and it would not function for Guild Wars. This is because I have a custom doped and spun motherboard chipset, but it is still the same as retail minus a few tweaks to structure.

After telling them to go suck an egg and that they were dead wrong, they tried to tell me I had a graphics issue... and then a RAM issue. Finally I had to tell them politely to go find a hole and crawl in it. PlayNC fails at tech support.

<font color="darkred">Please give your system specs here, and tell us if any other programs give you any sort of errors or crash.</font>

A Timbit is not a doughnut - it's a .... er...Timbit.... a doughnut hole. You'll have a bunch of dumb US tourists coming up here thinking "Canadian donuts are much smaller than ours".
(Actually, I think Dunkin Donuts, in the US, has the same sort of thing as Timbits, but they call them Munchkins.)