Some games crash XP Home, some don't?

[Mother Farquhar]

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

 

[Rick \Nutcase\ Rogers]

That's a real quandry. Have you tried disabling video shadowing in the
system BIOS yet? Your best bet of getting answers to this are going to be in
the gaming group.

By the way, as a BIOS flash from a boot floppy would not rely on Windows (it
never loads when you are booting a floppy for this chore), there is no
reason the internal floppy wouldn't work for that - unless it's gone bad or
you got the cable on backwards (done that myself a few times).

--
Best of Luck,

Rick Rogers, aka "Nutcase" - Microsoft MVP

Associate Expert - WindowsXP Expert Zone

Windows help - www.rickrogers.org

 

[Vanguard]

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.

What happens if you disable the anti-virus on-access scanner before
starting the game?

Check if SPD (serial presence detect) is selected for the speed setting
in your BIOS. I had some problems by using specific settings that my
memory sticks claimed it would support but found out they didn't and SPD
runs them a tad slower and the problems went away.

 

[Mother Farquhar]

That's a real quandry. Have you tried disabling video shadowing in the
system BIOS yet?

I looked in the BIOS but could not find this option listed?

 

[Mother Farquhar]

What happens if you disable the anti-virus on-access scanner before

starting the game?

I always disable it for games (

Check if SPD (serial presence detect) is selected for the speed setting
in your BIOS.

Think I'll try this now.

 

[David Candy]

How about the error messages.

 

[blah blah]

try disabling bios shadowing, and cashing, my msi board will crash every
time playing generals if this is enabled, I belive it is under the second
option in under the main bios screen( at least on mine) and in there some
were there is a swap floppy drive setting, disable that and should put your
drive back to a:, also make shure your on board fdc is enabled(floppy disk
conttroler)can't remeber where thats at good luck, and let me knew if this
helped

Ted


"David Candy" <.> wrote in message
How about the error messages.

 

[Guest]

David, I can't help you with your problem but maybe you can help me.. you
said you can run Thief1 and Thief2 under XP, I have no such luck.

I've got a new P4 system, with all the bells/whistles but Thief crashes as
soon as I actually try to play the game (the game loads ok, graphics run, I
can choose "difficulty" but when I try to "continue" it crashes and the error
message is "Direct 3D driver does not report texture memory usage".

The big difference between my system and yours (as I see it) is that my PC
came with service pack 2 installed, while you have not yet put it in place.
Also, my version of DirectX is 9.0c and this could be the KEY factor.

Would you be kind enough to check your version of DirectX (run "dxdiag", the
version number is listed at the bottom of the System Page) and reply back
here.

Thanks,
Gerry