Random Lockups

Hi all.

This is something that has happened to me frequesntly while playing Guild Wars, and since i've run out of ideas, I decided i'd post here and see if anyone can help.

Basically, while playing, my computer will completely lockup. Most often it drops to a black screen and has the last sound played stuttering over and over. No commands will take it out of this, (windows key, alt tab, ctrl alt del, etc) so I am always forced to restart my computer. I used to have a faulty memory stick, which I replaced, assuming it to be the cause of the lockups. However, they continue now, though with less frequecy. Oddly enough, they mainly happen when I am in locations in the Shiverpeaks.

I've tried running the game in varying graphics settings to no avail. I've also run a memory tester, and my RAM is fine. nyone else have this problem?

My system specs:

Athlon 1.4 Ghz
Nvidia GEForce FX 5200
512 megs of 266 DDR RAM
60 gig HD

The Exact same problem im having. Except there's no "mostly here" im having mine all over the place.
I've reinstalled, updated both sound and video drivers, and tried giving my computer more VR memmory but nothing has worked. This has only started with the latest patch.
My System:
Sound Blaster 2 ZS (sound card)
Radeon 9800 XT (Video card).
512 megs of DDR Ram
120 Gig Hard-drive.

anyone?

Might be useful to post what motherboard you guys have, also make sure you installed the cdrom that comes with the motherboard.
I have the same card as Ano_Heto, no problems here at all.

Both videocards can become very heated, so it might be an overheating problem.
I have placed a special cooler on my card, http://www.arctic-cooling.com/vga2.php?idx=11

You can also find them for other cards.

I registered just to answer this for you .

1.)make sure there is no dust or anything to insulate your graphics card.
2.)get updated motherboard drivers! I ran system information and it turned out my VIA KT400 chipset had drivers from Nov 2002. I went to there site, downlaoded the Hyperion drivers and have only crashed twice since (I'd say thats due to me running ME)

Nope neather of thoese have helped me. Game still crashes. Hard drive temperature is about 80 degres(F),casing is about 78 Degres(F).

I had this problem, then i messed around with the BIOS settings and its fixed now

I too tried what you mentioned, and to no avail.

I've been having this problem as well. I sent an email off to tech support, and have been waiting for their reply. Mine continuously crashes in the Catacombs area. I'd love to know what anyone else has done to get this problem fixed.

I am having the same problem too. It seems if its the first time I play the game I can go for about 1-2 hours before the problem occurs. If I do a hard reset after the video fails and start the game again, the problem will re-occur after about 30 mins.

So far I've tried updating my video drivers but it didn't seem to make any difference.
I'm going to try updating my motherboard drivers and leaving the case door of my tower and see if it makes any difference.

Specs:
AMD Barton 1.8 ghz
ATI Radeon 9600 128mb
Soltek 75FRN-L Motherboard

Also my friend has the exact same unit as mine (bought them at same time) and he is experiencing no problems at all and he's never bothered to update any system drivers since he got the machine.

I have a simular problem. After a few hours suddenly sound starts to fail. I dont hear combat sounds anymore, but I still hear other sounds correctly. Than about 1 minute later the game hangs and I have to restart.
I dont know if this is related but the game starts with an error message: Cant find entrypoint SMapl5 in kernel32.dll. The same message comes up when I start my old Windows ME version of DXDiag. When I use the Windows XP DXDiag version all works well and there are no errors. still have Windows ME on my C-drive. I'm running GW under windows XP on my D-drive. However the game itself is installed on C.

I contacted the official tech support site but I'm not sure if it worked. After filling the forms and entering my email and pressing the confirm button I suddenly was moved to an account creation screen with my email adress filled in. But I allready have an account on that mail adress, So I did not continue. Very confusing...

I'm having the same problem (computer locking after a while--possibly due to certain areas although I haven't been able to confirm). I've contacted the official support staff and will post the fix if I get one...

Having similar problem, my PC will crash after 5min of logging into GW's. One thing I noticed today:

Logged into GW's at 10am (low server load) and the game ran great with no crashes

Logged into GW's at 8pm (high server load) and the game crashed again in 5min

Has anyone else noticed this pattern?

I started to crash when i put in another stick of memory. Do you all have two sticks of memory in your comp? Are they diff speed? Guild wars does not like it one bit. Also are they by different companies. Guildwars does not like this either.

I m having the same problem..and a friend too..
I d say thats only with ATI VDP cards
Ppl i know that r using GForce cards don't have that kinda crashes

I have exactly the same problem as above, first certain sound effects drop out then I know there's a crash coming, however, I also use Skype to talk to a couple of mates who I play with and that carries on fine, updated evrything I can think of, does your cursor go a funy shape too?

6800nu so Nvidia are affected too!

I would start with checking for spyware. Use spybot, or adaware. (directions on their use on their homepages. Which you can find from google)

After you're sure theres no spyware, i would try it again. If it still crashes, i would then check to see if the processor is overheating. The 1.4's have been "in service" for a long time, and often the cases and configurations they're now installed in may have dust problems. You may want to make sure its getting proper cooling.

A good stability test is a program called Prime95. In this case you'd want to run it for max heat/power consumption.

If prime produces no errors, you may be looking at a driver or other software problem.

Sounds like an irq problem. Does your soundcard share an irq with anything else?

Hi i registered to post this

Someone said

I have a Geforce FX 5700, and im experiencing the random lockups.

I recently did a format of my system to completly get rid of everything and scans tell me im 100% virus free so now i know thats all ok. I also did tests on my hardware, doing tests on my power supply to see it thats ok and its running fine. I replaced my CMOS battery and cleaned dust out of my system, and also did a memory test to check that and it came back OK.

Temperature scales show me my system is running fine for what it is but yet still i get random lockups.

My specs are

AMD ATHLON XP 2000+
512DDR
Geforce FX 5700 256mb
80gig HD (75gb free)

The way this look i think this may be a problem guildwars should look into. I emailed them and he reply i get is install SP2, but i have that installed.... i havent got a reply since.

Any ideas now anyone?

-Aden

Sounds like a thermal problem to me.

Under normal conditions your cpu or video card aren't heavily stressed, therefore don't generate a lot of heat and don't need as much cooling.

So you fire up the game and start playing. Now either one or both of these are being stressed and things heat up until failure.

When you power cycle the box or shut down the game the componentry has a chance to cool down a few degrees, but not to the state it was at before you started playing.

You fire up again and now you have a smaller "cushion" of temperature before you experience the same problem.


Try opening up your case and positioning a good fan to blow directly onto the works. Make sure as many parts are covered as possible. See if you can play the game any longer. If you can play a whole session without issues (hours, or whatever it might be), then you've determined the nature of your problem.



A lot of people tend to neglect the little fans that connect to their cpu, video card, or chipsets until there is a problem. It's always good to periodically check these things to make sure they spin freely. Having a ventilation fan isn't necessarily going to cut it if one of these little fans seize because those little fans are doing a very specific job. If a normal ventilation fan was sufficient to keep everything cool, you wouldn't see so many fans on cpu or video heatsinks.

I just got the game today, and after playing for a few hours I had my video stop working. The display went out, and my monitor went into suspend mode. I had to manually restart the system. I haven't been back in since to test it though, so as yet I'm not sure what the cause is.

My system is only about 1.5 to 2 months old -- a Gigabyte nForce4 motherboard with an AMD 64 (Winchester), 1GB (512x2 in dual channel) Corsair PC3200 RAM (at 2-2-2-6), EVGA GeForce 6600GT 128MB PCI-E, OCZ PowerStream 520W PSU, running on Windows XP Home (SP1).

I built this system because my last couple systems had various problems that I made sure to correct on this one. I avoided the VIA chipset (personal dislike), and I made sure to get quality components, rather than going for budget. My last computer had random lockups and reboots due to using cheap motherboard (an ECS) and a generic power supply.

This last point is what I've noticed that almost everyone seems to overlook: the power supply unit. These days you can't just get away with using the generic PSU that came with your old computer case. They're made with lower quality components that don't deliver a constant steady amount of power as they heat up... and that means all the high quality hardware in your system that needs power isn't getting fed enough. The problems I was having when I discovered this is that my +12V rail on the PSU was only giving me 10.4 to 11.9 volts during idle, and since most of the major hardware runs off that (CPU and graphics especially) I'd get frequent lockups or reboots during high load situations.

I don't have any real heat problems now. I specifically worked out a case that gave me very good airflow with multiple case fans, and made sure to have as even amount of intake as exhaust as I could. But from things I've been reading, it seems like the "70" (71.xx) series of Nvidia Forceware drivers tend to cause some graphics cards to run hotter than earlier drivers did, sometimes by as much as 10 C.

So find out what PSU you're using (do some research to find out if yours is a good or bad unit, on places like www.devhardware.com for example), and make sure that your system has good airflow. Lots of fans blowing air in isn't always the best, it just means there's no where for the hot air to leave through and it turns your system into a giant dust repository. And check to see how fragmented the hard drive is, that can lead to headaches.

Irony here is I am running on Via and the game is extremely stable here. I can play for hours on end and never get a single crash.

Gigabyte Motherboard (7VRXP if memory serves)
1 gig of DDR-RAM (running at 233 mhz)
ATI RADEON 256mb (8550 or 9550, friend gave it to me)
Latest drivers for the videocard
updated all drivers for the motherboard
still crash every god damned day.

Black screen, PC reboots.

If I'm lucky, Guild Wars quits out and wants to deliver an error message.

A friend at work said that it might be the Gigabyte Motherboard, that a lot of those are having problems?

I've been having the same problem. The first time I played, it was fine and I ran it for about an hour and a half before I went off to do other things. Now every time I play it, it freezes my machine after about 10-15 minutes.

After reading a few other threads on here, I cleaned the dust out of my computer, left the side off and run GW in a window while monitoring the temp of my gfx card (GeForce 5700u, with latest Forceware drivers) on the side. Within a couple of minutes it had risen to 90 degrees C, from ~58 when I started playing. So I think I've found my problem...

I've encountered similar problems with my BFG 6800GT/OC- they told me to go into BIOS and set the "AGP Fast Write" to Disable. That helps a lot while playing single player, but I still get crashes (though not as often) while playing with my friends over Teamspeak. For my MSI Neo Platinum motherboard the feature was listed under "Advanced Chipset Settings", or some-such. He said it was more 6xxx-specific, but it might be worth a shot for you guys.

ive got the same problems with guildwars....and it only started happening to me after they did the shiverpeak expansion....it started to glitch and then everything was in zoom-in mode. later on i hadnt played guild wars for a while, and when i went in, i started a new character, and it kept freezing in the catacombs, then it started freezing everywhere else....in my opinion, i think it may have something to do with the fac that guildwars is on a one server system...even though it has different districts, it has only one server that everyone plays on...which at times it really packed, ive been kicked off a few times when i started playing guildwars for no reason...just walking around, and poof, disconnected...but anyways, i know its not my RAM thats the problem cuz i can run WoW no problem as long as i dont use messengers or other programs along with it....but even with guildwars, i dropped my virus scanner and spyware scanner before i logged on, and after five minutes even at the log in screen, the whole computer froze....i really hope that its just a problem with areanet and not guildwars itself...that would not be good, anyways, i hope someone finds out whats going on with this thing, so the rest of us that are getting dropped and kicked off can keep playing...i want to be able to see how the assassin profession is like