locks/freezes when in dungeons

[ghostspawn]

Hi. before I do the 'rightnow' thing I'd like to hear from anyone else who experiences frequent crashes whilst adventuring in dungeons. It seems to happen everynow and then for me, and when I do get crashes it lasts for a few days and can effect any char/realm. The game just locks up, more often than not when someone near casts a spell. I guess its my gfx card playing up. I've set preferences on card to get best performance.

If I catch it locking up a quick ctrl+alt+del will bring up tasklist and I can kill daoc & start afresh, but if I havent noticed it happen, I have to hit the dreaded reset key.

Recently I noticed a lot of disk activity during a crash and pressed reset a bit too quick, upon reboot I had a bad block but luckily it was only the windows swap file and nothing else was effected. This weekend it was so bad my main was in Spind, had 3 crashes in a row instantly upon game loading so I gave up and tried exping my alt on alb, only to have the game lockup when in the newbie dungeon.
Yeah, obvious solution is to avoid dungeons. But I'd rather not thx very much

System specs
p3 750, 320ish mb ram
win98 se
geforce 2 MX 64Mb vid card
newish standard creative sound card. nothing fancy
microsoft wireless optical mouse explorer. (god that thing chews batteries)
running a few systray apps, zonealarm, norton antivirus, thewonderful tray icon. Tried disabling what I could do but this has had no positive effect.

 

[Jupitus]

Well I'm certain that the first thing you will be asked by anyone is are you using the latest video drivers for your GFX card.... I suggest you download the latest native Nvidia drivers from www.nvidia.com and try them out a bit first, if you haven't already done so.

Also, may be worth running standard disk utilities to check for bad blocks etc and a defrag of some sort too (just for good measure, after some of the resetting you've been doing).

Your system spec isn't the latest or greatest, but it should be up to the job at hand IMO....

If it doesn't stabilise, get onto RightNow....

Good luck,
Jup.

 

[old.dittytwo]

Originally posted by Jupitus
Well I'm certain that the first thing you will be asked by anyone is are you using the latest video drivers for your GFX card.... I suggest you download the latest native Nvidia drivers from www.nvidia.com and try them out a bit first, if you haven't already done so.

Also, may be worth running standard disk utilities to check for bad blocks etc and a defrag of some sort too (just for good measure, after some of the resetting you've been doing).

Your system spec isn't the latest or greatest, but it should be up to the job at hand IMO....

If it doesn't stabilise, get onto RightNow....

Good luck,
Jup.

also another thing to try is getting the latest driver for everything soundcard...

one of the most inportant ones you can get is the windows motherboard drivers as with via chipsets unless you have the latest DAoC is crash city...

 

[tris-]

Turn off the system clean up thing that sometimes decide to start its self up. "Task Schedular" i think it is, slows my comp down no end when it decided to defrag the hard drive or something.

 

[ghostspawn]

Friday 13th I get home to a sheepish looking wife, who claimed she didnt touched anything. turns out the HDD had suffered a crit. failure (+99999dmg!). Took the opportunity to purchase a new drive & winxp.
So far not a single in-game crash. Only gripe is on approaching any town the framerate reduces to maybe 5fps for the first 5 seconds or so. Simple solution is to just stand still.
I find it odd the difference that OS can have in this regard. When in capital city, Jordheim I got much better performance in win98. Win2k stuttered through at about an 1/8th of the speed, as does winxp unless I stand still and wait for beggars for 5secs

Anyway I'd much rather have the odd bit of low framerate over random crashes, so I'm sticking with winxp. Its groovy, baby.

 

[nerve]

ahum

I seem to be experiencing the exact same problem. Also WIN98SE, Creative SB Live, Geforce 4200 (had GF 2 GTS before with same problems), and running Norton AV. I always disable Norton AV before starting the game but it doesn't help. I can play days without problems and then suddenly, the game freezes, especially when in dungeons, at the moment someone starts to cast a spell. I can then either kill the game, or often be forced to boot the damn PC. I have installed the latest nVidia drivers (the non-beta ones) and things seemed to be better, but the game has begun to hang again a few times. If anyone has experienced this one and actually got it fixed, lemme know plz !
I'm also considering moving to XP if this shit doesn't improve.
Also, I don't experience any problems with other 3D games...

(Other hardware: PIV 1.7, 256Mb Rimm)

Thanx !

 

[old.mattshanes]

Get windows xp if you have a powerful system and play games a lot nerve its real good if you have the specs for it.

 

[ImLestat]

I had exactly the same problem on my old comp, which had Win98SE. However I wrote the problems down to the very outdated drivers for my Voodoo5 card. Then I bought my new one, totally different specs, but I installed the same OS (Win98SE). I still had the same problem. A friend adviced me to use XP instead, which I did. Now I haven't got any problems. Well, the usual gfx errors which takes a relog and such I still experience of course.

 

[nerve]

XP

Gave up on looking for what was the problem and installed XP. Haven't experienced ONE freeze since, so I'm a happy camper now

 

[bissa]

I got the same freezes with XP.. And not just in dungeons, it can freeze everywhere. I got the latest VIA chipset the latest Graphicdrivers. Also tried reinstall DAOC after every driver are up to date...

Any ideas??