Restart Problems (exclusive to GW)

I've read almost the entire thread and this just reeks of SOFTWARE FAULT. ITs either DX9c or GW. But its most definitely not hardware, Pentium or Athlon.

And Arenanet won't look into it cause they say it's a hardware problem and i'm getting pretty sick and tired about it

Of course not, they won't look into it. Their rationale is "It works for most people, therefore our software is perfect and everything is the user's fault."

I've run up against this too. I keep getting Hardware Malfunctions, I've tried everything I've seen, I've been bantering back and forth with Support, (which sucks - but then again, ALL tech support sucks unless you have no experience with PC repair. That's all they can tell you to do =P ) and guess what - not fixed yet!

They refuse to look into game-halting bugs like memory leaks and incompatibilities, instead they spend their time nerfing farming spots and adding little 'dings' and rearranging vendor menus.

PRIORITIES, PEOPLE!

-sam

I'm on 3 weeks silence after I told them it was fine in the Beta, I beat your 36 hours.

From the information I have gathered about this, the problem seems to lie in the way the Client uses the computers memory. Maybe it's trying to use some of the protected system memory or is just havving addressing usses within it's own programing.

I got a lot of debug reports saying some memory addresses are unreadable. Now this can cause cauntless other issues with the client and the system. If they Kernel and the client are fighting over a memory address then the kernal will more than likely terminate the program or BSoD.

If its putting data in to a section of memory used by antoher program or by the kernal and client gets away with it, then that data will more than likely be changed by the kernal. Hench you get messes saying their are issues with the gw.exe.

I thin a lot of these errors boild down to how the client deals with memory and accounts for it. A lot fo this sugeests a memoey leak deep inside the GW client. Somthing which they cannot solve without a major rewrite of the code.

I will be checking the memory useage of the client later, but the tel tale signs of a memeory leak is the used memeory in task manager gradually increases with play.

If it is the case of a memory leak, and it's somthign to do with the games core memoery handler then it could be a long time before we see a fix. And we will all have to put up with random crashes.

gabby

I'm beginning to agree it looks verymuch like a memory leak issue, and bits of graphic data and game code are over witing eachother as well as protected system memeory.

However this was only an issue after the retail release. So they have added some code to the client after the beta which is causing these issues.

If this problem is not resolve quickly then I will ahve no option but to write a rather scathing article about his for the review site I work for. Because people are playing money for he game and not getting any satisfaction from it.

Ok I sat watching the memeory sesaw while playing, it would run at a max of aroun 250mb and a min of about 115mb, But each area I went to it seems to agressivly flush any data in the memeory and re allocate it.

Now from what I have seen woth corrupt or the wrong textures being show and the apparant random crasshing and memory allocation errors. I would day their is an issue with the routine they use to deallocate and reallocate memeory.

I have seen corrupted textures get progressivly worse the longer I played which stricks me as saying something is overwriing it in the physical memory storgae and then when it's sent through AGP or refreshed on the graphics memory that texture gets progressivly worse.

This woul also explain the random crashes on quests and mission becasue of a memory alocation error corruping a bit of script or program code. BSoD could be casued by the GW.exe trying to write to a section of physical memory used by the system, whiile the system is using it.

For example is the kernal is told to send Data X to the Graphics card, and it begins to send, but the game does not wait for the kernal to finish Sending Data X, and begin to over write the area of memory used by Data X. Then you will get in a situation wher they data is malformed causing system instability, and therefor the system Halts to stop any hardware bfrom being damaged. This usually always happens when an application dose not deal with dirvers in the correct manner.

THe BSoD error I'm seeing ar consistant with software that cannot use drivers properly, it's nto a falut wiht the hardware or the drivers but more a fault with the programing not working well with the driver.

The BSoD could be caused by any driver on the system, from Sound to a USB drivier. Any part of this game interacts with any part of the system which uses a driver then if the game dose not conform to how things are supposed to be done your going to end up with BSoD's

Now the issues seem to happen on many differant systems, and a very wide range of hardware. So what do thay all have in common, memory, You can have differant graphics cards and differant drivers, even differant types of hard drive canuse differant drivers but usually the memory drivers/handler in a windows system is standard and will be the same on nearly every PC. The Kernal is designed to work with this handler, yet is seems GW can take exception it it at times.

For one you can cuse rambus or DDR and you don't need to install a driver, yet if you change from various levels of IDE or SATA you will need to install windows drivers. So it cannto be tied down to that. it has to be oen common thing we all share. And I think thats the Memory.

Now it seems some peopel have sovled problems by changeing memeory timeing, I sadly cannot do that as my board take that in to it's own hands. So my board will check the memeory and set it to the correct timing.

I also know their is ntohign wrong with my system. I use Photoshop, Freehand and Word every day to produce print quality work, and I never have a problem. TH system is thrashed and the memeory used like an insane thing. Yet the system stays a solid as a rock. As soon as I open GW, it falls over with alarming regularity.

Lets face it it's tnot our PC. and it's nto what we have installed, as we all know many other thigns work with no issues. It's not a wattage or a heat issue as these ahve been ruled out by many people. it's not one type or hard ware or another as the same issuse comes up on many differant configurations.

So lets look at this like a criminal investigations, everything GW clam to be the problems turn up inconclusive and their for not admissable as evidence. yet in every case it seems that these proplems only occur while GW is running, and in many cases only after the retail release. So using my brillinat skills of deduction I would say the GW client got nerfed sometime after release, and A.net cannot or will not fix the error.

I have had a supoprt call open for over a month with this issue, and for the last 2-3 weeks I have had no responce, ever since I told them I had no problems in the beta only when the game went retail. then their responces to me stopped. This simple pice of information proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that the GW.exe if nerfed, otherwise why would it be fine for months then all of a sudden after retail all these prolems appear.

Come on A.net admit their is a problem that has been casue by some code added for the retail release, then at least you can start looking at what ws implimented at release but not properly tested.

gabby

The weird thing is, upping my AGP Aperture to 256MB and the update which was released yesterday seems to have done the trick, I'm not longer getting a BSOD, I sometimes get an Err=7 problem, but only once tonight, in the middle of an Ascalon Arena battle in which my team won 20 times in a row!

how do u increase the agp aperture size? mine currently is at 128mb. thx

Go into your computers BIOS, then look in something like 'Advanced chipset options' or similar, enter that menu, then look for AGP Aperture and it should have 128MB next to it, use your keyboard to go onto it and change it to 256MB. I'm not saying this will work for definate, but it certainly has for me.

Well, this is bloody brilliant. Thinking I had solved the problem and due to a problem in another game, I installed the latest ATI drivers, and then I played GW. Soon after this I began getting the BSOD's again, and thus I used system restore to go back to a day in which GW was functioning perfectly. I played, thinking everything was fine and then I got a BSOD.

The Windows error report said a device driver problem, but it's so frigging annoying, I just want this to be fixed altogether...I am definately not buying the next chapter if the problem is not fixed when it comes out.
Arenanet support= Poor.

I have had the same reboot problems since the last update.

AMD Athlon 64 3000+, not overclocked
Sapphire Radeon 9800XT 128 mb
Asus K8ne-deluxe Nforce 3 chipset
Windows XP sp1
1 gig Kingston memory
onboard sound
Artic cooler w/artic silver thermal paste

This system reboots constantly, In addition some of my desktop icons are reversed. The left half of the icon is on the right side and vice versa. This corrected itself when I uninstalled Guild Wars, and was backwards again when I reinstalled Guild Wars(Retail version}

To further confuse the problem, Guild Wars runs perfectly on my other computer which is:

AMD Athlon Barton 2600+, overclocked to a 3100
Asus A7n8e-deluxe nforce 2 chipset
Windows 2000 Pro
ATI Radeon 9600 w/256 mb
512 mb Kingston memory
on board sound

I Love the game, I'm just tired of having to play it on a lesser computer in my bedroom.

its not the hardware, my friend has teh exactly same specs as mine, same drivers, same updates. yet it runs fine on his comp.

Like I said before, this is a software fault and should be treated as such. I think that everyone experiencing should bombard the Areanet support site with this issue. Eventually they will have no choice but to take notice and have the programmers fix the issue.

I'm having the exact same problem most everyone is describing. Here are the symptoms.

#1 This problem didn't start happening till after the most recent update on 13-Jul-05.
#2 After about 20 minutes of play(give or take a few minute) the game either exits with a GW.exe fault telling me to send the message to arena.net support, BSODS and restarts quickly, or exits with no GW.exe fault.
#3 The fault messages - when I get them are - are random. One thing they all have in common is thread, stack, and trace, dump messages followed by long strings of hexidecimal and ascii code subsections.
#4 The BSOD when I get it flashes to quickly across the screen to be read.
#5 When I play....in the experience bar...sometimes the "20" thats normally there doesn't appear.

My system specs are as follows.
Hypersonic-pc Aviator AX6 laptop computer
AMD Athlon 64 3400+
1 Gigabyte of DDR memory
80 Gigabyte Seagate hard drive
VIA KT800 Chipset
CMedia Onboard sound
ATI MOBILITY RADEON 9600/9700 Series
Vid Mem128 MB

I've tried both the manufacturers drivers and the omega radeon drivers to remedy the problem to no avail. I've also tried VIA hyperion drivers rather than the manufacturers drivers to no avail as well.

other steps I've taken:
I've tried running everything on lowest settings, upping vid mem, the -nosound flag

This afternoon I will try running guildwars on my pentium 4 desktop....I will make sure to post my results here.

the same ... :/

i crash , bluescreen

Message d'erreur : STOP: 0x0000009C (0x00000004, 0x00000000, 0xb2000000, 0x00020151) ...



but i don't understand why some run the game without problems , the technical service appears not better than a bot

I'm running it on my desktop now with no problems.

When I first installed it, I had issues with freezing, using the CMedia onboard sound drivers provided by my mother board manufacturer(soyo p4x400). I swapped those drivers out with the ones that are offerd on windows update, and the freezing stopped.

My laptop makes use of CMedia drivers as well, but the crashing I was experiencing there versus the freezing I experienced on my desktop were two diff stories.

I have not yet tried the windows update provided CMedia drivers on my laptop, to see if that remedies the problem. I don't believe those are the source of the problem there though.

This may sound like a really dumb and obvious solution, but it worked for me...

Do a complete uninstall and reinstall. I don't mean just pop the disc in and select "Reinstall" from the AutoPlay menu. Go through Windows Add/Remove Programs, complete uninstall, find all the folders Guild Wars is associated with and delete them, and run a hard drive and registry cleaner to remove any orphan files or registry entires relating to Guild Wars. Then reinstall from scratch.

Like I said, this way probably a first resort for many of you, but for those that haven't tried it, it worked for me.

Cheers for the tip Lion! I'll try that later on, and will see if it works for me. If it does, you're a superstar

Nope, no luck. I really want to play this game; but I can't because of this problem

Come on ArenaNet, put out a fix for this damn thing!

hmm... without winamp running , GW seems to crash less

...Could it possibly be the internet installer? I just did a complete uninstall/reinstall (registries and folders) of the game, reinstalling with the CD and not downloading it from online.

Seemingly, I've played for a good 2 hours with no BSOD. I am not saying this is a fix, I am just saying so far it's working.

I'm starting to think the problem is within the installer.

I have been having the same problems, before i run it my video card was about at 43 degress then i opend gw and in about a 1minute it jumped to 73 degress i turned of GW then it went back down in like 30 seconds to its normal temperature. anyone else try that? Is that even possible to jump temperature that fast?

don't have the data on my graphic card (GeForce TI 4200)

I don't believe its the internet installer, as I installed from CD's and from internet both and still had the same problem on my laptop.

Almost same except I do not get #5
The rest is basically same.
I get random crash straight to windows with the Arenanet dialog (Does nayone look at this?), crash to windows except the last image is still displayed, I have to windows switch users to clear the display.. The final one is the complete reset of my PC

GW is only game I am having problems with, HL2 and COD are fine.
My PC is a relatively new build from scratch < 3 months.
Using Nforce4 6.53 and CAt 5.5
Tried 6.66 and cat 5.7 , it seemed worse so system restored back to 6.53 and 5.5

This is happening 3 or more times a session (2 - 4 hours) and really getting to a point where I will have to go to WOW

*** Edit - Sorry had the wrong thread when I responded**** Going to manually move this to the RIGHT thread**

(it will crash me, but it wont reboot me)

- Vin

Win XP Home (SP2)
AMD Athlon64 3ghz
1gb Corsair RAM
ASUS A8V Deluxe
Onboard Sound AC97
Saphire Radeon 9800Pro 128mb (latest drivers)

My system used to reboot constantly also. I initially thought it was a heat problem (Which I doubted because I have 4 fans in my case) So I checked my temps and took the sides off my case. It still locked up. Sometimes I could play for hours without a problem. Other times I would sign on, jump into a mission and then it would immediately lock up. This only happend in GW.

While trying to figure out where to go next I turned my computer on one day and noticed my hard drive died!! So while waiting for a replacement from Western Digital I reinstalled XP onto an old WD 40gb drive I had laying around. Of course I installed GW as soon as I got things up and running (XP updates, etc.) GW worked perfectly. I did not have any more restarts while playing.

Well, my new drive finally came in the mail. I was having trouble getting it to recognize my 250gb partition so I called WD tech support. They said to create a DataLifeGuard Diagnostic floppy disk from the software that came with my drive and then boot to that floppy. Then they said to Write Zeros to the disk. After doing that XP recognized my 250gb partition and I was able to finish installing XP. I installed the XP updates and then GW. So far, the past 3 weeks GW has been running great! There was only one time that that game crashed, and it kicked me out to a GW support screen (which it never did in the past). But that has only happend once!

Anyway, I don't know if any of this would be of any help. Sure, my hard drive died and that could have been causing the restarts, but why would it only do it in GW? Maybe there is some kind of hard drive issue with the game?

Doug

You may also want to check out this thread. Has helped a lot of people.

http://www.guildwarsguru.com/forum/s...ad.php?t=50008

Doug

This is utterly retarded. 19 going on 20 pages now of countless numbers of effected people and not a word from A-net. I'm sorry but from reading the past 10 pages there are far too many possible solutions and ideas to try out (Most of which I have actually tried). This is an outrage. Has A-Net recognised this as a serious problem or not?

AMD Athlon 64 3000+
256MB ATI Radeon 600Pro PCI EXPRESS
1GB RAM
Fully updated drivers for everything I can think of.

GW (and ONLY GW) freezes for about 5 seconds and then restarts my PC

A-NET COME ON FFS

I didn't bother to read this entire thread, but I think I have some information that's relevant to most of you here.

My brother's computer used to have the same restarting problem as most of you seem to have. At first the screen would black out, and these multicolored vertical stripes would cover the screen. Then it'd just freeze, and he'd have to restart. Then it progressed to restarting after a few mins of GW, really frustrating.

After a while he quit GW and started playing other games. Then these issues starting popping up on other games as well. My brother shares that computer with his mom, so they wanted me to fix it.

At first I thought it might be the mb, because I ruled out the vid card and ram. I knew it wasn't software because we did a complete system reformat. Well I tried another mb and the problems stayed. I decided I'd go buy a new power supply because the one in there was a piece of sh!t anyway.

Went to PC Club, bought an enermax 500 watt power supply. No more problems. I feel bad I wasted money on a new motherboard for it, but hey. At least there aren't any more problems.

I have a 550w enermax power supply on my rig, and I cannot overephasize how HUGE of a difference a good, reliable power supply makes. A bunch of people make these great systems, but figure any power supply with a large wattage will do the trick.

This is definitely not the case. For those of you who are fed up with restarts, go and buy a Raidmax or an Enermax power supply. I say those two because they typically have huge amounts of voltage on the +12v rail, and that's where your comp pulls most of the power from. I don't really suggest Antec, because for the most part, they just put out the same thing as Enermax with less voltage on the +12v. I think one of their topline models has only 18 watts, which is just rediculous. Mine has over 30. Antec power supplies tend to be higher priced, too.

I can leave my computer on for as long as I like, without stability problems now. I know people say that windows just clogs up your memory and cache after extended periods of time, but I've gone 43 days straight without stability issues. I definitely couldn't do this before I got my sexy, shiny enermax. Enermax, I heart you!

(no, I'm not a PR person for them or anything)

So yeah. People try getting a quality power supply.

Help me too! Just after the sorrow's furnace update, guildwars would just cause my computer to freeze then restart. whenever i run guildwars, it restarts randomly. sometimes right after i double click the gw icon, others after 25, 40 minutes. its getting frustrating.

im pretty sure its gw because my comp didnt have any problems before the patch.

sometimes though, gw would jsut exist, has this "send report to Anet" thing. i click it, then after that, my comp restarts again.

ok my sister's friend has this problem too it reboots after 30min ~ in guild wars only.

Worked -mines-
1.4ghz celeron pIII
soyo via u133x4
384mb ram
geforce 2 gts 32mb agp shader 0
agp aperture 32mb to 64mb
sb live
windows xp sp2

Crashed with message calculation not equal to check. -mines-
amd64 3000+ @ 2.6ghz
gigabyte k8nsc-939
1 gig ram tight unstable setting
geforce 2 gts 32mb agp shader 0
agp aperture 256mb
on board nforce 3 sound card
sb audigy 2 value
windows xp sp2

Worked rarely have had calculation not equal too check. -mines-
amd64 3000+ @ 2.6ghz
gigabyte k8nsc-939
1gig ram relax timing
agp aperture 256mb
geforce [email protected] 500/700 128mb shader 3.0
sb audigy 2 value
windows xp sp2

Reportedly have had worked
Barton 2500+ @ 1.8Ghz normal -sister's friend's computer-
ati 9600 xt 256mb agp shader 2.0b
agp aperture 64mb
1gig ram
sound storm
sb live
windows xp sp2

Had the restart problem everyone is getting -sister's friend's computer-
amd64 3000+ @ 1.8 normal or at 2.2ghz
asrock uli sata II - 939
1 gig ram auto setting
ATI 9600XT 256mb agp suspected cause of conflict maybe shader 2.0b
agp aperture 64mb
on board sound card
sb live
windows xp sp2

Worked - current - mines
amd64 3200+ @ 2.65ghz
gigabyte k8nsc-939
2gig ram auto 4x512 normal
geforce [email protected] 540/720 agp 128mb shader 3.0
agp aperture 512mb
sb audigy 2 value
windows xp sp2

If I had more time with my sister's friend's computer I probably might have possible solution. I have suggested him to disable onboard sound, disable post processing (shader 2.0b). Waiting for his results. The re-install drivers / agp and directx didn't help fix the problem. Also he reportedly said his old barton machine with the ati 9600xt seemly have worked but I doubt he ran it long enough to noticed it before the upgrade.

I was having the problem where my direct 3d enabled would crash my system hard and disabling hardware accelerated sound would solve the issue. I have gotten to the very root of the problem though.

Ive got a
p4 2.8ghz
2 gig ram
asus p4p800e mb
GeForce 6600GT
Audigy

Now heres how stuff started, I was getting the crashes where it was clearly caused by hardware accelerated sound, disabling all hardware sound accel stopped it. I got a little digial thermal probe to go about some work, and started heating up to room to test thermal limits, even at a fairly low temp the sound would crash.

But as I got it warmer with sound disabled I started getting graphics artifacts associated with overheating, yet the temp on my GPU's heatsink was only 108f. it would crash graphicly when the heatsink reached 112f.

I touched the back of the card and found one hell of a hotspot, nearly burned my finger, but thats besides the point. Turns out there was a dry spot in the GPU's thermal paste, I took off my heatsink cleaned it fully, and replaced the paste with arctic silver. Now the heatsink gets up to around 118f at full load, but no graphics issues anymore. a

And whats more, I can now reenable hardware sound accel.

What it is, is the fact that the videocard was putting out some bad data on the bus. And as many of you know the soundblaster live 5.1 series had some PCI timing issues, where on some motherboards the timing would get off just enough to cause a hard crash. the Audigy also has similar but not as bad of a problem.

So basically a overheating videocard can cause bus errors that cause a PCI timing error for Audigy/2 cards that then cause the Audigy to hard crash.

Make sure your graphics card isnt overheating, and does not have a hotspot and check your PCI timing, if the graphics card starts throwing out errors it can be enough to cause the audigy to have fits. I have no verification on this next bit, but it was mentioned to me DMA stuff if one was having problems could effect the other.

I had the sound crashing that was fixed by disabling sound until I fixed my videocard, then sound stopped crashing bit of a complex interaction of a problem, but at least in my case ive solved it

Well personally i don't think thats the problem, your fix could just be a coincidence. I have the same problem with an audigy card but fix the crashes by disabling 3D hardware in the Guild Wars menus.

My graphics card tops out at only 43 degree C and these cards are good for temps over twice that. Personally i think it's either a Driver issue, others have the same problem in WOW and BF2, or a Direct X problem.

The last issue of direct X had updates for D3D sound bug fixes, perhaps there are still some present.

Holy thread necromancy, Batman.

I just bought guild wars platinum addition about 4 hours ago. Am having the same issue as everybody else. I can't even get past the first screen to enable my account. It crashes in less than 30 seconds leaving an annoying "beeeeeeeeeeeeep" from my speakers.

After reading through most of this thread I have come to the conclusion that I'm not even going to bother trying to fix the problem from my end. Since it clearly has something to do with their software and not my computer. Hopefully the developers know how bad this problem is.

It's bull that opened software is non-returnable.

Make a new thread with what you just posted, include your hardware and software (OS, and other programs like antivirus, firewall, etc). It sounds like you have a driver issue, though.

lol did you even check how old this thread is? It was made in 2005, the last post before your's was a year old.