Game won't run

[beat365]

I bought COTN yesterday and I intalled it and had no problems running it the first time. However, now every time I try to open the game my computer instantly restarts. Has anyone else had this problem or does anyone know how to fix it?

I'm running:
Athlon 1800+
256mb ram
geforce 4 mx 460
w/onboard sound

all of my drivers are up to date

Please Help.
THanks

[Greg Sheppard]

Hi Beat,

Do you know if your computer has changed in any way since you ran CotN the first time? Have there been any changes to hardware, software? Is there any chance you've caught a virus?

Checking your event viewer for any events which coincide with the restarts might also provide us useful information.

Right click My Computer > select Manage > expand Computer Management > expand System Tools > expand Event Viewer > click on System.
Look for any red X's (errors) that occurred at the same time as the restart.

Please also post a save of your dxdiag

Click start\run\type "dxdiag" in the text box that appears

Choose "Save all information" once the diagnostic has run to a descriptive name (IE beat_dxdiag) & post the resulting text file to this thread.

Once the info I've requested above has been posted, we'll have a better chance of sorting this out.

Thanks,

Greg

BTW, this is not a common problem, but if you Google / Yahoo "Computer restarts" you'll see that some other folks have run into it as well, and that there seem to be several things that can cause it.

[beat365]

Here's the information you asked for:

[Greg Sheppard]

Hi Beat,

I'll check out the dxdiag, but it will also help if you answer the other questions regarding whether your computer has had any hardware or software changes (including the possibility of viruses) since you ran CotN & whether Event Viewer can shed any light on this.

Thanks,

Greg

[beat365]

I haven't made any changes to my computer since I installed it. Aside from updating video card drivers after the game started giving me trouble. I did a virus scan and cleaned all the ad-ware/spyware I could find off my computer and I'm still having the same problem.

[djp]

You could try renaming Cotn.ini and see if CotN then starts (with default settings).

Also there's a setting in windows XP that makes application crashes turn into full restarts, which we DONT want - thanks MS. Right-click my computer, select properties, then the advanced tab, then click the settings button for "start up and recovery". You don't wan't "Automatically restart" selected here !

[beat365]

Neither one of those works. I turned off the auto-restart, now it just gives me a blue screen telling me to try things I've already tried, then i have to restart to get rid of it.

[mouse]

Did you uninstall the old video drivers before installing the new video drivers? After uninstalling/installing video drivers you some times need to reinstall DX which seems to lose track of it's parts.

[beat365]

Thanks

I'll try that but I started having problems before I installed the new drivers. But it's worth a shot.

[WormHole]

I don't know if this is your prob, but I don't think that video card is DirectX 9 compliant. I see that you have 9.0c installed, but from what I've read on Nvidia, you card is 8.1 compliant.

Might be worht checking into.

[homegrown]

This is happening to me. Started last night. I had played several hours the night before. So far I've.. run ad-aware (had a bunch of browser hijack attempts *the change from when I was able to play to when I wasn't*); uninstalled, deleted the directory, reinstalled; updated video drivers (*note nVidia had a Nov 9 release*).

The error log has a basic theme... most of the errors refer to a TV Card that is no longer installed not being able to start.

ARGH!

[mouse]

Homegrown did you remember to defrag? The auto save and saved games will really fragment the drive (even if it says it doesn't need to defrag do it anyway).