WOW Problems

[JK949]

I sold a second computer of mine to a guy who plays WOW. He says it it is locking up
after anywhere from 10 minutes to 1 hour. This was a spare I built that has very little
hours on it and was built from all new parts. X2 4400, 1 gig of 3200 ram, WD250 sata
drive, Thermaltake Soprono case with 430 watt ps, evga 8600 gt card, XP Home kept
updated, latest MB and Video card drivers ect..
He dropped it off and since I have never played WOW I'm not in a position to get it
to lock up in that game. Looped 3DMark 06 five times. Heat not an issue. Played
Fear and Call of Duty 3 for a while with no problems. I have read a little about Nvidias
8 series drivers not playing some games very stable due to the fact they are
so new. Anybody have any ideas on what could be causing this. It only happens
when he plays wow. It sounds to me like the game is the source of the problem,
not any hardware. Chime in with any thoughts that might be helpful.
Almost forgot a couple things. 24" Samsung monitor. Logitech usb G11 keyboard
and usb mouse and Boise usb Companion speakers.


Thanks.

 

[Jschmuck2]

Wow - well, first and foremost paragraphs are your friend. Second and secondmost that could be a million things. But if I had to guess I would say one of three things, Driver issue, heat issue or a RAM issue. Did you check out nvidia's forums about any driver conflicts?

 

[JK949]

I ran memtest86 3.3 for two hours and no errors. Checked around for web driver problems
but found nothing specific to World of Warcraft. GPU hits 65c max at my house. The heat question is a
problem because I don't know the room temp the computer is in and no way to know.
Is it airconditioned ? I do know the computer it out in the open and not in a cubby hole.
I did more snooping after my original post and took a look at the .txt error log wow
creates when the game crashs and they are all 132, which is cannot read memory at
location ......
Thats why I ran memtest. I did read that the prefered minimum requirements include 1 gig of ram. I talked to the guy today and he said the problem occurs when he visits a large, busy
city with a lot of activity. A friend of mine at a nearby PC Club has played WoW a little
on a guest pass he was given told me that when you hit places like that the memory
usage increases a substantionly. At this point I'm beginning to think 1 gig of ram is not enough.
At bootup there is only 458 meg available. I'm going to pop in another gig and let him
take it home this evening and see if it stops the lockups.

Hope you enjoyed this paragraph and I'll post the end to this story.
Thanks for the reply. It's the only one so far. Looks like there isn't to many WoW
players here.

All this done for a computer that I have already been paid for and sold "as is" that has
a problem with one game.

 

[Sentrosi2121]

<easy answer> His new PC is trying to tell him something...uninstall and delete WoW. </easy answer>

But it could be a lot of things like the previous poster said. Run MemTest on it for 24 hours. Try running a PC Burn-in program. Sisoft Sandra for example.

It could possibly be bad sectors on his hard drive. Defrag the drive. Run the game again. If it's still doing it, look into doing a drive diagnostic on it.

 

[rh71]

It could be an add-on that he's using for WoW. Disable every single add-on in the character select screen and play for a while. These add-ons are sometimes user-written-code so it can bug stuff up and cause issues. Sometimes they disconnect you from the game, sometimes they make the machine restart. Freezing might be another problem though I haven't run into that one myself.

 

[CKent]

Never, ever build a pc for a friend or relative. They expect tech support for life. Recommend them a Dell if they ask. If they persist, tell them your knowledge is about networking / programming / etc., but that you don't know much about home PCs. Even if you're an expert.

Ok, that being said... I was having an issue with WoW locking up which turned out to be caused by the AG_UnitFrames addon. Ask him if he's using that, tell him to get Pitbull if he is. If he's not, tell him to disable / update his addons and see if his problem clears up.