Windows XP/GeForce Owner, READ HERE!
Okay, so you got XP and it rocks, right? Wrong, because unfortunatly the monkeys at MS, nVidia, and VIA left some tasty bugs in their drivers/systems for you to fix. These solutions are for those who can not run AO or can not keep AO stable (or any other D3D game for that matter). They're not official, just the result of some research I've been doing trying to get my system good (which I finally did :))....
- Infinite Loop (Blue Screen crash) - A lot of the time this will look like the computer has just randomly restarted. It hasn't, XP has crashed and automatically restarted itself. This is most prevalent among VIA motherboard chipset owners, so here's your fix.... here. You can read the official VIA post about it here. Basically it comes down to XP and the nVidia drivers pushing the VIA stuff too hard..... go figure.
NEW! If you own a "generic" GeForce card, chances are it's actually a Visiontek card. Grab the 15.7 WHQL drivers from their website (these are actually the 14.7, but different somehow, haven't pinned it down yet.). It's extremely important that you restore the registry to normal and remove ANY tweaking programs, as well as uninstall your current nVidia drivers before this upgrade. Otherwise your first restart with them will be very harsh. Also, tweaking programs do not recognize the drivers as 14.7, so unless you can manualy specify it, do not overclock or fiddle with them (If you must, RivaTuner is the best).
- Refresh Rate Stuck - Some (not a lot) of people are having a hard time getting XP to use any refresh setting besides 60mhz. And let's face it, that doesn't work for a lot of us. Well, this is a known issue with MS (there is a KB article about it, but I can't find it, lost all my bookmarks the other day :(), and while this is not an "official" fix, it works. Get it from here.
- Various Weird Crashes/Glitches - DO NOT OVERCLOCK YOUR GEFORCE UNDER XP. That's the important part. Seems XP is very picky with how some hardware works.... also, try using the 21.83 drivers or the latest WHQLs, 23.11. Both are very stable and work excellently with most games. If you need to reinstall your drivers, use Detonator Destroyer first (available here). This will make sure that the files you install when you update your drivers go in correctly. (Thanks go to Smaugh_the_Thief, original thread here). Also, check your system tempature! A lot of people have their GeForce cards crammed into a whole gang of cards, so the tempature for the card is actually about +10 or 20F than your system temp, and when the card overheats, it stops working properly.
- System Hang/Crash with no Error - Make sure that you have proper sound card drivers (hard to do with Creative Labs cards right now....) and that you have not fiddled with DirectX at all. Most often this is caused by a conflict between the video card and sound card (WinXP tends to assign them both the same IRQ) that only seems to occur while DirectX is being used. You can try to bypass APCI and force the video card and sound card to seperate IRQs, but I have yet to find a way to do that in XP.
- Crash while Zoning - Right now, I'm a little fuzzy on this one. If this is a constant trouble for you, try disabling Hardware T&L (select "Microsoft Direct3D Hardware acceleration through Direct3D HAL" instead of "Microsoft Direct3d Hardware Transform and Lighting acceleration capable device") (Thanks go to Bugur, original thread here.). If that doesn't work, try the other solutions as well.
Hope this helps everyone, and if you repost it somewhere else, please give me credit where credit is deserved. If you have trouble, just respond here or give me a shout in game. Hopefully I'll be updating this again real soon.
(Just remember, that these are not official Funcom solutions, so if you break something doing it, it's your fault. I mean, come on, XP has a freaking restore point function for crying out loud. Use it before trying any of this.)
If only it were on VIA motherboards, then my problem would be fixed!
I have been experiencing the random resets and freezes myself as well and I have an Intel motherboard. I have actually had this problem occur on two motherboards the Intel 815EEA (PIII 815 Chipset) and the Intel D850GB (PIV 850 Chipset). I have found that the computer is perfectly stable when using the default drivers that come with WindowsXP which work fine, sans tweaking utilities that come with the ones directly from nVidia. However, when I used the 21.81/21.83 drivers from nVidia I began having these problems. To fix the refresh rate issue I just downloaded nvrefresh utility off the internet and voila! problem solved. The only real downfall of the generic drivers that come with XP is the complete and utter lack of an OpenGL ICD - mini or full which poses a problem for those running games such as Quake3 as well.
If anyone knows of a similar fix for Intel boards as mentioned in the original posts for the VIA based boards, please post up so I can get my computer running as well as it did with WinME! Thanks ;)
Constant Blue Screen Crashing
I am constantly crashing to a blue screen then auto rebooting, immediately after log on. I have tried several things to corresct this but to no avail, any more suggestions would be great
AsusA7A 266 Motherboard
AMD 1333 Tbird
512 DDR
windows XP
Visiontek Geforce3 ti200
Soundblaster 16 PCI soundcard
Flashed bios up to current
installed latest drivers for ALI AGP
Installed latest detonator drivers
Not overheating
Reinstalled AO
Reinstalled XP
Updated sound card drivers to XP compatable current
Tried both adapter choices in AO settings
Tried both 16 and 32 color depth
Re: Windows XP/GeForce Owner, READ HERE!
Quote:
Infinite Loop (Blue Screen crash) - A lot of the time this will look like the computer has just randomly restarted. It hasn't, XP has crashed and automatically restarted itself. This is most prevalent among VIA motherboard chipset owners, so here's your fix....
here. You can read the official VIA post about it
here. Basically it comes down to XP and the nVidia drivers pushing the VIA stuff too hard..... go figure.
Been there done that. I've tried the fix, the newest 4in1 via drivers, newest nvidia drivers and some beta drivers. Nothing helps, only seems to make it worse :( But in faq they write about some drivers 23.41 and i havent found them yet so maybe it will come a fix for this crash. Sometimes I get bsod with "error in nopaged area" or something. Any help will be good. Hopefully i get response because otherwise I need to buy a new Hd to install a new os on.
My pc :
msi k7t266 pro2
AMD XP 1800
Elsa Geforce3 920
1.5 gb ddr ram ecc/reg
onboard sound(But with same prob with a SB live card)
Windows XP Professional/GeForce 2 MX400
Hi,
I keep getting a weird effect on gametext in any D3D game. The text is bold, oddly coloured and has a speckle/distortion effect all around it making it hard to read.
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Athlon 1.4ghz
768mb PC-100
Windows XP Prof
ASUS M/B with the 1007 BIOS
ViaTech 4-in-1 (v1.37)
DetonatorXP (23.11)
