Game freezes temporarily over and over...

Hi all,

A friend's computer has been having serious issues with GW lately, and I was hoping one of you would have a tried and working solution. Basically, the game installs fine, loads fine, and at the beginning of each play session, plays fine.

However, within 30 minutes (sometimes within 1 minute even), the game will totally lock-up for ~10 seconds before returning to normal. This problem recurs every few minutes after the first instance. Alt-tab and Ctrl+Alt+Del do not work, the keyboard and mouse don't work, and the screen is frozen. Sound keeps playing fine, and in sessions where we've tried running something in the background to see if the lock-up affects the entire computer, video files continue to play fine (at least as far as the dialogue goes). It doesn't seem to be a problem with any particular aspect of GW (ie. fighting, looting, inventory, etc.), since we've even experience game freezing during the character selection window.

So far, we've tried numerous things listed on forums, including:

-changing aperture in BIOS
-defragging computer
-installing CoolBits and changing the GPU frequency
-setting the video performance setting to "highest quality"
-changing video options to run in 16-bit instead of 32-bit
-changing pagefile (exceeds 1G now)
-installing the newest video driver
-decreasing all in-game video options to the lowest setting
-increasing all in-game video options to the highest setting (yes, stupid as it may sound, it was a suggestion from someone and we decided we didn't have anything to lose trying it)

Additionally, we have tried running GW with as few background applications as possible, and monitored system/video card temperature to no avail. There has been no overclocking, and scans show the system is free of viruses, spyware, etc. System specs have been compared to other listings, and the only potential problem I can see from his specs seem to be the GF4 MX440 64mb vid card. Sadly, we've tried installing the game onto another friend's computer, running with the same video card, and it works fine.

This problem seems to be isolated to GW only, because running even more graphic-intensive games like UT2k4 are ok on his system, minus the expected low-fps due to his less-than-amazing video card.

Any suggestions? Thanks in advance for your help.

*edit* Oh, and the game doesn't crash the computer or the game, and doesn't cause any error messages to pop-up. It's just repeated instances of the game hanging. Thanks!

Best is to have 512mb Memory atleast, what does he have?

He does have 512 ram, DDR2100 I believe.

Buy the program PerfectDisk and let him defragment his computer, this thing made my computer go faster ;p

The windows-defrag utility sucks.

first things first.

do you have a temperature/voltage program that came with the motherboard?

try opening the case and putting a small fan blowing into the case to cool things down.

what is the age/wattage of the power supply?

compare the cpu usage using task manager to see if GW is making the cpu work harder than the other game you tried

This is the same problem i have/had too. I found that using older video drivers work. For me nvidia's 66.93 driver work perfect and other say 77.72 work for them for me didnt. So I would say try older drivers.

Yes, definately try going back in drivers. My computer is the same way, GW & B&W2 played fine on the original drivers (somewhere in that 6 series), once I updated the drivers 2 or 3 times GW does that exact same thing, especially in the sword-shield mission/bonus completion animations. B&W2 lags so horribly it can't even be played without making you want to take a hammer to the computer. Now I need to go back to the old drivers, and everything should work great again. :P