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.)