Guild Wars Crashing Entire System

'allo. I have this annoyance with Guild Wars and I think it's exclusive to Guild Wars because this doesn't happen on any other game. I left a more graphically intensive game on over the night and it didn't crash my computer like Guild Wars did.

• Intel Core 2 Duo E7200 (Stock clocked)
• VisionTek Radeon HD 4850 (Overclocked to 700MHz Core and 1050MHz Memory with Catalyst 8.10)
• 2x 1GB DDR2 PC8500 RAM
• 650W CoolerMaster Real Power Pro
• Windows Vista Home Premium SP1 32-Bit

Guild Wars likes to crash every now and then and I have no clue as to why it's doing it. It locks the entire computer up and makes annoying, repeating sounds. Most of time, the screen freezes and I can't move my mouse cursor or anything. Sometimes it gets a black screen and restarts. One time my monitor displayed "No Signal" but I could still hear those annoying sounds.

I have also gotten "Display driver atikmdag.sys stopped responding and has recovered" or something along the lines of that. That has only happened once and that was while I was playing Guild Wars.

Anything I can do to further diagnose or resolve this?

Thanks in advance.

your graphic card is probably unstable at those speeds. GW is really finicky about hardware stability, and will crash long before a more demanding game will. drop the core speed to something more reasonable, like 660mhz, and see if the game still crash.

yes, lower the speed on the 4850, I would suspect that is the problem.... if not it may be a corrupted gw.dat file, but I doubt it with that error message.

I got this *exact* same problem with two games on my Vista 64 bit, literally the exact same things happened, in no particular order. But I had an Nvidia card and AMD Processor.

I couldn't fix it.. tried updating everything except the BIOS. It'd always say that it was a hardware failure but it's not because everything is perfect on Windows XP.

I'd say trying to run Guild Wars with only one core instead of two, you never know. CTRL+ALT+DEL while Guild Wars is up, and then in the Windows Task Manager go to the Processes tab, find Gw.exe, right click, go down to ''Set Affinity'' and un-check one of the cores. I kind of doubt this will help, but it's worth a try.

Also make sure you have no dust and that your parts aren't overheating. Guild Wars would easily push my card to 85c+ (8800GTS) with the fan at 60%. Alas everything is different though, but I did hear that 4850's ran hot?

The error has nothing to do with GW.
GW is an application and can not crash the system, only drivers can, plus the error message says it's a display driver error.

It might be that GW uses a buggy function in the driver, or it might be, like other suggest above, that GW stresses the system more, leading to overheating or memory errors due to overclocking.

If stopping overclocking doesn't fix the problem it's time to contact ATI support.

I clocked the 4850 down to 600MHz Core and 1000MHz Memory, set GW to run on only one core and it still crashes. =[

I'll try -repair and if that doesn't work, off to ATI support I suppose.

I'd also like to mention that my mom's notebook has these crashes also. She's using an Nvidia GeForce 8400M GT, and the crashes only happen at the login or character selection screen. Her notebook also has Windows Vista Home Premium SP1 32-Bit.

These crashes only happen with Guild Wars... Argh!

Google ForceCore