The be-all-end-all restarts/crashing problems topic

I may be a new user here, but I've been exploring GW communities all over the 'Net to find out about these restarting problems, which I had. I never realized until I researched that so many people were having this problem in one variation or another. It's interesting to note that any disscussions about this problem seem scattered all over, and there is no one place with a whole lot of information about it. I've noticed even here there are several different topics. We need a unification, one place for everyone to come and try to solve this thing once and for all, and maybe even get ArenaNet frantic to solve it once and for all. In this topic, I intend to do just that.

If you're like me and have researched this problem, you know there are many differing opinions on what it really is, and no matter what that may be, the solution is always different. Some people change their RAM timings, some people remove sticks of RAM, some people upgrade their power supply, some people roll back drivers, and that's just a brief look at the many different "fixes" for this. The ArenaNet support team insists on maintaining that any restarts or crashes are hardware problems, but I know I'm not the only one who finds it suspicious that I can run HL2 pushing my computer to the max with no trouble, but as soon as I fire up Guild Wars, even on the lowest settings, my computer chokes.

So here's what I want to do, for the good of all who have this problem: If you or someone you know have this problem and have solved it, no matter what way, please post a detailed report here, including your system specs, specific problems, diagnostics, and everything you may have done to fix it. If we compile all these things together in one place, maybe we'll be one step closer to finding out how to kill this bug once and for all.

Maybe this is all just wishful thinking, but I really hope everyone can come here and help solve this problem. Let anyone you know who has the problem about this topic, no matter what online community they're from.

I STILL haven't had a fix to this problem yet. The GW Tech's have been no help, and they have told me to fix my power supply, which I see no point to because all my other games run completely fine with no problems or no blackouts what-so-ever. Any kind of solution would be great!

I was getting annoyed by that too, then I found out that the last few BIOS updates for my MB had changes to the P4 microcode/firmware because of HT timing bugs. That fixed everything for all programs that were having problems. The techs ran me through every other itteration of hardware fixes, including the "Stick a floor fan on the case" suggestion which was a bit suspect.

The big problem is that the machines have no diagnostics for this kind of thing, so the techs have to guess. With today's dirt-cheap power supplies, and super-hot processors they're giving the right advice to start with, but it's the same advice everyone else has already given the person.

If you're machine is randomly rebooting that means that the processor has decided to go into "real mode", and start executing at instruction FFFF:0000 (note the 16-bit memory model here) because of either a hard reset on the _RESET_ line, or a soft reset by some means that I don't feel like looking up. Hard resets are caused by bad power, the reset button, the machine's built-in power-on reset, and (hopefully)nothing else. Soft resets are rarely ever executed without having some warning, but I can imagine of a couple of instances that would cause the proc to say "Funk dat. I'm out" and not try to deal with an error.