Random Crashing

POINGjam

Pre-Searing Cadet

Join Date: Aug 2009

When I play Guild Wars, the game will randomly cause my computer to crash. It's not just the one application; if I have music on in the background, it locks up too and the screen goes black, so it's the whole computer. Guild Wars and Fallout 3 are the only applications I know of that cause a crash like this on my computer (most everything else runs fine).

It can't be a performance issue, since I'm getting about 85 FPS. The game did this years ago when I first got it, so I quit, but I figured they'd have fixed it by now and I started playing again. I even have a different video card now, so I'm guessing it's not that. I tried updating the video driver and that hasn't helped.

To sum my computer up, I'm running a Radeon X850, a Pentium 4 3.2 Gigahertz CPU, a gig of ram, and an Audigy 2 sound card. Here's my DxDiag:
http://www.deproductive.com/DxDiag.txt

majikmajikmajik

Wilds Pathfinder

Join Date: Aug 2007

SATown~Tx

Guild Hopper!

R/

are you crashing today? becuz the are having a matinence today untill noon i think

Bob Slydell

Forge Runner

Join Date: Jan 2007

Quote:
Originally Posted by majikmajikmajik View Post
are you crashing today? becuz the are having a matinence today untill noon i think
Network Maintenance would not cause hardware on a computer to dramatically lock up, Internet and computer are two different worlds.

@ OP: Several things could be wrong. First if this is new just try a reinstall of Drivers/DirectX and see if that helps. Also go ahead and look in the computer at fans and air ports and mak sure they are not clogged with dist. You'd be surprised even the smallest amount of dust can seem to cause enough poor air flow to cause a complete overheat failure.

Snograt

Snograt

rattus rattus

Join Date: Jan 2006

London, UK GMT??0 ??1hr DST

[GURU]GW [wiki]GW2

R/

Hmm, only 1GB of RAM?

AGP video card (Radeon X850)

Creative Audigy (I know - it's a good old card, but Creative's drivers can crash anything.

That's my initial impressions at least

The forth fly

The forth fly

Krytan Explorer

Join Date: May 2008

england

Mo/

u dont need a gig of ram to run gw i was running it for 3 years on 512meg with no problems at all

l15ard

l15ard

Pre-Searing Cadet

Join Date: Jul 2009

UK

The Knights of Cyadon

R/

From what you've discribed, it sounds like one of two things, a heat issue, or a power issue, as if you've an intel, they'll cut out to protect themselves from damage, but then your pc would restart, get a temperature monitor and run it when your playing games.

Power issues can be caused by running too much stuff inside your case or having too small a rated psu to cope with your kit, so this info will be useful to so I can help you solve your problem, ATI's are notorious for sucking lots of power.

one small tip is to disconnect unnessecary kit and try the game again, see if it crashes out.

hope this helps

can you tell your PSU wattage, and the rail voltages etc.

Quaker

Quaker

Hell's Protector

Join Date: Aug 2005

Canada

Brothers Disgruntled

A while back, people were getting a lot of random lock-ups in GW. A band-aid fix at the time was to make sure that GW ran in only one core (of a multi-core cpu). The problem mostly seemed to go away as various updates to drivers and Windows came along.
So, bottom line - update all your drivers (sound, video, mobo) and update Windows.