Hello guys,
I have no idea if this will be helpful or not, but I made a guide regarding system problems. If anyone has anything they think I should add to it let me know. I hope it helps somehow....
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Here is a write-up I made that I will post in case it might be of any help... The first part is simply a reply I made to someone on another forum that got me started on making this troubleshooting guide.
So, it sounds like what your computer did was 'reboot'? Right? Also known as a 'Spontaneous Reboot'. I say this because you say...
"When the computer restored, the message, 'Your computer has recovered from a serious problem'; appeared."
This means that the Game didn't crash, it means the Operating System(OS) crashed. So it is more serious than a bug in the game. The crashing of the OS was only prompted by the use of a resource intensive piece of software(the game). It was not caused by the game software alone and all by itself.
The System is made up of a lot of things, Software(the OS being a large part of that), some low-level software called Device Drivers, and Hardware.
And the point I want to drive at is that a Spontaneous Reboot is almost always the symptom of a more deeply rooted problem in your System than just some bug in a game's software/code. It could be a Device Driver problem, a problem with poor RAM in your system, or possibly a loose connection somewhere. OR, most likely an Overheating problem. The problem you have described is usually the sign of too much heat building up in a system.
Note: Device drivers are just software too, but they are given access to a lower level privilege, called kernel or system level privilege, within the OS than normal programs/games are(user level). Device drivers interact closely with the OS and have no restriction on where they can go or what they can do.
Computer Systems are one of the most complex devices made by humankind. Anyway, without futher ado...
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I thought I'd list some possible reasons behind the cause of system problems/instability.
1) chkdsk - A simple 'chkdsk' on a command prompt to make sure there are no filesystem problems that need fixing. WinXP usually handles this automatically when you reboot after it has detected an error in the filesystem. But ya never know, so just to be sure you might want to run a chkdsk.
2) DxDiag - You could run DxDiag, run through all the tests and then see if it's reporting any problems. You can also try turning down the 'Hardware Acceleration' slider on the Sound tab and see if that cures your problem. Click the 'Save All Information' button(on the very first 'Tab' that DxDiag displays when you start it) and save the text file somewhere. Open up the text file and then copy and paste it's contents on the forum here for people to look at. You'd be surprised the number of times problems have been solved by doing this(for GalCiv II just use the 'debug.err' file found in the main GalCiv II folder).
3) If you have Dr. Watson enabled(enabled by default on WinXP) then look at it's log file and open it up with Wordpad. First, click [ Start --> Run --> drwtsn32 --> press Enter --> look at 'Log File Path' at the very top ]. Go to where that log file is stored on your hard drive and then open it up with Wordpad. It might be helpful if you post the details contained in it concerning the crash. Although, this suggestion does not lead to a cure for problems as often as posting the 'DxDiag' information and is usually only helpful to a Developer.
4) Mods - Some Unofficial modifications to an application can sometimes causes instability. Make sure you are running an unmodified installation of the software before seeking help with problems.
5) PSU. A cheap or faulty PSU(Power Supply Unit, or just 'Power Supply'). Or, one that is not neccessarily faulty, but does not supply the system with enough Power(juice, hehe). Your PSU must have a high enough power rating to supply all your components with enough juice. If you have quite a number of PCI addon cards, hard drives, optical drives and other types of hardware attached that draw power then the PSU must be up to the task. Newer Video Cards require quite a bit of power compared to ones from the old days. The Power Supply is one of the more underrated components in a PC. The Power Supply is actually pretty darned important.
6) Loose PCI Cards - PCI Cards that are not firmly in their slot. If a PCI card is even just slightly loose it can cause problems. You might want to turn off your computer and then open up your case and pull each card out and then stick it back in. Sometimes you can't tell just by looking.
7) Overheating - If your system's CPU or Northbridge chip is getting too hot then you will have system instablities that rear their ugly head when you run resource intensive applications(such as games). You might be able to determine this by taking off the side cover of your PC, and then get a fan and point it so that it is blowing right into the inside of your system.
8) IRQ Sharing conflicts - Some PCI slots share IRQ's(Interrupt Requests) with each other. You can usually find this information in the manual for your motherboard. Some PCI addon cards are capable of handling this. Some are not. For instance, IIRC one of the PCI slots in my machine shares an IRQ with the AGP slot(which is where my video card is). SO, I made sure that my Sound Card is not in the PCI slot that shares the IRQ with the AGP slot. In fact, I made sure to not put anything in the PCI slot that shares the IRQ with the AGP slot. Also, if you have an addon (PCI Slot) sound card and also have a sound card built into your motherboard(onboard sound), it is possible the two are conflicting. You may need to go into your BIOS and disable the onboard sound.
9) Drivers - You should make sure you have the latest BIOS for your motherboard, the latest Chipset drivers for you motherboard, the latest Sound Card driver, the latest driver for your Network Interface Card(NIC), the latest driver for your Mouse, the latest driver for your Monitor. If there is a driver for your mouse and/or monitor that is. My monitor has a driver that came as a .inf file. There's probably other hardware you have that require device drivers too. Make sure you have the lastest device drivers installed for all your hardware. Note: When it comes to Video Card drivers the latest one is not neccessarily the best one.
10) Motherboard - Hopefully this is not the problem, but, there is the possibility that you have a defective motherboard.
11) RAM - You could possibly have a bad stick of RAM. Or your RAM could be just plain unstable due to improper settings in the BIOS. Settings such as CAS/RAS and/or other RAM timing settings that are set to aggressively, or an incorrect vDimm setting. That is, if your BIOS allows you to adjust these settings. You can download and run 'memtest86+'(www.memtest.org) to check your RAM. You need to let it run for a considerable amount of time though to see if it encounters any errors. The following is a little story I have about a situation I had with some RAM.
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I put my system together and purchased some Mushkin Low Latency RAM(Special 2-2-2) made from Winbond BH-6 chips. You had to bump up the vDimm voltage(amount of voltage supplied to the ram modules) in your BIOS to 2.65v in order to use this memory. I had two 512 MB sticks of this RAM so I could run in Dual Channel mode. Well, one of those first two sticks was bad right off the bat. Fortunately for me, Muskin's main office is in the city I live in. So I took it down there and they exchanged it for me. They had run 'memtest86+' on the new stick and said it checked out ok. When I put it in my system I had 'Fast Boot' disabled in my BIOS and it checked out fine. Disabling the 'Fast Boot' option in your BIOS causes your system to run a check on the RAM, not as thorough of a check as a utlity such as memtest86+ does on it though.
Everything was fine, it seemed. Well, the problem for me was I would be playing a BF1942 mod called 'Forgotten Hope' and eventually my game would either crash with an error(this would happen a number of times throughout the day), or I would get a loud digital screeching sound, the screen would go black, my hard drive would go thunk, and then my system would spontaneously reboot(happened once or twice a day). This is not the only game that would crash after some time with an error message either. Also, on a somewhat rare occasion I would have a subtle error occur when I booted up WinXP. I would get a message that said, 'One of the system registry files is corrupt and had to be recovered from a backup copy. The recovery was successful.'
It took some months before I really started having these problems. But they did happen and started to happen more and more frequently over time. And I lived with them for some time after they started happening(because I could use my computer for hours until the problem occured). I finally got fed up enough to where I started trying to think about what the problem could be. Eventually, for reasons hard to explain, I came to the conclusion that something was getting hosed up in memory. So I went into my BIOS and disabled the 'Fast Bootup' option. Again, when this is disabled it runs a test on your RAM. The test of my RAM got as far as 470 MB's at which point it encountered a R/W(read/write) error.
Well, my Mushkin RAM had a lifetime warranty on it. So I called them up and the fellow explained that the Winbond BH-6 stuff I had was a hit or miss proposition(yeah, pretty much miss I thought to myself, lol). He told me that they now had some modules that are made from a different process than the old BH-6 stuff, is very stable, doesn't require a bump in the vDimm voltage, and it has the Low-Latency memory timing capability(CAS/RAS 2-2-2). And that they would give me the newer stuff in exchange for the old Winbond BH-6 modules I currently had, since they were bad. After the exchange for the newer and better stuff, I have had 100 percent rock solid stability.
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12) Some piece of hardware in your system, your video card for instance, may not have fully failed yet but may be starting to go on the fritz.
13) A somewhat remote possibility but nevertheless a possibility is the your CPU is not quite seated properly in it's socket and needs to be reseated.
14) You have 'Fast Writes' enabled for your video card and it is causing system instabilities.
It's hard to know if your problem is a driver problem or any of the things I mention above at all. It could be something else altogether, like a BIOS setting or some other configuration problem. But other folks might be able to try and help you out better if you could list your System Specifications similar to the following example....
System Specs:
Intel P4 3.4C(C = Northwood Core) on Asus P4C800-E Deluxe(Intel 875P + ICH5R Chipset), Zalman 7000a-Cu HS/Fan, Enermax RG651P-VE 550W PSU, 2 GB Mushkin eXtreme Performance(2-2-2) Dual Channel PC3200 RAM, Samsung 214T MultiSync 21" Digital LCD Monitor, Sapphire Radeon X800 XT PE Videocard with v6.3 Catalyst Drivers, DirectX 9.0c, Creative Audigy2 Platinum Soundcard with v2.08.0002 OpenAL Beta Driver, Western Digital 250 GB w/8 MB Cache 7200 RPM Parallel ATA HDD, WinXP Pro SP2, Comcast Cable Internet Connection, Nortons Anti-Virus and Personal Firewall 2006
Listing system specs alone usually does not lead to a cure for system problems. Nevertheless, at the very least it gives people a starting point to helping troubleshoot problems.
Hope that helps,
One Tin Soldier
GalCiv2 Forums
