Most older games crash on startup or quitting

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Paulky45

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Oct 4, 2013
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Hey all, hope you can help.

I've recently bought a new machine, specs below:

Windows 7 64 bit
16GB Corsair PC3-12800 1600MHz DDR3 Memory (2 x 8GB sticks)
Intel Core i5-5370k, 3.40GHz
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 660
Asus P8Z77-V LX Motherboard
I also have both a SSD standard HD (all games installed on the standard HD)

I'm having trouble with older games not starting or other times, starting perfectly but then crashing when I quit out of them. The crash is the same each time: the screen goes dark and nothing takes in input; I can't ctrl+alt+delete or anything, just have to do a hard reboot.

This only has happened with older games so far, whether there from CD, Good Old Games(gog) or Steam. And it varies: Thief Gold from gog starts but crashes on quit, System Shock 2 crashes on startup from Steam, Arcanum has run once but crashed on quitting, and now crashes on startup.

Then there's games like Baldur's Gate, Fallout Tactics that seems to run fine so far, despite being of a similar age. Newer games I've tried so far haven't had any trouble.

Any ideas? I understand getting older games to run on newer systems can be a hassle, but I've played these games before on Windows 7 (on a Mac laptop via bootcamp) without much hassle. I've also looked online, there seems to be some problems like this with games, but not specific to older games or to just on startup/quiting (that I can find anyway).

Any help would be very appreciated. PC is less than a month old so curious if there's a hardware problem. But I can't really afford the downtime work-wise so don't want to just send it back on an issue like this without being sure.
 
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Onus

Onus

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Jan 27, 2006
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Do the Windows Event Logs contain any useful information about the crashes? Are you using the latest WHQL drivers for your video card? Although it only affects older games, I'd run MEMTEST86+ anyway.
Do you have a swap file? Even with plenty of RAM, some programs expect there to be a swap file, and get wonky if there isn't one. If not, set it to a fixed (small) size, like 2GB.
 
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Paulky45

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Oct 4, 2013
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Thanks for the reply, Onus.

I'm not that used to Windows technical side, but pretty sure I've done all the above correctly. Drivers are all up to date, and the memtest came out fine. The Windows Event logs don't seem to come up with anything substantive that I can see; I can track them easy enough because there's a kernal error every time because I have to hard reboot after each crash, but there's no errors being logged that I can see before hand.

I thought you had it with the swap file, as after checking I noticed the SSD had one, but the normal HD where the games are installed didn't. But after setting one up, the games still crash.

I tried Thief Gold again. It ran as normal, but this time after quitting it still crashed, but the desktop showed with the transparent Thief Window over it first. But I don't know if this was just random or as a result of creating the swap file. I tried System Shock 2 and it failed to start in the usual way.

//edit


Just happened now again with Legend of Grimrock, which is an Indie game released a couple of years ago only. Playing it on Steam. Had ran it before with no hassle, but only for a few minutes. Played it there for maybe 30 minutes or so, went to quit it and it crashed in the same way. Black screen, no input, had to reboot manually. This is very weird and annoying. I've played games like Starcraft II for hours at a time and never had any trouble like this with it. Any ideas?

// edit, next day

Did some more troubleshooting. I reinstalled both Thief and System Shock onto the default C:\Program Files (x86). Now System Shock seems to run fine (before it never even started), and also quits fine each time. Thief ran and quit fine the first time I played it, but now crashes in the same way when I quit it.

C:\ is the SSD drive, where Windows is also installed. It's only 120gb or so. I'd previously had the games installed on E:\Games.
 
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Paulky45

Honorable
Oct 4, 2013
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10,510
Think I've solved it. I turned off my antivirus and games are now working. Doesn't make much sense to me but not complaining since it's an easy problem to fix at least.

For those who want to know, it's 'Bullguard' Anti Virus software that seemed to be the issue, just a 3 month free version I got free with the computer. I've now installed Avast; have that running and all the games mentioned above are now working. If someone wants to enlighten me and others about why that would be a problem, feel free. I've heard anti virus can cause issues, but didn't realise that one anti virus could break games whereas others could have no problems. And Bullguard did have a 'gaming mode', though I'm not entirely sure how effective that was to be honest.

Anyway, hopefully I'll have no further problems.
Thanks for the help, especially about the Swap file, I didn't know about that before.
 
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