Topic awaiting preservation: Random BSOD when Gaming

I have been having a problem with gaming on my computer lately, and I am wondering if anyone else has some experience or might give me some information that I need to trouble shoot the situation.

I have recently purchases both HL2 and WoW, and while playing I will randomly get a blue screen of death and immediately following a hard reboot. The BSOD flashes so quickly that I am unable to read what the actual error is, this makes it really hard for me to figure out what to do with it.

It happenned infrequently in the past, maybe once per gaming session (4 hour block). However, yesterday it happened to me about 8 times. Once within 10 minutes of each other. It is really at random intervals, and I do not notice anything in game (as a pattern) that is causing the reboot.

I have a couple of theories.

1) I have a bad ram chip. To check this I rand a free memory testing application for an hour and a half and no errors popped up.
2) Bad power source. The quick poweroff makes me think it might be power related. I doubt this as the powersourse is pretty new, less than 6 months.
3) Computer is overheating and initiating a restart to cool itself. I don't know how to test this theory, as it is happenning with newer games and not when I am doing regular work I can accept that. However, I had a program utilizing 100% CPU all last weekend and I didn't have a single problem, no restart over 72 hours, while yesterday I have about 8 reboots in 12 hours.
4) A bug in the games. This option puts the games at fault. I really doubt that there is a bug that is causing a BSOD, it is windows but I would assume that the OS has the correct memory protection scheme that wouldn't allow an application to cause a hard restart (maybe I am giving MS too much credit).
5) The last issue is that I am running a Dual Monitor system. The main AGP card running for my main monitor, with a seconday PCI slot graphics card for the second monitor. I did have steam complain that it saw the driver for the PCI card as the match for the AGP card, I figure that this shouldn't be a problem, because the drivers really are setup correctly and are the newest drivers. Maybe something here is causing a problem.

What it boils down to is that I have no idea why this is happenning, and I can't find anything that might explain it when searching. If you have any advise at all I would appreciate it.

Dan @ Code Town

The rebooting is most likely due to your recovery settings. WinXP's default is to reboot after system failure. You can change this setting under the Advanced tab of System Properties (right click on my computer).

As far as your actual crashing I really can't help you much, other than suggesting reinstalling drivers on more time.

I've been using this utility... which has waaay more features than I'll ever use... maybe something to look at.... and of course when it comes to gaming 'blackviper.com' shows you how to really tweak things out...

quote:

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PowerStrip provides advanced, multi-monitor, programmable hardware support to a wide range of graphics cards - from the venerable Matrox Millennium I to the latest GeForce 6600GT and ATI X800. It is in fact the only program of its type to support multiple graphics cards from multiple chipset vendors, simultaneously, under every Windows operating system from Windows 95 to the x64-bit edition of XP. A simple menu that pops up from the system tray provides access to some 500 controls over your display hardware, including sophisticated color correction tools, period level adjustments over screen geometry, and driver independent clock controls.

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http://www.entechtaiwan.com/util/ps.shtm

Stopping the restart will be great! I can at least see the failure information. I will do that and maybe come back with some concrete error messages.

I will try the drivers, it can't hurt, the 10 minutes to reinstall the drivers really doesn't compare to the time spent getting back into the game.

Dan @ Code Town

In Winxp/2k you can right click on My Computer and select Manage. Then go to the Event Viewer and see the system logs. This will often have the contents of error messages in it.

If this is a heat releated incident you can try setting a temperature alarm in the BIOS so that the computer alerts you to it. Set the alarm for the 60-80 C range. 80 and up is a bad place for a computer to be.

A driver update and apply the patches for the games is another possible fix.

__________________________
Eagles get sucked into jet engines and weasels are oft maligned, but beavers just make nice hats.
tj333- the semi-Christ

I'd try running the games on a single monitor setup (rip the PCI card right out of your system - that way you can be absolutely sure if it's an issue or not) and see how it goes.

Usually the BSOD is relateded to hardware-sofware interfacing problems - IE driver issues.

Keep us posted.

Back about 7-8 years ago I used to do vido game tech support.

First the general rule of thumb about hard crashes (your issue) was that it was a sound card issue. Display driver issues usually manifested in artifacts or black screens. Try playing with the sounds settings set to their most basic level (no surround sound or anything)

Second is too update all drivers and install all patches. Including the installing the most current version of Direct X.



.:[ Never resist a perfect moment ]:.

I used to have a lot of crashing problems playing EQ when my Sound Card and Network card shared the same IRQ. Moving the sound card to its own IRQ solved that problem.

*scans the thread*

Hmmm... nothing to add yet...

How do you move a device to a different IRQ? Both my AGP and PCI share the same IRQ. I am thinking this might be a bigish issue.

Barring that. I am going to put sound down to its basic levels, and see what happens there, then I am going to try removing the second monitor.

If I still get crashes, then I am going to be very angry. I think I might also reinstall all the drivers just because. I believe I am up to date on all the drivers and directX stuff, but they get updates all the time you never know. Windows updates hasn't warned me at all.

Thanks for all you help, it will take me a bit of time to get these things all worked on, with work+school I don't have much time during the week for anything.

Thanks again,

Dan @ Code Town

I would remove the PCI card for a couple of days and see if I had any more crashes. You can try shifting the PCI card to a different slot so that it is reassigned an IRQ, but XP generally handles IRQ assignments rather effectively - shared IRQs are not necessarily conflicting (unless a device conflict is shown under the device manager, of course).

What soundcard do you have? I have a Soundblaster Live! card that caused random freezes for ages until I found an extraordinarily odd solution to it - but no BSoD. It appeared in the end, to be a bandwidth conflict between my AGP card and the sound card.

It is quite possible that swapping some cards around could provide relief from the BSoD.

If you can determine which card or cards are causing the problem, there may be a software solution... but get back with any new details.

Well I have now put about 10 hours into WoW and have not had a single crash.

What did I do? I turned of Google Desktop, Picasa, and Gmail Notifier. When gaming with these off I did not have any problems, not a single BSOD. I am thinking it might not be Gmail but the other programs actively read new files, and I am thinking that it was an access violation. Something is reading something, will something else is writing to it, and bam, corrupted data -> hard crash!

I do not know this for sure yet. I just wanted to let you all know that this might be the issue. I am going to play some more (it hurt me to do this), and then submit something to Blizzard Technical Support and Google. It might be nice to see their resposes, both are companies that actually take the time to listen to their customers and respond.

Dan @ Code Town