CotN crashing and freezing

[swmicros]

Like many others I am having trouble with the game crashing to a reboot or freezing. I have checked to see if my system is overheating, as you have suggested, the highest CPU temp I have seen is 39C. I have removed the side panel on the case and placed a 12 inch room fan next to it to blow directly on the components, noisy but effective. I have gone so far as to swap my hard drive for a new one and install a fresh copy of XP Pro, latest non-beta drivers from VIA, Asus and ATI, and CotN, only to have the same problem.

CotN is an amazing game and I enjoy playing it very much, however, having it crash after 5 or 10 minutes is unacceptable.

I have attached my DXDiag file, your assistance would be greatly appreciated.

Greg Stiles

[Keith]

swmicros, did you use the uninstaller tool provided by ATI to remove your old ATI drivers before you updated to the new ones?

I run a Radeon 9800 Pro too, XP Pro 2P2, but I'm using the August 2004 Catalyst drivers. It might be worth a try. The only difference is that I run a P4 Intel and a SB Audigy 2 sound card.

[mouse]

Like Keith under XP I use the August 2004 drivers for my 9800 Pro video card. As to you system overheating 39c should not be enough to cause your system to shut down/crash. But the 9800 Pro can have overheating problems that would cause a crash. If you want to find out if it's the video card run the DX tests for your video card.

[Manni]

@swmicros,

from your dxdiag-results concerning the sound-on-motherboard-chip which is:

---------------------
Sound Capture Devices
---------------------
Description: SoundMAX Digital Audio
Driver Version: 5.12.0001.3663
Date: 7/15/2003

.............you ought to look out at your motherboard-manufactorers page for a newer sound-driver, this might help.

You have an outstanding hardware fitted in your pc. The game should really work & run smooth with that combination.
"other than that".....do a clean-up with a reliable Cleaner and do a defrag.

[swmicros]

Please remember, this is a brand new hard drive, nothing is installed except CotN. All drivers were downloaded last week from Asus, (mobo, audio and NIC), VIA, (chipset) and ATI.

I have tried the 4.11 drivers, no luck, and yes I did use the ATI Unistaller.

I also tried setting the AGP to 4x and turning off fastwrite but it still locks up and or drops to desktop and or reboots. It did play for a little longer though, about an hour, but it was excruciatingly laggy.

I have tried setting everything to Off, Low, Best Performance, 16 bit, no luck.

Phil, I have the fan about a foot away and vaccuum things out regularly.

[Keith]

The Radeon 9800 takes a lot of power and draws from the system power supply. Do you know the maximum wattage of your system power supply?

Another thought is that you could be having problems with one or more chips on a RAM strip or strips. I spent two years suffering with random hard lockups on my system, until I replaced some memory strips and my problem disappeared. Just something to keep in mind.

Are you running Norton's Anti-Virus? Over the years I've seen a number of reports where that has caused problems with games.

Do you have any other background apps running? Screensaver? Sleep mode on the the hard drive?

[sunred]

Hi,

Try and run the program as a Windows 98/ME program. That worked for me, and i have the same problems as you did.

Morten

[mouse]

Make sure to turn off your virus scanner software (all of it through the task manager (ctrl-alt-del) ). Virus scanners running in the background or any disk monitoring software will cause problems with games. Personally I've run CotN both on XP and Win 98SE without any problems using the drivers Keith recommended.

CotN doesn't need to be run in compatibility mode to run on XP.

[swmicros]

Keith: The power supply is an Andtech True Power 450W, hand picked by me for clean power. No antivirus (see comments below to mouse) I will make sure screensaver and power settings are dissabled and restest

morton: I will try that.

mouse: CotN is the only thing installed on this hard drive, I have set it up as a test system.

Everyone: remember there are NO background programs besides Windows XP.

[swmicros]

OK disabled screen saver and changed power settings never for all settings. The only thing set for startup in msconfig was the ati control panel, turned that off. Virus scan (Norton Corporate Edition, Defs 11/10/2005) came up clean.

Will be busy until Tuesday and will try playing again then.

BTW my name is Greg.

Thanks for all your help, I appreciate it and really hope we can fix this.

[mouse]

It doesn't matter where CotN is installed it still uses the operating system thus a virus scanner running in the background can cause problems. The virus scanner can interfere with sound and video since they run through the operating system.

[swmicros]

No guys, I have a separate bootable hard drive, it is just like another computer. I physically unplug my regular harddrive and plug in this test harddrive and then bootup to a completely clean version of Windows XP. There are no other programs installed besides CotN. There is nothing running in the background. msconfig only showed the ATI control panel which is now disabled.

Hope this clarifies my test rig.

[swmicros]

OK, here is what I did:
After running the virus scan, removing all startup items, changing power settings to always on and turning off screen saver as mentioned previously.
Unistalled CotN and deleted the Tilted Mill folder in Program Files.
Use the ATI Unistaller to remove the existing driver and delete ATI folder then reinstalled the 4.11 driver.
Reinstalled CotN and applied the 1.2 patch.
Ran defrag and disk cleanup.

Then I tried playing the first campaign, Nekhen with everything set to defaults and it froze after about 20 minutes.

I then set the AGP to 4x and disabled FastWrite in the BIOS and played again and it did about the same, freezing at a different random place.

I then changed all the video settings to minimums, 800 x 600 16 bit, and turned off all sound and it ran for about 4 hours and then froze, again at a random place. I tried it again after a while, to let everything cool down, and it ran for about 2 hours and dropped to the desktop with the message "Children of the Nile has caused a problem and will need to shut down" after which Windows seemed to be functioning fine!

I really think this is a heat problem as when I set the video settings to bare minimum and slow the VPU down to 4x, CotN seems to run longer. I also did a google search on "Radeon 9800 Pro overheat" and got a bunch of hits of others complaining that they were also having trouble with this card.

Interestingly, my son's computer has the same Radeon 9800 Pro VPU but by a different manufacturer and the heatsink and fan seem to be better. I am going to install CotN on his computer and see if he has the same problem.

In the meantime I have ordered an Arctic VPU Cooler which will arrive on Thursday. I will test again after the cooler is installed.

Anyone else have any other thoughts?

Greg Stiles,
still unable to CotN in California

[Manni]

@swmicros

It is more useful to **Ran defrag and disk cleanup**
before **install CotN**
------------------
You dxdiag says:

Memory: 1022MB RAM (physical)
Page File: 365MB used, 2094MB available

Do try and set the page file: min and max to 3000 MB, followed by a defrag

[swmicros]

Manni and Phil,

I will try your suggestions and let you know.

BTW, I also installed CotN on my son's computer and it ran all night in the first tutorial and I have been playing the first campaign all morning and have had no problems whatsoever. A total of about 12 hours now.

Our systems are nearly identical, same MB, CPU, PSU, VPU and memory. One thing I noticed that is different is our video cards. While they are the both a Radeon 9800 Pro, my son's has a different fan and heatsink configuration.

Also, I just installed CotN and the 1.2 patch and started playing. Did not disable any background programs or anything. I am pretty sure this is a hardware problem and I am also going to try swapping things between our two systems and see if I can identify the problem component.

Thanks again for your willingness to assist, I appreciate it!

Greg Stiles,
Closer to playing CotN in California!

PS Phil, I only have one AGP slot.

[Keith]

If you reconfigure your system along the lines of your son's system and still have problems, you might want to consider that you may have one or more bad chips on your system's RAM.

I was plagued for 2 years by constant lockups on my system. They could happen right after system startup or 3 hours later or any where in between or after. Sometimes they would happen once or twice a day and sometimes as often as a dozen times a day.

My system eventually crashed on me, and had some new components put in, CPU, and RAM. Turns out the problem was in the RAM. They were going to replace all four, but only had 3 when the time came, but the must have gotten the bad one out because since that time my system hasn't had a problem with random lockups.

[swmicros]

Well guys, here are the latest results:

Changed the swap file to 3000 and ran defrag.

Tried CotN with game settings at default and it froze up right away.

Swapped my video card (ColorPower 9800 Pro) for my son's video card (ATI 9800 Pro). Used ATI Uninstaller to cleanly install 4.11 drivers.

Tried CotN with default settings and it again froze right away.

About the only other thing I can swap without too much effort is the RAM. I will try that next.

The only thing that seems to allow the game to play for a longer period of time, is setting the AGP back to 4x and the game settings to minimums. While it plays this way for up to 2 hours at a time, it is a shame as the game is so beautiful with the graphics cranked up.

Greg Stiles
getting tired of CotN in CA.

[swmicros]

It turned out to be the memory. I swapped the memory in my son's computer and CotN ran for at least 4 hours on default settings without a problem.

The memory in his system is the same type as mine with the exception that his is ECC mine is not. I am going to call Crucial and see if they will swap it out.

Thanks for everyone's assistance, this was a long drawn out problem and I appreciate the help.

Greg Stiles,
Finally CotN'ing in CA, with error correcting RAM that is!

[Keith]

I'm glad to hear you got it nailed down. http://members.aol.com/dheitm8612/animated/ltdance.gif:D

[Manni]

Congratulations swmicros :)

[swmicros]

Guys,

I received the new memory from Crucial yesterday. They agreed to swap it out for ECC ram, and cross ship it to me ahead of me returning the non-ECC ram, that is why I love those guys. I am a reseller and it is a relief to deal with people that have great customer service.

I played the entire Bubastis campaign last night with no problems, about 6 hours!! woot!!

Thanks again for all your help.

Greg Stiles
Happy pharoah buried in my large pyramid in California, er Bubastis.

[MarkDuffy]

I played the entire Bubastis campaign last night with no problems, about 6 hours!! woot!!

Welcome to our family, Swmicros! :)

Surf's up in California!

Can't wait to see you in the COTN Game Help & Strategy section! :) :) :)

[Jeff Fiske]

Impressive fix, glad you are playing.

Memory problems are virtually impossible to confirm, without swaping in new RAM so I am glad you had some sticks on hand to try it.

[fragmonkey]

my cotn crashes all the time. I don't know why. it crashes when my city reaches a certain size. VERY ANNOYING. I get an error message after the crash saying cotn needs to close.

[Amenirdis]

Please attach your Dxdiag file. Otherwise we can't help you solve the problem.