Call of Duty 4 hates my system

[boge]

I just don't understand. My system is stable like a rock, plays just about any and everything I put in it and does it well. Then I bought myself CoD4. and the trouble started.

First the damn disk just sat in my drive and spun. Light on, steady.... and spun and spun. Nada else.

I double checked to ensure I had the latest firmware for my LG dvd-drive. all was good.

Then I found that if I fired up the system, let it settle and go to idle, I could then insert the disk and I would get the installation frontend to come up....so I installed the game.

Re-booted after and nada. So I pulled out the disk, and rebooted again. Insert disk ... click on Single player and freeze. Re-booted a few times, same thing each time.

Set screen rez to 800 x 600 (from 1680 x 1050) tried again, still no go. Turned off Crossfire. monkeyed with it a bit and it would allow me to get into game one in five times.

Then I found a true-fire fix. Start computer, turn down rez, turn off crossfire insert game disk and set affinity to 0 (turned off one of the dual cores) then killed the `005.exe that was in task manager.

Ejected disk and reinserted it. game now starts fine.

So tell me this: Why is the latest and greatest game out there requiring me to turn everything off to get it to start? I see lots of review which have crossfire and dual cores working just fine.

AND before anyone starts with the bios / drivers, don't. I have the latest 1101 bios and Cat 8.2 including the chipset drivers.... and dvd drivers are current ....

 

[jay_l_a]

When I put my COD4 disk in, the launcher tries to appear, but I just get a black box in the middle of MY SCREEN.
It's annoying.

 

[stock86c]

yikes, and i was thinking of getting a crossfire system for COD4.....

looks like i just get the 3870 instead...

 

[JonnyRock]

Well i would not know about this problem, although it is concerning as i am looking to get the 3870x2 at some point.

The problem i have with the game is that it keeps killing my player profiles. It renames the current player to .corrupt. When i delete the new one it creates and rename the .corrupt file to the original, the game some times works but more often than not it does not, and renames it back to .corrupt.

I have the latest patch installed but this has not helped.

 

[tstebbens]

The fact the problems started before the game was installed indicate it's probably not anything to do with the graphics cards. I'd be looking at the anti-piracy measures the company may have used on the DVD. I had the same problem and I had 2x Nvidia 8800GTS in SLI mode. Luckily my PC completely crashed anyway with a dead disk so I reinstalled everything from scratch and it worked first time.

 

[pauldh]

Are you running virtual drives? Alcohol? Daemon? Some games copy protection detects these and won't run.

 

[MrsBytch]

Hmmm.....wierd. I thought I would have trouble with COD4 and Vista64, but it runs like a champ. Good luck, its a good game.

 

[razor512]

press ctrl alt delete, how many running processes do you have

you can have a really good gaming pc but if you have like 50+ running processes taking up over half of your memory, then if will lag the game and it will be forced to use the pagefile and it will lag the game

cod4 is a real memory hog
no matter which res you use, cod 4 will use a crap load of memory
for me i only have 11 running processes and my cpu and video specs are lower than yours, but i get no lag in cod4

 

[chilli]

I've been having horrendous problems in COD4 multiplayer in that for no apparant reason, my whole system will just BSOD with no specific error. Usually indicating a driver has failed in the same way that my system will BSOD if I turn off my headset while it is in use (ie an application is trying to output sound through it). It will only ever crash if I have alt-tabbed at any point (usually to use the admin program takatai to kick TKers etc, but i have ruled this out of causing the crash)

I have a vague feeling it has something to do with teamspeak as the game never BSOD's in single player, no matter how many times I alt-tab.

Or it has something to do with my webcam bizarly as I have bene looking through eventvwr to see if there is anything there, but there are semi regular errors caused by my cam so may just be coincidental....

 

[Flakes]

my COD4 game started to crash in multiplayer, it locked my pc but i found it to be a overheating problem, taking off my HSF giving it a good clean and some new thermal paste fixed all my problems, 38C idle 46 load from the 66C i was getting load in COD 4... lots of dust bunnies clogging my HSF.

 

[boge]

I have about 23 processes total running in the background, I like to keep it at a min. The vast bulk of which are passive and don't take up a whole lot memory. I believe the answer is in the anti-pirate software, it must be American 'cause its more important that you can't copy it than that it really works. After all, security is so much more important that functionality, right Homeland security?>
After a few more days of stupidity, I return the game to EB and now im playing a game that works..... first time

 

[firebird]

I've been playing COD4 on my system <sig> on Vista 32 without issue. I was just at a LAN party where we had a large variety of PCs playing the multiplayer, and nobody had issues starting the game. I person did have their game crash and an error that indicated the system could not allocate resources to the video. He was running x1950xtx Xfire. His system never did make it back up....

I should note that my edition looks European, or at least not from the US region. Maybe the encryption on the disc was not compatible with your drive.

 

[gone fishin&#039;]

I'm running a American version in XP Pro with a 7600GT and no multiplayer,and no problems

 

[boge]

Indeed, the problems I had made no sense. They were not consistant, nor did they reflect a lack of equipment or drivers. I don't believe for a second that my system or its configuration are the root cause of the problems I had. I have a "new-game-a-month" purchasing program and this is the first game that I have had an issue with.

I also think its to do with Stream or w/e its called....nothing seemed to work right with my Orange box games until I allowed the silly stream program full access then I started getting weird traffic.

I also want to point out that my reference to America was a joke about security being placed over function and not a real issue. It was a poor joke and one I would have re-worked if I took the time to read what i had written before sending it.

 

[firebird]

Ok, lets not get all wishy washy about being PC. Your joke was both valid and taken lightly (I hope they aren't scanning these posts...). I work in IT, and it isn't just America as a country that's getting silly with security, it's everything. As a great Dilbert cartoon stated, "In a perfect world everything would be so secure you couldn't anything done". Seems that philosophy is moving towards game copy protection as well.

 

[lostandwandering]

It could have also been some software you had installed on your system. Sounds really stupid right? I had Microsoft Office 07 installed on my laptop. Anytime I inserted the disc to play or install, it gave me an error and wouldn't continue. I got rid of Office 07 and it worked. Computers are stupid, what can you say?

I know you said you didn't think it was a driver issue, but the only thing I would have tried to do was roll back the drivers a step. It wouldn't have taken much time and *might* have fixed it. I'm also wondering if you maybe got a bad disk as I have never seen or heard of that specific issue.

Sorry to hear that you had to return the game. You are really missing out.

 

[razor512]

PS extra running processes even if there not taking up a lot of cpu cycles, they reduce overall system bandwidth

do a clean boot and run a cpu and memory benchmark then do your normal boot and run the same test again

even if there idling, there still using system bandwidth

also another cool test you can do is run the benchmark with and with out a external hard drive turned on, you will see that with it on it takes about 10% of your memory bandwidth

here is my benchmark with my usual bootup which gives good performance

and here it is with microsofts crap enabled through msconfig and with the external hard drive turned on

edit click on images for full sized, why does the forum software act retarded and resize a image like 5 pixels smaller?