FL Causes System Restart

Sun Apr 18, 2004 4:24 am by Ravenzfire

Hey guys,

I just picked up Freelancer last week. I've heard a lot about it and thought the game sounded awsome. So I bought it, installed it and found that is really awsome. However I have a problem that I can't seem to figure out and it's really frustrating.

I can load the game fine, The movies play fine, the audio is fine. I can get into the game and do everything. The problem is that, seemingly at random, after about 10 to 15 mintues of play the game will either shut down and return to my desktop, or My computer will just restart. There is no warning and nothing that seems to trigger it.

My Sys specs are:

AMD Athalon XP 1.2 Ghz
896 Mb RAM
128 MB nvidia Geforce4 Ti 4200
Sound Blaster Live 5.1

All drivers are up to date and I have the latest verson of Direct X. I've gone to Microsoft's support page for the game and tried everything they suggested to no avail.

On another Note, When I play Halo on my computer it will do the same thing pretty much. The game will crash after about 10 or 15 mins of play. I've had Halo for about a month or two now. When I first started playing it, it was fine, but as of this week it's started crashing. I'm not sure if there are problems with the games...or with my system. Any info would be very appreciated, thanks!

Sun Apr 18, 2004 10:33 am by Stinger

many people forget about chipset drivers. It's a thought.

Sun Apr 18, 2004 12:57 pm by Spreadie

You got a System Temperature monitor?

Could be that your cpu is getting too hot - This will make it unstable.

Try running one of these games with a temp monitor running in the system tray - next time it dies and leaves you staring at the desktop check out your cpu temp.

A coupla 80mm case fans will help to keep it cool - check out your cabling too, if its a mess it can restrict airflow thru the system.

HTH

Spreadie

Sun Apr 18, 2004 1:56 pm by Esquilax

Indeed. It could be any number of things, but the type of problems that you are having are often caused by overheating, and/or by RAM problems. Check the temp of your MB and CPU as already suggested, and let us know the results.

Sun Apr 18, 2004 8:01 pm by Ravenzfire

Yeah, I'm working on upgrading my chipset drivers now.

As far as a Temperature Sensor, any suggestions for a good one? I've tried looking for some in the past but seemed to have a hard time coming up with any. My roomate and I checked the BIOS after the computer restarted itself while playing the game and he said that if anything the Temperature was very very cool...if not cooler then it should have been. So I'm not sure if Temp is the problem. As far as RAM, I've got quite a bit of it and I've tried running the game with a clean boot, shutting down all programs and all backgroung Apps, all with the same effect. So I'll update my chipset and work on finding a Temp Sensor, any other ideas will be appreciated. Thanks guys!

Mon Apr 19, 2004 2:03 am by Ravenzfire

Ok this is where I'm at.

Updated my chipset driver.
I also download a few System Monitor programs. I used Speedfan to keep an eye on the Temp. In game it stayed right around 45 to 47. I played the game for a good while before I had it restart my system on me. When I reloaded back to my descktop I ran the sensor and the temp was still at 45. So I don't think it's a problem of overheating.

Something interesting though. Not sure how it could be related. When I restarted my computer I tried to get online to come to the forum to post my status. However it said I had no connection. Now I'm on a network at my home and we're behind a router. Everynow and then our Cable service resets so that we have to unplug and replug in our router. When I stopped to think of it I had trouble getting online a lot of the times after the game crashed. Could it be possible that haveing our internet drop would somehow crash the game? Granted it's on Single Player and not online. I know it seems kind of far fetched, but everything else seems to be in working order. I'm going to test it a bit and see what I come up with.

Mon Apr 19, 2004 3:28 am by Ravenzfire

Yeah, that had nothing to do with it...just a coincidence. So now I'm back to square one it would seem.

Mon Apr 19, 2004 1:56 pm by Esquilax

One thing you could try, is to swap out some of the RAM DIMMs, and see if there are any commonalities, such as is a specific DIMM being in one of the slots whenever FL crashes. Another option is to experiment with the "Compatibility Settings" (Win 2000/XP), and see if the crashes evidence themselves when running FL under a WinME setting, etc. Apart from that, it could be a simple Windows-related bug, that is caused by a corrupted registry entry, etc. A clean install of Windows is always a good idea if you are having problems. By the way, which version of Windows did you say you had?

Mon Apr 19, 2004 8:43 pm by Ravenzfire

Whoops, I don't think I did.

I use Windows XP.
I'll Try the Ram tip you said. Also for a clean install of windows, do I just install it over the previous install?

Mon Apr 19, 2004 11:31 pm by Ravenzfire

Ok I'm starting to think this error may have nothing to do with FL in specific. I've been trying to play Counter Strike today and it's been doing the exact same thing, restarting my system at random. I've played this game for months with no problems. So I'm guessing something is wrong with my system...but I can't for the life of me figure out what. I have up to date antivirus and I check for spyware all the time.

When my system restarts I get a "System has recovered from a serious error" message and it includes these two files to send with the error report.

C:\WINDOWS\Minidump\Mini042004-02.dmp
C:\DOCUME~1\Jonathan\LOCALS~1\Temp\WER1.tmp.dir00\sysdata.xml

Any ideas as to what that may mean?

It seems that my computer will restart only when playing some sort of game as I can spend hours on it doing other things. Any help is really appreciated.

Tue Apr 20, 2004 2:04 pm by Esquilax

It could be anything unfortunately. Apart from the RAM, you may want to try removing your graphics card drivers, and using a program such as "Driver Cleaner" (see Google) to remove any out-of-date graphics driver files. Then simply reinstall your latest set of drivers. This will eliminate any old files and hence, any conflicts.

The error message that you are receiving means that XP has dumped the information from the memory into a text file, which you can fnd in the directory specified. It contains technical information about the error, and may be worth reading through.

Finally, a clean install is always preferable, although you may like to boot up using the XP CD and "Repair" the current installation. This may also be a possible solution.

Tue Apr 20, 2004 2:20 pm by Ravenzfire

Well thanks for the help!

Seeing as how this is no longer a FL issue I probably won't bother you guys any more

Thanks again for all the ideas, I have a feeling a clean install of windows might be the only way to go. Just when I think I've found the problem and nixed it I find that it in fact had nothing to do with it. Ah well, thanks again!

Tue Apr 20, 2004 6:34 pm by Esquilax

Not at all. Hope you stick around

.

Thu Apr 22, 2004 2:54 pm by bmr007

Hey Razenfire, did you have any luck fixing the problem? I'm having the same problem and still haven't solved it.

Sat Apr 24, 2004 8:39 am by Seer

You may also like to check for virusses.. Just a thought..

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