Frustrating Game Crashes

[TheWalken]

Up until mid January I was able to play all my games just fine, including Call of Duty and Raven Shield. Then one day I'm playing Call of Duty and the game crashes. Figuring it was some kind of fluke, I loaded the game up again, and it crashed. The game would play from a range of 1 minute to almost 2 hrs before it would crash. I've gotten 1 minute crashes after a fresh restart, even if my computer had been off for a while. All the fans are in working order... just to get all that out of the way. I have reformatted about 3 or 4 times and the game still crashes! It does this too with Raven Shield. The crashes could be a total freeze up, or an error message. And the error reports have ranged to everything under the sun or just the simple "unknown." I've tried DirectX 8.0 to the latest after each reboot. Along with almost every Nvidia driver I can think of, all the on board sound drivers, and the VIA 4 in 1 chipset drivers. I can run the entire 3DMark03 test without any problems.

Graphics card is GeForce 4 Ti 4200, and AMD Athlon XP 1600+, 1.4Ghz, and 512 DDR with AC'97 onboard OS is XP Home.

 

[LemonHerbWRX]

Sounds like a programatic problem to me. I would suggest uninstalling the game while saving all of your saved game files somewhere else. Then check for any stray files it may leave, or even registry entries if you want to. Once you reinstall the game update it with any available patches and then try to play the game again. If it works then try to run one of your saved games to see if it works.

 

[TheWalken]

And if it occurs with more than one game?

 

[LemonHerbWRX]

Im not a huge computer gamer, so I don't have a super ammount of experience with it. I had a friend who was having trouble with some of her games and found that diableing hyper threding fixed the problem. I guess the standard answer of upgrading the BIOS if you can and updating any drivers would be something to say. But then you get into the area where it is likely a weak component somewhere or other, but that would be hard to pin down. Does event viewer have any errors that are consistant at all?

 

[Mem]

Run Memtest86 from here ,this`ll test your ram,you could try a different video card to rule out yours being faulty,how are your temps?Try running the games with the case open and maybe a big desk fan blowing in.

 

[TheWalken]

Thanks for all the help. I discovered the problem. At first glance at my mobo everything looked fine, but under closer inspection I noticed that 4 of maybe 15 or so capictors were bulgding out, which causes the computer to be unstable. I anylized the crashes. Sometimes running cold for an entire day I can play for about an hour and a half or maybe two before a crash, after tha crashes become more frequent and are different each time, occuring every 35 minutes for a while and then eventually, depending how long the computer has been on and how hard its working, as frequent as 10 minutes apart between crashes. So the solution, I might be able to pull some strings with a family friend who could solder on some new capictors, since they are really cheap. The other alternative is to get a new mobo. I'll definately be getting a new power supply while Im at it. So I wont be gaming for a while, now.