Some games crash - some don't?

[Guest]

Archived from groups: microsoft.public.windowsxp.newusers (More info?)

A while back I had a new HD fitted onto my machine and had XP Home put onto
that. So, the only thing different about my PC is the O/S.

Anyway, suffice to say, even after a lot of patching, defragging, virus
checking, updating and so on, a lot of my games started crashing to the
desktop. And I don't mean old games that aren't compatible with XP, either.
These are new games such as Hal-Life 2, Painkiller and Farcry.

I feel I should point out that other games seem to work fine, such as:
Diablo 2, Tombraider 2, Civ 3, Heroes of Might and Magic 3 and Thief 1 and
2.

So what's going on? Most people seem to suggest overheating, but if that
were true why aren't the above games crashing? Also, why does Farcry crash
more or less instantly, whereas I can play Painkiller for a while and HL2
for even longer? Anyway, my CPU never goes above 60 (which I realise is a
bit on the high side, but it was no higher on Win98 - ON THE SAME PC!).

If it were something like bad RAM, then the above argument would still apply
(nothing crashed on 98).

By the way, let's get my sys-specs out of the way:

XP Home with all updates apart from SP2
AMD 2600
512 DDR 3200
2 HD's with gigs of space
SB Audigy 2 (latest drivers)
Radeon 9700 (latest drivers but have tried a lot of others)
MSI MB with all updates apart from BIOS (see below as to why)

Nothing is overclocked!

Yes, I suppose that updating the BIOS my help but IT'S THE SAME MB! Anyway,
I would only risk a 'disk' update and not a 'windows' one in case something
went wrong. Only I can't because my old internal FD was never recognised by
XP so I had to by an external USB one and that will only be recognised as
drive "B" not "A". S I haven't risked it, but I have tried the following
(after consulting lots of old posts:

Lowered AGP to 8
Put graphics to AGP
Turned of sys-restore
Nothing but essentials in background
Turned off virus checker

And quite a few other things!

One last bit of info I can give you are the temps and voltage of my system
(I use a utility from MSI to tell me this so I do not have to enter BIOS):

CPU temp: 53
Sys temp: 42
FSB: 167
Vcore: 1.650
Memory Voltage: 2.60
AGP voltage: 1.55
3.3C: 3.22
+5v: 4.97
+12v: 11.42

Lastly, my chip (2600): 167MHz x 12.5

I am posting this message to quite a few groups (not cross-posting) because
I really am at my wit's end now.

Thanks for any help

 

[Guest]

Archived from groups: microsoft.public.windowsxp.newusers (More info?)

On Sun, 23 Jan 2005 10:45:51 GMT, Mother Farquhar wrote:

> A while back I had a new HD fitted onto my machine and had XP Home put onto
> that. So, the only thing different about my PC is the O/S.
>
> Anyway, suffice to say, even after a lot of patching, defragging, virus
> checking, updating and so on, a lot of my games started crashing to the
> desktop. And I don't mean old games that aren't compatible with XP, either.
> These are new games such as Hal-Life 2, Painkiller and Farcry.
>
> I feel I should point out that other games seem to work fine, such as:
> Diablo 2, Tombraider 2, Civ 3, Heroes of Might and Magic 3 and Thief 1 and
> 2.
>
> So what's going on? Most people seem to suggest overheating, but if that
> were true why aren't the above games crashing? Also, why does Farcry crash
> more or less instantly, whereas I can play Painkiller for a while and HL2
> for even longer? Anyway, my CPU never goes above 60 (which I realise is a
> bit on the high side, but it was no higher on Win98 - ON THE SAME PC!).
>
> If it were something like bad RAM, then the above argument would still apply
> (nothing crashed on 98).
>
> By the way, let's get my sys-specs out of the way:
>
> XP Home with all updates apart from SP2
> AMD 2600
> 512 DDR 3200
> 2 HD's with gigs of space
> SB Audigy 2 (latest drivers)
> Radeon 9700 (latest drivers but have tried a lot of others)
> MSI MB with all updates apart from BIOS (see below as to why)
>
> Nothing is overclocked!
>
> Yes, I suppose that updating the BIOS my help but IT'S THE SAME MB! Anyway,
> I would only risk a 'disk' update and not a 'windows' one in case something
> went wrong. Only I can't because my old internal FD was never recognised by
> XP so I had to by an external USB one and that will only be recognised as
> drive "B" not "A". S I haven't risked it, but I have tried the following
> (after consulting lots of old posts:
>
> Lowered AGP to 8
> Put graphics to AGP
> Turned of sys-restore
> Nothing but essentials in background
> Turned off virus checker
>
> And quite a few other things!
>
> One last bit of info I can give you are the temps and voltage of my system
> (I use a utility from MSI to tell me this so I do not have to enter BIOS):
>
> CPU temp: 53
> Sys temp: 42
> FSB: 167
> Vcore: 1.650
> Memory Voltage: 2.60
> AGP voltage: 1.55
> 3.3C: 3.22
> +5v: 4.97
> +12v: 11.42
>
> Lastly, my chip (2600): 167MHz x 12.5
>
> I am posting this message to quite a few groups (not cross-posting) because
> I really am at my wit's end now.
>
> Thanks for any help

You've already tried different versions of the ATI drivers but wanted to
point something out. If you've ever checked the "more info" and "in this
release" links for any of the ATI driver releases, you'll see that most of
the improvements to the drivers are for specific games. In other words,
some games don't play nice with certain cards or drivers.

Suggestions:
You could check the online tech support pages for a particular game.
Sometimes they release updates and have them available for downloading.

Search out some discussion groups for the individual games and check to see
if any users with the same ATI card have similar trouble. If yes, they may
have posted workarounds that they've been successful with.

In the same vein, ATI has discussion forums at their site. Have read
several threads where ATI support folks have made very specific suggestions
for optimal BIOS settings based on the card model (and sometimes software
settings as well).

Check the game's configuration menus. Some will allow you to run the game
in "software mode" which is a bit "lighter" on the drivers and in
performance demands. I have one game that was released about the same time
as XP. It needed software mode at first. It took a while but eventually,
ATI released a driver that allowed me to turn software mode off.

--
Sharon F
MS-MVP ~ Windows Shell/User