Restart Problems (exclusive to GW)

They are quick to say 'please attach your Dxdiag report' and 'please check your drivers' (even if you have already told them you have done that) but as with most CSR/QA people when it gets any more complicated than that they just start to ignore you, 4 days and counting now with no reply.

PS but thanks for the link to that program is very useful even if it is telling me that kmixer.sys is not running so... i have no idea how it could be causing the problem but windows is telling me it is.

I've bothed completely locked up and locked up with a following reboot within 8 hours of play.

My case was warm to the touch, so I opened it and *crossing fingers* haven't had trouble since.

Previously, I was also have this problem with HL2 and Band of Brothers, and realized a lot of people were having the same problems with WoW. So I uninstalled WoW and haven't had problems till now. Odd that uninstalling WoW fixed my lockups in HL2 and BoB.

System Specs:

A64 3000+ on nforce3 chipset
Audigy 2 ZS
ThermalTake PurePower 480W
512x2 Corsair XMS memory running Dual Channel
BFG Nvidia 6600GT
Raid 0 76G Western Digital Raptors

they patched the game sometime yesterday (Monday 7pmcstish) evening, im not sure of what fixes they implemented but the red dots are back on peoples maps and my crashing has stoped. I think they just released a bad patch on sunday.....

that patch dident stop any of mine

I have GW installed on 2 machines, one machine has never had an issue the other has had several issues.

Machine 1 (Laptop) - no issues
Motherboard: Arima W720-K8
Notebook Battery: Li4402A Lithium-ion
CPU: AMD Athlon 64 3400+ M 2.200 GHz
Memory: 512MB DDR PC2700 SO-DIMM
Video: ATI Mobility™ Radeon® 9600
Audio: PC2001 Compliant AC '97
Hard Drive: Hitachi 60 GB 7200 RPM
Network Interface: VIA Rhine II Fast Ethernet Adapter
OS: Windows XP 64 Bit extended edition
All patches and drivers up-to-date


Machine 2 (Desktop) - issues
Motherboard: ASUS A7N8X Deluxe
Power: 450 WATT ATX
CPU: AMD Athlon XP 3200+
Memory: 1024MB DDR PC3200
Video: nVidia FX 5200
Audio: nVidia integrated
Hard Drive: Hitachi 60 GB 7200 RPM
Network Interface: nVidia integrated
OS: Windows XP Pro w/ SP2
All patches and drivers up-to-date


Since I am running the same client installs and can play on one machine with no problems logout and turn around and run on another machine within seconds and have problems. I'd say this is not a client issue but a Windows OS or a hardware related problem.

Things seem to run better on machine 2 when I turn of my antivirus and kill all non-essential services. On Machine 1, I can run a SQL database server, web server, and my antivirus and everything still runs great.

Go figure, GW runs better on my laptop than my desktop.

That's especially impressive considering ArenaNet claims no support for Windows XP 64-bit edition.

However, I disgree that your scenario proves it is a Windows OS or hardware-related problem. It's just as likely to be a software-related problem that manifests with certain hardware configurations.

No support doesn't mean it won't run. I'm running SQL 2000, VS.Net 2003, Civilization III, even Diablo II and everything is running fine. The only thing I couldn't get to run was my old version of Nortel VPN client. Found a new client and everything runs fine. The XP 64 bit extended edition allows running 32 bit and 64 bit processes. I'm not sure about the other version though.

My experiences have mostly reveiled to me that drivers usually cause the problems but not always. I've seen it with Battlefield 1942, Dungeon Siege, Diablo II, Never Winter Nights. Not always has the solution been to update to the latest drivers but I've even had to roll back to an older version when new drivers don't perform as advertised.

I'm still troubleshooting my desktop. I haven't checked for any bios revisions and that's where I'm headed next.

DId anybody check this thread.. Some people found solution to the problem. It's not 100% but it might work for some.

http://www.guildwarsguru.com/forum/s...ead.php?t=6951

Im telling you guys, I had this exact problem. I originally started this thread.
I did TWO things, and I never had this problem again.
Here they are...

1. Defrag the drive GW is on.

2. Set your last memory timing (TRAS, #4) to 11 (this may be exclusive to Athlon setup, but who knows...).

It would be nice if a few people tried this and replied to say if it works or not. I haven't seen any responses by people who did these two things, but Im telling you, I run an Athlon XP processor, 1 gig dual ram, and I overclock everything (memory, processor, gcard [which is a 6600 GT]) and GW has run flawlessly since I did 1. and 2. above. TRY IT. IT CANT HURT.

-Ex

Hmm, I have been meaning to get a new PSU... and maybe I should unplug my Saitek P880 (not a keyboard but it's still a USB controller)... :/

Though I haven't had the restart problems since the Sunday patch anyway...

I dunno about that.
Telling people to screw around with their memory speed can hurt quite a bit.

Re: Heat issues....

Many of you are forgetting something when talking about how your CPU isn't overheating....CPUs aren't the only components that overheat. Video cards (especially high end) tend to run extremely hot also, which is why the latest and greatest come with huge heat sinks and fans. Due to the many graphical features that GW uses, it's probably causing stress on parts of the video card that other games don't stress that much...including Doom 3 and HL2. Neither of those games use the "post-processing effects" that GW uses, or at least not to near the same extent.

One other thing to keep in mind. ALL games that come out run into problems on some configurations. It's an unfortunate but unavoidable fact. If you guys think GW is having a lot of problems, you should have seen the amount of problems people ran into with HL2. I know that doesn't provide any solace for those of you who can't get GW to run, but still, keep things in perspective before jumping on Arena.net about having "buggy" software. At least they can keep their servers up and running (unlike Blizzard...).

The chance of physically hurting the system isn't that much, but it could break other software even if it fixes a problem with GW. Best thing to do is to make sure your memory timings match the optimal timings for your motherboard.

ITS WORKING!!!!....GW IS WORKING!!!......WOOT!!

i woke up today and tried to play GW again and it loaded up the recent patch and i went in to try it out and ive been playing for 4 hours without any lock ups, reboots or any kind of graphical glitches. im actually able to play longer than 5 minutes without the game locking up. i made no changes to my system. the problem was obviously the last patch, it screwed something up somehow. all i can tell you guys is wait for another patch if your still haveing problems. if the new patches do not help you at all, i would have to say some of you have hardware problems. i wish you all goodluck on getting your GW to work. i hope you guys get your problems worked out. GW is an awsome game......when it works.

Indeed.
Doesn't look like there's much I can do besides wait right now.

Soory to be dense but the reference to patch is it one we need to download or a general one they've passed themselves?

All Guild Wars patches are streamed directly to you.
No separate downloads required.

thanks - not that it's helped, tried again tonight -5 minutes blue screen of death - no error messages. Have latest ATI drivers for my 9800 pro graphics card.
Perhaps it's a ram issue, see if local NZ friendly PC store will rip out my RAM & test with different RAM.
Think I'm getting to the give up & hope they patch it stage !!!
I've read this thread backwards & frankly there's about 100 different variables if you can be bothered spending the time.
Roll on Dungeon Lords or Dungeon Siege 2 !!

Actually, i didn't start rebooting until Tuesday evening, so w/e patch they released seemed to have messed me up now...

Well guys, I did a little testing last night. When I posted yesterday about experiencing no crashes, there was one big difference.

I was playing in POST-SEARING.

Therefore, I went back to a Pre-Searing character and guess what, intermittent game crashes to blue screen and re-boot.......definately a software issue.

If you haven't ventured to world after the Charr obliterate Ascalon, try it. I would have expected more game crashes. The game is far more video intensive when you are questing with larger groups, fighting more monsters and using more powerful spells. It also rocks by the way.

TIP#1 - Don't quest alone.

It may help to mention where you are in game when the crashes occur. Pre-searing, I noticed more crashes when fighting multiple opponents, but I also noticed the game crashed while I was standing still with no one about.

The crashing has nothing to do with what's going on in-game for me.
If I leave it at the log in screen for a while it crashes too.

I had the same problem with random reboots, turns out it was sp2 on my computer. I uninstalled it and haven't had a crash since

Too bad I'm on service pack 1

well i run SP1 and am just now getting the reboot problems...

just for kicks, could everyone post what size their power supply is.

Mine is 400W, i use a video card with a separate power input and i think that may be the problem. B/c in the areas with a huge amount of attacking and monsters is when i get rebooted

I set it to 11 but it still crashed for me

Tried it already.
It doesn't really matter what I'm doing in game.
If I leave it at the login screen for a few minutes it reboots too.

i'm not too tech savvy, but i only have an intergrated graphic card (intel) 64mb i think, the game never crashed until i went to the intel site and installed new drivers for it called extreme graphic accelerator..something like that. Right after i installed that, i started to get lock ups and restarts. So rolled back the driver back to what i had before, ran norton windoctor and that fixed something with the activeX or something and now its fine again. Its scary to hear how much problems people are having though...i can hear the fan in the system going full blast when i play this game. It would really suck if they don't get this fixed...they owe it to the customers to fix this. i mean we paid hard earned money for it.

well some people have been getting the problem after changing something...I on the other hand played the game hardcore(for up to 8 hours at a time, nonstop) and never had a problem more than the occasional lag from all the new people getting on at launch, but all of a sudden my computer has randomly rebooted 3 times during heavy gameplay....this leads me to believe that 1) a bad update is conflicting with the system, or 2) my Power supply is going bad and can't handle the increased activity of my vid card (which has it's own power input)

to test the Power supply theory i am going to try unplugging one of my cd drives (cd drvies take up mondo power) and turn off my cathode.

If yours only occurs during heavy gameplay then it's not the same problem as we've got: ours happens completely randomly. It's happened after an hour of playing, or it's happened 5 seconds after the login screen comes up.

As for my problem, I tried unplugging every device that my computer doesn't use to play GW, to no avail. Power isn't my issue. I'm more and more convinced that it's a software issue.

Yeah, I tried unplugging every non essential component in my PC, and it still reboots.

Reboots, Crash to Desktop, Game Freezes, Blue Screen of Death -
all these are variations on the same basic problem:
there's a subtle bug "somewhere" in the GW rendering client.

In my own case I can play for anywhere between 1-4 hours before I get a system lockup that requires a hard reboot. And it seems completely random. And I can play every OTHER 3D-intensive game and mmog on the market just fine. Arg!

Sure, in =some= cases it's the customer's fault, some people do have power supply problems, or RAM problems, or video card problems, or overheating problems, or corrupt drivers, or whatever, BUT for the other 99% of people whose computers and drivers are just fine and are STILL experiencing problems, the core problem is that the GW client has a bug "somewhere".

It's either a memory leak (happens in MANY games), or an invalid texture (saw this happen in DAOC), or a non-standard rendering method, or something somewhere that is causing a system failure for a significant percentage of customers who can otherwise run 3D-intensive games like Doom 3, Half Life 2, EQII, WoW, and others just fine.

The Solution?
Keep submitting reports to Technical Support until it gets fixed.

Except for known problems like the AMD 64 and nVidia FX cards, in most cases IT'S NOT YOUR COMPUTER. The problem is in the client and it'll take a few weeks for programmers to change the way they're doing something before the problem gets fixed.

A few weeks....... They should be fired....The beta ran fine...

What known problems with AMD64?????
Please specify...cuz I have one, and if there is a fix, that would be dandy like candy...

Mine went black every 45 minutes since Sunday's patch. After new patch on Tuesday this has been extended to an hour between crashes. Better, but we are not there yet....

I've gotta tell you, knowing that your computer can reboot at any time really adds a new feeling of tension to the game.

"I'm almost done with this Co-op... then I'll finally get to go to a new area... come on, come on, come on comeoncomeoncomeoncomeoncomeon Run faster Rurik-AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHH."

-_- I've been trying to get to Yak's Bend for two days now. I'm already level 12... because of all the grinding I've done from not being able to complete any long missions.

^^^yeah that is exactly how i feel

hey guys like everyone else on this particular thread i got the same problem, been talking with tech support, after sending them all my info (dxdiag..etc.) they came back with this as a reply:


I would suggest you adjust your paging file. How you do this is by RIGHT clicking on My computer - Properties - Advanced TAB - Performance SETTINGS - Advanced TAB - Virtual memory CHANGE - Custom size - Set Initial size to 0 and the Maximum size to 0 - SET - OK - OK - OK. Restart your system and the defrag the hard drive. Then RIGHT click on My computer - Properties - Advanced Tab - Performance Settings - Advanced TAB - Virtual memory CHANGE - Custom size - Set Initial size to 1024 and the Maximum size to 2048 - SET - OK - OK - OK

And you may also want to make sure that there are no other programs running in the background to interfere with the game. To do this go to your START button and choose Run. Type in "msconfig" minus the quotations and hit enter. Once there go to the Services tab. At the bottom of the screen is a box called "Hide all Micrsoft services" Check this box and go to the Startup tab. uncheck ALL boxes on the startup tab. Then exit msconfig and re-boot.

Thank you
The Guild Wars Support Team


I did all this but unfourtently it didnt let me keep the game going any longer than usual (actually it felt significantly shorter than usual before the game crashed)

I have been trolling this topic since i got the game installed on monday and the game has been crashing like all hell. After doing some pondering i decided to run a battery of full exams on my computer, i built this baby i refuse to believe that after it ran farcry, doom 3, half life 2, etc. etc. that this game (which i played the beta for completely fine) could ruin my computer.

the battery of exams came back as thus: my power supply is a dirty liar.

after running the motherboard monitor which was set to go ape poop in event anything didnt run at normal, went absolutely crackers over each of my voltage settings. apparently my core 0 pipline only puts out about 1.7 volts steady when it should be putting out 2, unfournetly for me it was a laundry list like this all of my voltage were way below acceptable. so i am thinking this is a programming issue that for whatever reason requires something to have full power and well since my power supply aint cutting it it is crashing my computer.

with that said i bought a new power supply from thermal take last night a 480 watt bad boy, hopefully it will be the solution.

as for the rest of my computer (cause i know some ppl are comparing all our specs):

2.8 GHz Pentium
512 DDR Ram PC 3200
GeForce 5700 FX
Soundblaster Live!
Asus P4SDX
Maxtor 60 Gb
Seagate 40 Gb
also i got 2 fans in the case plus the standard one on the CPU
and my computer is running at 23 degrees Celsius when idle and hits 31 when guild wars is up and running.

and finally i got windows XP Pro SP2

i think that about covers it, o yeah and since i can only get the little quicky quests done i am only a level 3.9 necromancer with a secondary profession in elemntalism.

i haven't crashed for the last 4 hours, and usually i crash after 4 minutes...AND i had FRAPS running...which was odd...

and dude, 2v to ur CPU is a BAD THING...thats too high, depending on ur cpu, u should have anywhere between 1.5v to 1.65v...

It's plainly obvious you have never done support of any kind in your life. Ask anyone who does tech support for a living for any kind of software application what most of the problems are that they see, and it WON'T be the software itself. 90% of all problems usually have a simple solution. It's the other 10% (or less) that end up taking 90% of the time to fix. Spamming Arena.net with support requests isn't going to get it fixed any faster either. The only way you're going to get it fixed in a timely manner is by cooperating with any troubleshooting suggestions given to you, either by those of us here who are trying to help, or by cooperating with whatever support you get from the devs.

That would be all fine and dandy, but most of us have tried everything they've told us already.
I know it's not the game overstressing my videocard, because I'll get reboot problems even if I just sit idle at the login screen.