my computer crashes when i play guild wars

I've been playing guild wars since last june and have never had any problems with it. until they other day when my computer just crashed i restarted a few more times and it did the same thing a few more times. it never crashed while i was in the menues or creating a character only when i was actualy playing the game. can any one help me out?

Did you get artifacts? Any visual problems? Do other games crash? Describe the problem in more detail, and specs would be nice.

Give your computer info for further analysis.

ok so i defraged it and it doesnt crash any where near as much(it went from every 10min to over an hour somtimes) and i dont think the problem has anything to do with guild wars beacause it did it a few times when i started it back up. Althou it doesnt crash as much i dont think i would trust it in a gvg, FoW run or anything like that. it may be from a bad download or somthing. doese that help explain the problem any beter? srry i don't know very much about computer repiar:/

I'd say format, but am unsure if you have the knowledge on how to do so.

What are the specs of your Power Supply?

My Computer -> right click your primary drive -> Properties -> Tools tab -> Error checking -> Check now, check all options and reboot.

It sounds like a faulty drive with bad sectors.

Sudden crashing have many causes, here's a few of them:

- Power supply not delivering enough power.
- Processor overheat
- Memory leak caused by one of the processes you're running(not neccessarily GW)
- Harddrive bad sector(very unlikely)
- Virus
- Spyware/adware

Since you've been playing for quite a while without problems, I doubt it's your power supply or a CPU/GPU overheat. Malware installed on your computer might do it, try using a few removers. (at least 2. some catch what others don't.) If things still stay bad, You could try backing up all of your documents and important files to an external hard drive / other computer and doing a full reformat.

Omg i have the same problem! I really don't know what to do, im so pissed off! I sent an email to Anet, and they said to me to upgrade my video card and i did that, but it wont help!!!

ya i kno my vidio card is fine and its not that. i ran a nortan anti virus scan and it didnt find anything also.

Great, now run ad-aware too. Norton's great and all, but nothing catches everything.

Just thought of something else, I used to crash GW all the time, and I'm pretty sure my memory was at fault. I never figured it out for sure, maybe my chips were overheating or maybe they were unstable at the settings I had them at (turning down a few BIOS options helped) but the blue screen of death I always got said something about memory could not be written. This might not be the original problem, though, as I never got any artifacts with mine.

Once again, your comment about defragging helped tells me it's your hard drive. I'd suggest reformatting it. Make sure to back up all important documents somewhere else, but ditch and re-install any programs.

I've contacted ArenaNet and they reply me with this :

Thank you for contacting the Guild Wars customer support team and sending us the results of the Dx-Diag test. I would recommend increasing the size of your Page File, in Windows. You can do this by following these steps:

- Right-click on your "My Computer" icon and select "Properties".
- Choose the "Advanced" tab, then click the "Settings" button in the "Performance" section.
- Click the "Advanced" tab here, before selecting "Change" in the "Virtual Memory" section.
- Select the "Custom Size" radial and increase the Initial Size to 1024, and the Maximum size to 2048.
- Click the "Set" button and Windows should prompt you to restart your PC. If it does not, then please do so.
- Ensure that you have enough free space on your system partition to support your pagefile

I would also recommend to update your system's video card drivers by downloading the latest driver package from NVIDIA's website at www.nvidia.com . Be sure to uninstall the old drivers before updating in order to avoid any potential conflicts.

You can uninstall your current NVIDIA driver by using Driver Cleaner. Please download Driver Cleaner http://www.drivercleaner.net/ . Install and launch the program. In the drop-down menu select NVIDIA and then click on the clean button. Be sure to also look for any other manufacturers names that you may have had installed on this system at one time in the past. Reboot your computer and continue to install the latest drivers from www.nvidia.com

ANet's tips are terrible sometimes. Your min and max for your pagefile should be set to the same amount.

Yes and no. Windows uses a dynamic paging system, you do not have to have the min and max values set the same. Doing so only removes useable diskspace from your system. It in effect creates a virtual swap partition of a static size by having both values the same. It has both its positives and negative affects. Its however not terrible advice to re-initialize the sectors windows uses for swaping data.

My first though on this thread though would be to drop Norton. Norton is nothing more then a burden on your system. While they might hold high marks and be a sudo standard, they have no concept of resource managment and good code development. If your system is reaching its resource limit turning off all of norton will improve your system performance 100% without doubt. I would suggest you find some smaller more modular application to replace it with like AVG by grisoft and well there are lots of free firewalls out there in fact AVG even offers one now a days with the non-free edition of its virus scanner.

As far as all other causes, Power supplies and Video cards, as well as Processors, and All Drives can and do fail with wear. Simply because an application or group of them have been running ok, does not mean a hardware failure has not occured. Power supplies that are over extended for period of time will turn into smoldering slag, trust me, I have had smoke come out the back of mine for what seemed to be no good reason, even though it matched the specs I needed. Not all devices are built of the same quality, and not all put out what they claim. Its the same with all internal components. Do not rule out hardware failure simply because everything was fine 2 days ago, thats just how the cookie crumbles.

srry but i dont think ime going to delete norton beacause i already paid for it this year. and i tried what u said to do tarun but no luck:/

well i treid that error checking thing and reboted (well it rebooted itself lol)
and at first there was no diffrence it still kept crashing. but eventualy it went a while w/o crashing i played for 2 hours then went to sleep when i got up the comp was still on. i played about all day and no crashes. then i played a while today and still none but ime kind of scared to shut the computer off and ime worried the next time the power goese out the problem could come back. is this somthing i should worry about?

it also makes a sound while its on kind of a click.click but not really its hard to describe

@aero the min and max pagesize should be the same.. just for keeping the pagefile defragmented- usually you'll put the pagefile on your fastest drive and it'll be the first thing you put on it.. keeping the pagefile from changing size keeps it fast- it's really builders and oldschool peeps who know this stuff.. there's alot of tweaks you can do that work great for gaming- this is just one of them

When was the last time you opened up the case and blew all of the dust out?

problem fixed it was the back up battery/ surge protector i think it got ruined in a storm or somthing.