game used to play fine....

[Kythe]

Hi,
Game used to play fine and I was really enjoying it, but now it crashes regularly durning gameplay. DxDiag is attached.
Thanks in advance for your help,
Kythe

[Keith]

What have you added to your computer since you installed CotN?

Your system looks fine.

When is the last time you defragged your hard drive?

Have you tried uninstalling and reinstalling?

[Kythe]

I defraged the drive this morning it still crashes. I've added some other games and some small programs that I need for college classes.
If I try uninstalling and reinstalling will I lose the saved games and custom senarios that I'm working on?

[Keith]

I defraged the drive this morning it still crashes. I've added some other games and some small programs that I need for college classes.
If I try uninstalling and reinstalling will I lose the saved games and custom senarios that I'm working on?You should not lose them. You can copy the SAVED GAMES folder you have now to someplace safe just to be sure. As long as you reinstall the game back to the path it is in now everything should be ok. If not you can always copy the SAVED GAMES backup folder over the new empty one.

You'll need to backup the Scenrios folder too.

[Kythe]

Ok I uninstalled the game, then reinstalled the game and patch. It seemed to be working ok for awhile then it crashed again. I was going to attach a screen shot of the microsoft error report but I couldn't get the attachments window to load. Maybe I'll try again later.

[Kythe]

Ok got the screen shot to upload.

[imhotep3147]

It could be that one of the programs you've installed is trying to run in the background and causing the crashes......have you tried turning any of them off or disabling them temporarily to see if that helps??

[Kythe]

None of these new programs run in the background, they only run when I have the cd-rom or dvd-rom inserted, so I don't see how they could interfere with this game.

[Keith]

The new programs may have installed some kind of file that is conflicting with CotN or changed some settings on your system.

Since you have P4 3.4Ghz hyperthreading CPU you may have a heat problem with the CPU it it is running at 100% capacity.

With the game running you can press the CTRL+ATL+DELETE key to bring up the task manager and then click on the Perromance tab to see how much of the system reources are being used. On a hyperthreading system like yours and mine the normal range should be 50% or less. If it is 100% you have a background process running somewhere on the Processes list that is eating up CPU time and power and this may be causing the CPU to heat up. Mine has lockup problems because it's running in hyperthreading mode 24/7 and at 100% because of a background program I run that appears on the processes list.

I've got a 3.04 Ghz Dell Dimension XPS desktop system.

[Kythe]

It's hard to tell exactly what the CPU usage percent is because it drops as soon as task manager comes up. When it first comes up it was at 77% then it dropped to 50 something.

Another thing I thought of was to run my adware/spyware detection program and it came up with a lot of stuff and the game has been playing better since I cleaned that stuff up. Maybe that is something that you can suggest other people to try in the future. I will let you know if I have any other problems.

[Keith]

Yes, the performance graph on the task manager usually spikes when it is first run because to the extra cycles taken up on the CPU. 50% sounds about right. That's where mine would be too if I were not running a program that is hyperthreading the two virtual CPUs.

[Ken I]

I have been playing COTN and am deep into the campaign. However, in the last five or so attempts to resume play after saving the games gets to the point of the load bar says "Loading Completed" and the background music starts to play and abruptly I get a blue screen that states "YOUR SYSTEM HAS SUFFERED A MAJOR ERROR AND HAS BEEN SHUT DOWN. IF THIS IS THE FIRST TIME YOU'VE SEEN. . . ."
I am doing nothing different when I have attaempted to load the game and nothing else is running. What has happened?
Ken I

[Keith]

Wow, "blue screen of death"!

First run dxdiag and post your results here.

Start/Run then type dxdiag and then when it is done testing your system SAVE the results to a folder you can easily find it in.

Then come back to this thread, post a short new reply, then click on the Manage Attachments button below to bring up the attachments upload windows. Browse for the dxdiag.txt file you just created, and seletc it and then click on the UPLOAD button. Once it is uploaded, CLOSE the window. Then SUBMIT your reply.

You may need to update some drivers, but we can't tell until we see the dxdiag.txt file.
http://members.aol.com/dheitm8612/pics/tut_rule.gif (http://panzerblitz.proboards9.com/index.cgi#test)

[GillB]

Have you installed any new programmes or made any changes to your system between it working OK and now not working?

[Ken I]

Gill B,
When I first loaded the game, part of it was hidden on the right and I had to test several screen resolution settings changes to make the important play areas visible. That was the only adjustments, additions or changes I made to the PC. What I can't figure out why the game ran for several hours of play time and just now had decided to crash my PC? Would these resolution settings changes cause the crash of my PC? I'm not too crazy about my fairly new machine being treated in this manner.
Ken I

[GillB]

I can't imagine that changing screen resolutions would cause a complete crash like that.

Is it the same file that's crashing your PC each time? It's possible that the save-file has got corrupted

[Keith]

I can't picture a resolution change causing that sort of problem either.

From the sounds of things it looks like your save game file may be corrupted. Do you have a previous save from the autosave you can start from?

[Dnisis]

I had that happen to me. the only way I could fix it, was to uninstall the game. Delete the remaining folder including all the save games. Then reinstalling the game and starting over. I had done nothing to my computer other than the install of CoTN. I think the game or a saved game just had been corrupted somehow as it didn't work with just an uninstall, reinstall. I had to delete everything.