Major crashs that stuffs windows

Hiya guys,
I just brought Guild Wars on Saturday and was extremely excited about playing so I made sure I updated my nvidia drivers to the latest ones - 84.21 (I uninstalled the previous ones before installing the new ones).

Installed GW and started it up, went to the options screen and changed my resolution to 1280X1024 and this is where everything went bad. GW froze up and became unresponsive, no ctrl+alt+del, esc, etc etc...

So I rebooted my machine manually only to find my DOS bootup is all jarrbled and full of artifacts, I can't read anything on the screen. When I get to thw windows xp pro loading screen the colours are at 4-bit and there are lines running vertically down the screen.

This is as far as the boot process gets, my computer will just hang and then eventually reboot just to repeat this again.

This is with the latest drivers. I can boot into "safe mode" which is a guessing exercise since I can't make out what the text says in DOS, but I can get there.

Now in safe mode I can uninstall the nvidia drivers and run NFS and Driver Cleaner to remove all the .dlls. This doesn't work, I reformat my C: (my drive is partitioned so all my important files are on different partitions). WINXP Pro in now reinstalled and this still makes no difference.

Reboot back into safe mode and run NFS and Driver Cleaner again, reboot and it works, windows is back to normal. I update everything again (WINXP SP2, all my mobo drivers etc etc), then I install nvidia drivers 77.77 and they install fine, reinstall GW boot it up and bang same thing happens again!

I try all the steps I did above but now none of them work. I have taken the graphics card out and put in a Gefore 440MX SE and my display is fine and windows boots fine, but if I have my nvidia 6600GT my display is stuffed and Windows doesn't boot.

These are the specs of my machine:

Intel P4 3.0ghz Hyper Threading
2 x 512MB DDR400 RAM - Veritech (exact same makes and models)
Xpert Vision 6600GT nVidia graphics card
WINXP PRO Sp2
Intel Desktopboard D865PERL
Direct X 9.0C
Samsung 204Ts 20" LCD - Digital
Standard Keyboard and Mouse (PS2)
400W Power Supply

Any ideas guys? I reallly really want to get playing this game and it only seems to be this game causing problems!

If you've dropped your older MX440 in and it works, then the problem is most probably with your 6600GT. Have you checked that the fan on the card is working?

Yeah the fan is working fine... I've taken it into the computer store from where I brought it, still waiting on the out come.

Could it be the power supply is not strong enough? 400W, from what I've read its best to have something over 450 - 500W

I should mention that I have not tested GW on the MX440 as I'm worried it may stuff that one too, which would render me computerless

You can't bork a graphics card by playing a game. If it's going to knacker then it'll knacker no matter what you're running through it.

I wouldn't have thought it was the PSU, 400W is enough to power your system and leave some power in reserve. This system of mine ran just dandy with a 400W PSU before I dropped in my new Hiper PSU. That was both with my old 6600GT and my new 7800GTX.

hmmmm well I wonder what did it? I guess I'll have to wait to hear from the computer store...maybe my card just died?

^ Maybe it did, I don't think I've ever heard of Xpert Vision, cheap manufacturer?

Sounds to me like a driver problem..

if its running in 4-bit, then its windows, cant load the drivers, (for whatever reason) if you have artifacts in Dos, then it can be a few things...

yes..
A) your psu isnt powerful enough,
B) you have overclocked your card,
C) you have over clocked your CPU (often doing this the FSB method will clock the PCI/AGP and Ram too, which can cause all sorts of problems)
D) the card is just, broken

Yeah theres a couple of things I'm wondering now.

1. Could it be I'm using the downloaded client to play the game? Maybe all the pausing to download stuff is causing some problems?

2. Could be the card manufacturer

3. Maybe I need to clean the fans out? Buy a faster PSU?

I haven't overclocked the card or the CPU though... damn I really want to play this game and I've already paid for it

So I think I have this solved. Firstly my CPU was overheating, secondly my 6600gt was faulty... apparently this is common with the first Xpert Vision cards, I'm told the revision is much better.

So I'm getting a replacement plus I cleaned out my CPU fan (which was choca with crap).

I'm currently playing GW with my geforce 440MX SE with everything turned down and it runs fine... weird!

i have a 6600gt and is overheating, coincidence or just shitty gw