Windows Xp Professional Sp1 Crash
Maltay
Join Date: 2003-02-24 Member: 13926Members, Reinforced - Shadow
Join Date: 2003-02-24 Member: 13926Members, Reinforced - Shadow
<div class="IPBDescription">Natural Selection 2.0 Crashes Windows</div> I just updated to Natural Selection 2.0 and everytime that I try and play the game I run into problems. After approximately five minutes of perfectly fine play, my system locks up, turns black a second later, and then begins looping static. In this instance I am unable to get back to the Windows environment and find myself forced to hard reboot my system in order to do anything.
Natural Selection 2.0 is the only application that I have encountered this problem with, all of my other games, software, and similar Half-Life modifications, like Day of Defeat and Counter-Strike continue to function without difficulty.
For reference, I am running on Windows XP Professional SP1 with an ATI Radeon 9700 Pro. I have the latest versions of the Catalyst drivers and DirectX installed, with in excess of a gigabyte of system memory to back me up; not to mention half a terabyte of total hard drive space spread across a striped RAID array.
Natural Selection 2.0 is the only application that I have encountered this problem with, all of my other games, software, and similar Half-Life modifications, like Day of Defeat and Counter-Strike continue to function without difficulty.
For reference, I am running on Windows XP Professional SP1 with an ATI Radeon 9700 Pro. I have the latest versions of the Catalyst drivers and DirectX installed, with in excess of a gigabyte of system memory to back me up; not to mention half a terabyte of total hard drive space spread across a striped RAID array.
Comments
Uninstall NS and Reinstall NS.
I'll try the reinstall to see if that works.
ps also run win XP prof.
Win XP pro sp1, Radeon 9500 and Audigy GamerX.
A suggestion, try not using the latest versions of Catylyst. I have noticed on my machine that they don't work very well with HL, that could be the problem, I'm running 3.1 right now and I have yet to run into any problems in NS.
Also, if you are running in DirectX mode, try OpenGL. NS works a lot better in OpenGL from my experience..
P3 1.8ghz
Radeon 9800, unsure about the drivers as ATI doesn't want to tell me if the 9800 is a Rage card or not (their little program on the web page to determine drivers does not work either).
CL Audigy2 Platnium, updated the drivers.
512 megs ram
There are no IRQ conflicts that I'm able to detect, but with Winxp its a gamble for me. Its not as friendly as Win98 or Win2k. More like a pain in the rump with networking.
Basically a new sys, new harddrive as well.
Originally, I thought the issue was a faulty install, DNR'd the progs (half life and NS) and found their registry info and removed that as well. Reinstalled a clean copy, no error msg's when installing or afterwards when updating.
I've been warned before about virus scanners causing lock up issues, but the AVG scanner I have is disabled before I try and play.
Usually lockup occurs when there is a sound, it locks up and loops that particular sound. Disabling the sound card does not clear the issue as well.
Hope this information helps, as I'm completely stumped right now as to what might be the problem.
Take care all and give'm hell.
LS
But I still get crashes now and then in WinXP. Something about IRQ errors. I will try to write down the info next time it crashes
I was also getting originally getting IRQ conflicts with Natural Selection 1.04 due to the fact that PCI 2 and my AGP share the same allocation on my Epox 8RDA+ motherboard. I eventually simply moved my Creative Labs Sound Blaster Audigy Platinum eX up a PCI and eliminated the problem. Then again, I'm also currently in the habit of assigning IRQs myself.
this is defintely a growing issue with alot of the people, i know some others who have the same problem too. it would be very nice if the NS team could address this, cause it's not just a few people getting it.
ps system specs: amd athlon 1400, geforce 2 mmx, SB live!, 512 mb sdram.
Going to try to run sound off the onboard soundcard of my motherboard, see if that helps.
So far has been successful. For those with the Audigy2 sound cards.
Turn off all the sound enhancements (Creative Sound control). So far will need to test more, but the lock up is with sound, not video card. Certain sounds cause the freeze with a looped sound. Two sounds cause it, at least on my sys.
The reloading sound for the LMG, or the building sound that the gorger creates.
Will let you know if it does work or not.
Take care all and as always, give'm hell.
LS
Occurances remain random (had a 2 hour session without problems) but seem to be keyed on playing a sound.
Also noticed weird files getting dumped on my F:/ disk (containing HL etc) after each crash reading like:
Š
Cheating-Death v4.1.0 - Update 4.1
Get it free at <a href='http://www.unitedadmins.com/cdeath.php' target='_blank'>http://www.unitedadmins.com/cdeath.php</a>
Cheating-Death is optional on this server.
eb¹@
or just plain:
6 event_t ùC (s£Ks#+à P } } È €\˜\X[ @@ è è @þ ÄàÂäÂÚd ˆ @ @ òG ø&—v–æ¶Ó€ Ð ú ?? À7¹´³4·˜. € €> Ð €ü ¾É¥?¥¹mÉt@ @ ô €> ä? Ð.L.¬- €Pà ô €fparam2 4 € ùC Lƒ“k‹À€ } } È `\˜\X› @ è
including the file with the post (read it with notepad).
What I had found a few times when this happend was a corrupted client.dll it was actually modified somehow, I checked the meta information of the file. I thought perhaps there was a nasty server that was causing this but anymore Im not sure.
I just know that when I have this problem I just copy a backed up client.dll
(From a time that its operating correctly) and replace the bad one. Sometimes it doenst look like the file was modified and other times it does. Either way this fixes the problem for me everytime, although the problem does seem to rear its ugly head once every 2 months or so and its a quick copy paste to fix.
I would be courious to see everyones set up and see if we can find a common link in this problem albeit hardware or software So Ill start by listing what I have:
Counter-Strike Retail
Windows Xp sp1
Asus Motherboard (nVidia nForce 2 chipset)
AMD 1800 XP processor
Hercules 7.1 sound card
ATI 9600 Pro (But I also had this problem with my nVidia Geforce 2 64M before I upgraded to the ATI)
I run Norton Firewall and Antivirus at all times
Apache web server and U-Soft FTP server in the background
HLDS Server that I play most on Runs MetaMod, Adminmod , Cheating Death, HLGuard and AMX Mod.
My biggest hunch right now is something to do with the retail version of Counter-Strike , but its just a hunch.
I hope we can get this sorted out.
I can play the game anywhere from five minutes to two hours fine, then it locks up, the screen usually turns black, and it starts looping a combination of static and whatever the ambient noise was through my speakers. I've reformated my system and installed every driver from scratch, updated to SP1 for Windows XP Professional, flashed my BIOS to the newest revision, and mucked around with the video and sound settings in both Windows and in my BIOS. I even turned down the clock speed on my processor and CAS-RAS latency to see if my overclocking attempts at all impacted my stability while within the game. For reference I am running an AMD Athlon XP 2200+ on an Epox 8RDA+ with the ATI Radeon 9700 Pro, the Creative Labs Sound Blaster Audigy Platinum eX, and 1024 MB of Kingston DDR400 PC3200 RAM. Finally, the problem is not native to internet games, but persists when I try to start a LAN game and play with only myself in the game.
My reasoning for this problem being related to sound is that when the game does run stable for any extended period of time, I begin to get static at seemingly random intervals. This static is nearly identical to the static that loops through my speakers when my system does crash. Sometimes it's simply beeps and hissing, other times I get static and general interference at a volume loud enough to hurt my ears. I spoke with Creative Labs, and they were clueless, Natural Selection is the only game that this happens in. Further, I was getting this static, though not quite so regularly, when playing earlier versions of Natural Selection. Back then it would happen on a rare enough basis, perhaps once per week, that I paid it no mind and simply rejoined the server at such times.
Whoops, three thing I almost forgot. One, I am running Natural Selection 2.0 off of the retail version of Half-Life. Second, someone mentioned getting weird files written to the root directory of the drive they had Half-Life installed on, and I am getting the same now that Natural Selection 2.0 is living there. Examples of such are t1n4.1 and t1n4.j, no idea what those files are to be used for, or what purpose they might serve. Third, Natural Selection is the only game that I have this persistent problem in.
Ok, Time to run through a few random things:
1) Every one seems to be Running XP SP1 (is any one not? did I miss something?)
2) People are running both brands of vidcards (ATI vS GeForce)
3) Is every one Running SBs? are they all audiogys?
Things to try out:
1) Turn of the sound
Start by disabling sound in Windows and in HL and any other way you can <!--emo&:)--><img src='http://www.unknownworlds.com/forums/html/emoticons/smile.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='smile.gif'><!--endemo--> (not just turning volume down, disable it)
Run a LAN game and just wait to see if it crashes
If it don't try turning one source of sound on, then reverse.
lets see.....
and GL (and that is good luck, not grenade launcher, thoguh the new one is rocken <!--emo&:p--><img src='http://www.unknownworlds.com/forums/html/emoticons/tounge.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='tounge.gif'><!--endemo-->)
Please, give us at least some kind of word that the problem is being looked at, will make me (and the others) feel a lot less agitated when it happens again and again... and again. <!--emo&:(--><img src='http://www.unknownworlds.com/forums/html/emoticons/sad.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='sad.gif'><!--endemo-->
You guys might want to try deactivating CThelper.exe then...
Its a creative labs (sound blaster) program that is supposed to help keep audio working properly, but has been known to crash certin games...
to deactivate it, go startmenu>Run>msconfig>"okay">Startup>uncheck "CThelper.exe">Apply/okay>Restart.
This might help.. The only downside to not running CThelper.exe is that after running your computer for a couple hours (6-8) You have to restart it or you'll get a horrible buzzing feedback type sound in HL (not just ns, but HL in general)
Win XP sp1
Geforce 4 Ti 4200
SB PCI 128 and later SB audigy
I then found newer drivers for SB audigy. Driverversion : 5.12.1.253, Date 08-12-2002. After installing these drivers a few days ago, I had no problems. Hope that it helps some of you
I was under the impression that I had the newest version of the drivers installed, which would be the ones released on 12/31/2002 and later updated on 6/25/2003. However, Grimfang, would you happen to have a hyperlink to the drivers that you are using, the ones released on 8/12/2002?
<a href='http://dk.europe.creative.com/support/drivers/search.asp?file=AUDDRVPACK_L11.EXE' target='_blank'>Sound Blaster Audigy Driver Pack for WinXP</a>
I am also getting the file dumps into the root of my hard drive. They seem to be the log of whatever was in the console at the time of the crash (+ unrecognised characters)
My spec is:
AMD 2200XP+
512MB DDR RAM
2 x 60GB RAID HDDs
128Mb Geforce 4 Ti 4600
Creative SB Audigy
And again, i am using windows xp (fully updated)
All my drivers are fully up to date.